How much time do you spend maintaining your house?

None of this makes any sense. Presumably as your house value increases so does your hourly rate from work.

You send what needs to be spent. You shovel when it snows, and mow when it grows.

Different components of the house have different life cycle, so there is work involved. You either do it yourself, pay someone to do it, to rent which becomes the landlord's problem. I do think home owner needs certain level of competence when it comes to maintenance.

A lot.

Also, this is a totally subjective question. You could mow your lawn twice a week and have a huge garden, or you could mow your lawn once every three weeks. If you like gardening does that count as "maintaining your home"?

Most of it comes down to personal preference, and what you have time to do or what you can afford to do or see value in doing.

I'm sure you could leave most things as are for most rooms for 30 years+, then just the normal windows, furnace, roofing intervals.

Three percent of your house cost a year seems pretty high. Lets say you own a million dollar house in the GTA, you house is probably worth $500k (on the high side ) and the land is worth the balance. I would say 1%, ie $5k a year would probably cover you.

HVAC = $5k, Windows = $20k, Roof = $8k, so thats 33k on maybe a 15 year horizon, which comes out to 2.2k a year for the "big ticket stuff", Idk if you count appliances as maintenance, I probably would, but basically after big ticket stuff, you still have $2.8k a year to cover basic maintenance and appliances, which seems legit. So 1% of the actual house cost, not the sale price probably seems more legitimate.

Again, a lot of this comes back into needs vs wants, and that whole can of worms. If your maintenance is renoing your old kitchen to the tune of $100k, then maybe the numbers don't apply to you.

All in all, you could spend very little and you could spend a ton, just like most things in life.

other then mowing the grass and shoveling snow, there is really no maintenance at our house. in the spring we do some yard sprucing up every year ourselves but that's about it.

I don't do annual maintencence on hot water tanks and furnaces, i only service them if something is wrong.

buttertarts wrote: ↑ Out of curiosity, how much time do people spend per week maintaining their home per week? And how much would you say that you spend per year on maintaining your home? I've been reading that 3% of your house cost is what you should spend. Do you find this is the case?

I would say closer to 1% per year on average. That is just maintainance and does not include renovations (eg updating bathrooms etc).

Time wise I would say a an hour to a few hours a week. Again that’s just maintainance eg mowing the lawn, yard work. Obviously this will vary depending the size of your property and overall condition.

I spend a fair amount of time and money in the spring, but less spending this year due to COVID. I recently tore apart and replaced the bottoms of the two pillars at my outside entryway as they had rotted. I just bought a new cathode for my hot water tank and will replace that next weekend. On Friday, I spent three hours cleaning 20 metal min-blinds using a jig I made up with plywood and hooks. Yesterday, I shampooed some carpet that had kitty puke on them. I'd say on average I spend about 1-3 hours per week doing maintenance of some sort. I like to putter around though and fancy myself an ultimate DIY guy.