The real cost of waiting

Deferred maintenance never sends its bill at the time. It sends it later, larger, and far enough away from the cause that it is easy never to connect the two. The job that was put off and the repair that followed look like separate events. They are the same event, with time in the middle.

Follow one downpipe

Take a blocked downpipe, because the shape of what happens next is the shape of almost everything that goes wrong in a house.

In autumn, leaves and grit from the roof settle in a downpipe on the shaded side of a timber house. Nobody notices, because nobody walks down that side of the house in autumn. The spouting above it fills. In the next heavy rain it overflows. Some of the water spills onto the path, which just looks like a lot of rain. Some of it runs back behind the fascia and into the top of the wall, or soaks the ground at the foot of it.

BRANZ's repair guidance for gutters names exactly this: overflowing spouting brings damp into subfloors and raises the moisture in the cladding and the wall framing. Water inside a wall runs down until it finds something flat to sit on. In a timber frame that is the bottom plate, the length of timber the wall stands on. Low in the wall, close to the ground, is where rot in a wet wall commonly turns up.

On the shaded side, through winter, that timber is wet more often than it is dry. Timber that stays wet rots. Even treated weatherboards will rot if they stay wet for any length of time, which is why the paint and the maintenance matter as much as the timber.

From outside there is often little to see. A few winters later, someone washing the house finds the bottom boards soft under a thumbnail and calls a painter. The painter calls a builder. The builder takes the boards off, and the job is now framing, building paper, boards and paint. The job that would have stopped it needed a ladder, a pair of gloves and a bucket.

The ratio, not the number

I won't put a figure on the repair, because every house is different and the number is not the point. The ratio is. A fix small enough to forget became one large enough to need a quote, and the years in between saved nothing.

The shape of it

Every deferred job follows the same curve. The first season it costs nothing. The second season it costs the same small fix it always would have. Then, at some point, water, sun or movement reaches a material that does not recover, such as framing timber, plasterboard or a membrane, and the cost steps up. Not by a little. It becomes a different kind of job, with different trades.

The step is sudden, and it always looks like bad luck. It is not bad luck. It is the end of the waiting.

The same curve runs through a cracked flashing that becomes a stained ceiling, flaking paint that becomes new weatherboards, and a slow drip under the sink that becomes a kitchen floor. It runs through smaller things too. A heat pump with dusty filters works harder and uses more power all winter, and nobody sees it until the bill.

Waiting has a legal cost too

There is a part of this that owners rarely hear about until it matters. Residential building work in New Zealand comes with implied warranties under the Building Act, for up to ten years after the work is done. They are a real protection. But MBIE's guidance for homeowners is plain about where they stop: a builder isn't liable for a defect caused by the owner not carrying out normal maintenance, or not getting repairs done as soon as practicable once a defect shows.

Product warranties work the same way. When building work finishes, the contractor has to tell you how it should be maintained, including any maintenance that could affect a guarantee or warranty. Skip it, and the cover can go with it. If a claim does come, the government's consumer protection advice says that proving your maintenance was kept up to date can help your case.

So waiting does not only make the repair bigger. It can move the cost of that repair from someone else to you.

Care before repair

The answer is not vigilance. Nobody can watch a house every day, and nobody should have to. The answer is a short list of small jobs at fixed points in the year, done whether or not anything looks wrong, because by the time something looks wrong the small job has already become the large one.

• The spouting and downpipes cleared before the autumn rain.
• The house washed and the paint looked over in spring. BRANZ's Build magazine suggests washing timber cladding every six months near the coast and once a year further inland, and a wash is the best chance you get to see the early signs.
• The heat pump filters cleaned through the colder months.
• The roof, flashings and the bottom boards on the shaded side looked at once a year.

Each one done, and each one written down. A year's care for an Auckland property sets the whole year out, month by month.

I think of it as care before repair. Repair arrives on its own schedule. Care runs on yours.

What it is for

None of this is about the house for its own sake. A home that is dry, warm and sound is one you enjoy living in, instead of one you quietly worry about. The care is small and steady. What it buys is a house that stays healthy and stays a pleasure to come home to, and that is the reason to do it.

If you keep your care plan in the Archive, each item on it says why it matters, the early sign to watch for and what happens if it waits. That last line is this essay in a sentence.

It is also the way we look after every home we are trusted with. Small work, on time, recorded, so small jobs stay small. You can read more about how we work.