What to be prepared for as a new homeowner

Just imagine: you’re in a lawn chair in your backyard, sipping lemonade on a sunny afternoon, watching your kids frolic on the swing set you just put together. Home ownership! 

But then: what is that smell? It turns out a thick root from that beautiful spruce tree, the one that made you fall in love with this yard in the first place, is strangling the drain pipe on your septic system, and now you’ve got a leak into your leach field. That’ll be $5,000 to fix. And no playing on the swing set for a few weeks. Sorry, kids. Home ownership!

“Owning a home is tough,” says Roy Berendsohn, editor-at-large and home repair expert for Popular Mechanics. Repairs are inevitable, and you can’t let them affect you emotionally. “You’ve got to look at that house with a cold hard eye,” Berendsohn says. Maintaining your home — especially a house, but an apartment or condo too — is going to take lots of work, lots of time, and lots of money. One rule of thumb is to estimate that you will spend an average of 2% of a home’s purchase price each year on maintenance. (So if you buy a $650,000 home, that’s $13,000 each year.) “It becomes a ‘what do you want out of life’ question,” Berendsohn says. “You may not go on those vacations you are envisioning; it might affect the type of car you drive.”

If we haven’t scared you off yet, the good news is that you can reduce some of your biggest future headaches before you buy the home — provided you crawl through every inch of the property with a seasoned home inspector. They can help spot issues before they arise, and maybe even help you get the seller to pay for the fixes before you close. 

But the reality is, stuff is going to break, need upkeep, or need replacing. Here’s a guide to some (but far from all) of the home repairs coming your way, when you’re likely to face them, and a rough idea of what it’s going to cost you. 

•  HVAC: As in “heating ventilation air conditioning.” In Canada, where our winters are long and unforgiving, it’s the heating part you really need to focus on. Fortunately, modern heating systems rarely need wholesale replacing. They’re built to last for as long as you’re likely to live in the home — 30 years or more. So the costs here really depend on when you jump into that life cycle. On the scale of what can go wrong, unless you’re talking complete replacement, this is a relatively cheap fix. ($$)

• Roof: If your house is a new construction, exhale, you probably won’t have to touch your roof for a while. If you’re moving into an existing home, though, expect to do some patchwork every few years. Because it’s more dangerous work, you’ll need to pay a roofer as much for the labor as for the repair. Here again, wholesale replacing is rarely necessary nowadays. Unless a tree falls on it. Stuff happens. ($$$)

• Septic system: Oof. This is a rough one, because if something goes wrong — even something relatively minor — you probably can’t live in the house while it’s getting repaired. And if you have to dig up your yard to get at the problem, double oof. On the bright side, septic systems are built for toughness, so chances are you won’t have a major problem. But that’s not accounting for human idiocy. If your son decides to see what happens when he flushes his Star Wars action figures down the toilet, you could be facing a five-figure repair project — along with a tractor in your yard and a week at a hotel or your in-laws’. One thing you’ll want to know about your home before you buy is how many people lived there before you. The bigger the family, the bigger the strain that’s been put on the system. (Please don’t make us explain why.) ($$$$)

• Windows: Most windows nowadays are known as IGUs (insulated glass units) or DGUs (double glass units), but they refer to the same thing: two panes of glass with a spacer in between that’s filled with an insulating gas like argon or krypton. IGUs typically last between 10 and 20 years, but the colder the climate, the quicker they’ll need replacing. On a per-window cost, it’s not expensive — about $800 — but this is something you don’t want to put off for too long after noticing a problem. “Windows can get so deteriorated that the livability of the house can suffer,” Berendsohn says. “You've got all of these fogged windows. The seal can be so bad that condensation forms on the inside of the IGU and gets into the building cavity.” That’s bad. Now you’re not just replacing a window, you're repairing an exterior-facing wall. ($$)

• Driveway: Assuming you have a driveway, it will need patching, especially in colder parts of the country. (If you have an interlocking driveway made of pavers, you’ll eventually need to replace broken stones and re-level the entire thing.) Unlike your septic system and your windows, however, a bumpy driveway won’t impact the livability of your home — although it can get ugly (and mess with the shocks on your car). The good news: even a homeowner with no repair experience can handle patches with the help of YouTube. If you decide to redo the whole thing, though, call in a pro. It’s not too costly, and it’s a one-day job. ($)

• Carpeting: Wood floors are relatively bulletproof, but they don’t hold in heat as well as carpeting. With sufficient love and care, a new high-quality carpet can last for 20 or 25 years. If you have pets (or if the previous owner did), they can cut the life of your carpeting in half. Children also do damage but not as much — particularly if they obey rules about not eating in their bedroom — and their messes tend to be more contained. When it is time to replace the carpeting, it’s often more expensive than you might expect. A big house with nice carpeting can be a $20,000 job. ($$$)