Maintenance

The stage

The day a building is finished is the first day of its upkeep. Most of its life, and most of its cost, comes after the builders leave.

What the usual way assumes

That maintenance is the owner’s problem. The builder is gone in a year. Kitchens, floors and windows are thrown out long before they wear out, usually when a home changes hands.

What we do instead

We keep what we build, so the upkeep is ours. That changes how we build.

• A schedule and a reserve for every part. Roofs, paint, heat pumps and sealant each have a known life. We plan and save for each one.
• Repair before replace. Refinish the floor. Rebuild the window. Reglaze, re-tile.
• Spares on the shelf. Matching finishes and parts are kept from day one.
• A record that is kept up. What is in the building, and what was done to it, updated every year.

We also build so that repair is possible: access panels where things fail, parts that unscrew, nothing important buried in foam.

What we don’t know yet

How many hours a well-kept building really takes. Small building systems tend to fail for lack of attention, not bad equipment. We intend to count our own maintenance hours and publish them, because almost nobody does.