Maintaining and Repairing an Older Home

The traditional materials, period designs and aged character of older houses are all part of their appeal. This section will help you understand how to maintain, repair and improve your home with this in mind. Scroll or click the links to jump down to:

Get a free copy of our Guide for Owners of Listed Buildings, which includes lots of practical information on living in and looking after a listed building.

Looking After Your Home

Explore the fundamentals of maintaining and repairing an older home.

  • Maintenance Checklist

    Use a checklist to inspect your building in a logical sequence.

  • How To Find the Right Professional Help

    When choosing professionals to help you plan and carry out work to an old building, you need to choose someone who has the appropriate experience.

  • Keeping Safe

    Keeping safe when carrying out a maintenance check or repair work on your home is mostly common sense.

Making Repairs

To be effective, repair work needs to resolve any underlying causes.

  • Understanding Decay

    Knowing where to look and what to look for will help you spot potential problems of decay in your home.

  • Use the Right Materials

    When considering what materials to use for repair work it's important to understand how your house was built.

  • Structural Movement

    Most old buildings move to some degree during their life, but this movement may not be a problem.

  • Repairing Walls

    A large proportion of houses of traditional construction are built with solid masonry walls of brick or stone, or sometimes a combination of the two.

  • When to Consider Restoration in an Older Home

    Restoration involves returning a building or part of a building to the way it looked at a previous point in its life.

Energy Efficiency Improvements

While making repairs to your home, could you include any energy saving measures in the work? For example, you could lag hard-to-reach pipes, or draught-strip windows.