Basic Home Maintenance

Your home, or in our case rental properties, require routine maintenance, to keep you for ending up with large problem and even larger headaches. Many of these activities you can perform yourself without breaking a sweat. If your not the handy type, check out servicemagic.com to find a handyman to help with your projects.

Clear Air - Everybody wants to breath clean air. Check your furnace, and replace your air filter every month. It's not necessary to buy those $15 to $30 filters from your local hardware store, which claim to work for 90 days. Instead, you can get the $3 variety from discount store and even supermarkets in your area.

Additionally, you should clean areas that tend to collect dust like ceiling fans, dryer vents, forced air in and return vents and stove hoods. The less dust that collects in your furnace, and around air vents, the more efficient your air systems will run, which will save you money in the long run.

Water, Water - Colorado on average gets about 300 days of sunshine per year. That coupled with the snow and really poor soil makes it difficult to keep a healthy lawn, so sprikeler systems are a must. However, owners should remember to blow out their sprinkler systems (and I don't mean shutting off the vales in the house and opening the drains, I mean blow them out) once a year. If you where to hire someone to do this it would run you about $30 a year or purchase your own air compressor and do it your self for about $100. I'd invest the money in a good air compressor if you were going into the rental business. With two homes, the compress would pay for itself in 2 years.

A good rule of thumb is to blow out your sprinklers after the first snow that sticks in October.

This will keep your sprinkler lines working well from year to year, and prevent your "sprinkler backflow assembly" for cracking. A new backflow will run you close to $200 if you sweat the brass joints back yourself.

Aside - The backflow assembly is used to prevent water from being sucked backwards from your sprinkler lines into your house.

Garage springs - If you have a garage door opener, you might think about rubbing a light coat of silicone grease on those springs once a year. If they break, you're going to have to hire someone to replace it.

Flush your drains - It no secret that hair, cooking grease and other trash can cause a plumbing nightmare. With even a little collection of gunk in a horizontal (and even some vertical) pipes, can eat a hole in it. We recommend that once a year you flush your drains with an enzyme cleaner, which eats the gunk. Most other cleaners use sulfuric acid to burn clogs away quickly. However, with older drains this could eat away the lining in your pipes and cause a big mess. Make sure to read and follow all of the directions and warnings on the bottle.

Monthly, you should pour boiling water down the kitchen drain to melt away any fat or grease that may have collected.