Maintenance is a design decision

A kitchen is torn out because the house was sold. A floor is replaced because refinishing seemed like more trouble. A window is thrown away because one seal failed. Very little of what leaves a house in a dumpster was worn out.

Buildings fail in two ways that have nothing to do with age: neglect, and replacement before its time. Both are decided long before the first repair, at the drawing board.

Why builders don’t think about it

Because they are gone. A builder who sells a house carries its problems for a year or so. After that, how hard it is to reach a valve or match a tile is the owner’s trouble, and the builder never hears about it.

We keep what we build. A leak in year twelve is our leak. That one fact changes many small choices.

What changes

A life and a budget for every part. A roof, a coat of paint, a heat pump and a bead of sealant each have a known lifespan. We list them, schedule them and set money aside for each.

Repair before replace. Refinish the floor. Rebuild the sash. Re-tile the corner. A rule like that only works if the building allows it, so it has to be designed in.

Things you can reach. Access panels at valves and traps. Equipment with room to work around it. Nothing important buried in foam.

Things you can match. Spare tile, flooring, paint codes and hardware are kept from day one, because in ten years the pattern will be discontinued.

A record that is kept up. What is in the building, where the shutoffs are and what was done, updated every year. The cheapest part of the whole list, and the one most often missing.

Very little of what leaves a house in a dumpster was worn out.

The parts that fail for lack of attention

Rain tanks, heat-recovery fans, solar equipment and filters all share one weakness. They seldom fail because the technology is bad. They fail because nobody is looking.

A single household can’t be expected to look. A builder who owns several buildings nearby can visit them on one round, the way a route is serviced. We think that is the only way small building systems stay working, and we mean to test it.

What we don’t know

What it really costs. Almost nobody publishes the hours a building takes to keep in good order. We intend to count ours and print them, including the years when the number is bad. If long-lived, repairable buildings cost more to look after than they save, that is worth knowing too.