Home Maintenance & Punch Lists in Raleigh, NC

The impression, not the repair

Raleigh has the widest range of housing on our list and a market that moves. Which makes pre-sale maintenance one of the most common reasons people get in touch here.

The economics are worth stating plainly, because they are not what people expect.

A buyer does not price the faults they find. Nobody looks at a sticking door and mentally subtracts eighty dollars.

They form an impression. A house with six small visible things wrong reads as a house that has not been looked after — and that impression gets applied to everything they cannot see. The roof, the systems, the things behind walls.

That is where the cost lands, and it is far larger than the repairs.

The list, which is nearly always the same

Across a great many houses, the pre-listing list looks like this:

Doors. Any that stick, will not latch, or will not stay where they are put. Doors are touched by every single person who walks through the house.

Handles and hardware. Loose, rattling or mismatched.

Holes and marks in walls. Where pictures, shelves and televisions used to be. Filled properly in thin coats and touched in.

Dripping taps and running toilets. Both are heard as well as seen, and both read as neglect.

Dead bulbs. Including in fittings nobody can reach. A room with two of four bulbs working looks dim and dated even when it is neither.

Split caulk. Around baths, showers, worktops, and outside around windows and trim.

Damaged trim and skirting. Vacuum cleaner damage, knocks at corners, mitres that have opened.

Anything chirping. A smoke alarm with a low battery during a viewing is a genuinely bad start.

Cabinet doors out of alignment. Kitchen doors that do not line up are one of the first things people look at, and hinge adjustment takes minutes.

Exterior. The front door and its furniture, a dead exterior light, the gate, and anything visible from the street on the way in.

It is a good half day. It is the cheapest thing anybody does before a sale.

What is not worth doing

Equally worth saying.

Large works you will not recover. A kitchen, a bathroom, a roof, new windows. Those are decisions to take on their own merits rather than as a pre-sale move.

Anything that draws attention to itself. A single freshly painted wall in an otherwise tired room reads as a repair rather than as maintenance. If a room is being touched up, it is usually better to do the whole wall corner to corner so there is no visible edge.

Which decade the house is from

Raleigh spans four eras and each reaches a sale differently.

Inside the beltline — Oakwood, Five Points, Hayes Barton. Plaster walls that show every repair that was not primed to even out porosity, original doors that have been painted a dozen times and no longer close cleanly, and trim profiles that are not sold anywhere so damage has to be built up or milled to match rather than swapped.

The 1960s to 1980s ring. Original fixtures at the end of their life, hollow-core interior doors that have dropped, popcorn ceilings, and trim that has been painted repeatedly.

North Raleigh and Brier Creek. Nail pops as the framing dried out, anchor holes from shelving and televisions, the wall-to-ceiling joint opening seasonally, and builder flat paint that has been wiped and burnished in every doorway.

Beyond a sale

Most of our maintenance work is not pre-sale, and the same arithmetic applies: one small job costs the minimum, the ninth item on a list costs a fraction of that because the visit is already paid for.

Walk the house with a pencil, room by room, without filtering. Include the things you have adapted to. Use a torch held flat against the wall — raking light shows nail pops and cracks that are invisible looking straight on.

Seasonal work twice a year: caulk, exterior paint on the sun-facing elevations, deck and railing fixings and fence posts in spring; weatherstripping, thresholds, gutters, exterior faucets and alarms in autumn.

Holiday decorating, including the part people forget to book — taking it down again in January.

What we do not do

Anything requiring a permit, anything structural, roof work, and licensed electrical or plumbing work beyond fixture and valve replacement.

On a pre-sale list that matters, because those items take longer to arrange. It is another reason to start early.

Getting a price

Send the list numbered with photographs, and say if there is a date you are working toward. Most lists can be priced without a visit.

Raleigh is about half an hour from us, with no travel surcharge.