10 Ways You’re Damaging Your House Without Realizing It

Maintaining a home is expensive, with many financial advisors recommending you set aside around 2% of its purchase price for upkeep each year. That cost is well worth it, as it prevents small problems from becoming bigger ones, and keeps your home in good shape so you can actually enjoy living there.

It’s reasonable to assume that if you’re doing at least the bare minimum home maintenance tasks, you can rest easier. But even if you repair stuff as needed and do all the recommended annual checks and upkeep, you might still be damaging your house in a myriad of ways. That’s because many things homeowners without thinking about it can actually damage a house over the long term.

Doing these 10 things occasionally likely isn't a big deal, but over time and with repetition, they can contribute to some major headaches.

Using too many bath bombs

If you soothe the stress of home ownership with a nice hot bath spiced up by a fizzing, colorful bath bomb, you may be slowly ruining your home’s plumbing. Bath bombs typically contain stuff like citric acid, cream of tartar, Epsom salts, and baking soda, not to mention scented oils, glitter, or other decorations intended to give your bath a whimsical or romantic vibe. Over time, all that stuff can easily congeal in your pipes, or get caught on existing clogs, making them worse. A bath bomb once in a while won’t cause much trouble, but if you have a regular habit, you’re risking paying a plumber a lot of money sooner rather than later.

Using chemical drain cleaners

If you have a clogged drain and you turn to a chemical drain cleaner to open it up, you’re probably not going to destroy your house in the process. But if you have frequent clogged drains that you use drain cleaner to clear, you’re not only putting a band-aid on a bigger problem (why are your drains always clogged?) you’re probably damaging your pipes. Most of the drain cleaners you buy in a store are either caustic or oxidizing, and both release heat as part of the process of turning clogged material into something more easily dissolved and cleared away. That heat can soften PVC pipes and warp metal pipes over time. If your drains are always clogged and slow, it’s probably better to call a plumber and implement some basic drain maintenance steps.

Putting your appliances in the wrong spot

Just about every appliance in your home, from the refrigerator to the television, generates heat as a byproduct. If you place an appliance or two near your home’s thermostat, this can have a real negative impact on two things: Your heating or cooling bills, and your HVAC’s lifespan. That’s because the heat from the appliance will fool the thermostat into thinking your home is hotter than it actually is, causing the air conditioning to run more in the summer and the heat to run less in the winter. With the former scenario, your HVAC system will suffer more wear and tear, leading to a shorter lifespan, more repair bills, and more frequent replacement costs. In the latter scenario, you’ll find yourself turning the heat up to compensate, leading to a similar situation.

Painting over brick

If you’ve got exposed brick in the interior of your home that you’ve painted, congratulations: You may have just lit the fuse on an expensive home repair bomb. Brick is a porous material, and it needs to “breathe” properly. Paint can seal the brick, trapping moisture within, which can lead to deterioration of the brick, mold growth, peeling paint, and spalling. The problem is worse when it’s an exterior brick wall, but even a totally interior wall can be slowly destroyed if improperly painted.

If you must paint that wall, prepare the surface carefully and use a paint designed for masonry work. Then keep an eye on it. Inspect it regularly for bubbling, peeling, and brick dust—all evidence that moisture is doing your walls dirty.

Painting over rot

Speaking of paint, it’s important to note that it’s not magic. If you notice that wood in your home’s interior or exterior is suffering a bit of rot, cleaning it up and painting over it will absolutely not arrest the progression. It will, in fact, make things worse as the paint traps moisture, likely accelerating the process of rot that is eating your house alive—plus, that trapped moisture will cause the paint to bubble and peel soon enough anyway. Even if the rot you’ve discovered is minor, you have to figure out where the moisture is coming from and address that, then repair or replace the wood as needed before painting.

Flushing wipes down the toilet

It’s a weird fact of late-stage capitalism that items clearly marked “flushable” on their packaging are often not flushable at all. Neither is a long list of stuff that seems like it should be flushable, like food (which can persist a long time in your pipes, forming cement-like clogs) or kitty litter, including the clumping kind. If you’ve been flushing “flushable” wipes down the toilet, you’re on a countdown to plumbing disaster.

Using the wrong cleaners

Cleaning your house requires time, elbow grease, and the right cleaning products—which is more important than you think. Vinegar can be an effective cleaner, to the point where it’s suggested for just about any cleaning job. But vinegar is a weak acid, and as such it can damage surfaces like natural stone, television and monitor screens, hardwood flooring, and wood furniture. It can also do a lot of damage to washing machines and dishwashers if you toss it in to freshen things up, because the vinegar will weaken the rubber seals inside those appliances over time. Similarly, bleach is a powerful cleaning agent—but it's powerful it can actually corrode metal surfaces (like those on your kitchen appliances) and natural stone. If you’re cleaning your house with vinegar and bleach regularly, you’re basically slowly dissolving big parts of it over time.

And if you’re using a steam cleaner on wood or laminate floors, you’re probably slowly ruining them, too. Unlike a spilled liquid, steam is pushed under pressure into the tiny seams in your floor, infiltrating the wood and making it swell-resulting in permanent and irreversible damage.

Not sweeping enough

Even if you’re not steaming your floors, you might be ruining them by not doing something: Sweeping (or vacuuming) regularly. As in, daily. Even if the floors look superficially clean, dirt that’s invisible to you is busily destroying your floors. It gets pushed into the tiny cracks and seams, dulling the finish and discoloring the floor. And the tiny particles of dirt and debris act like sandpaper, and as you walk around you’re grinding that stuff into the floor, creating scratches. When you do sweep, notice how much stuff you’re cleaning off a floor that didn’t look dirty to the naked eye, and realize that you’re scraping that stuff along your floors all the time.

Planting climbing vines

If you think a vine enveloping your house is charming, think again: Creeping and climbing plants that grow up and over homes are eating those homes bit by bit. They trap moisture and open up cracks in your home’s exterior that allow that moisture to infiltrate, their weight can damage siding and other exterior cladding, they offer shelter to damaging insects and small animals—they can even tear stuff off your house, like gutters and downspouts.

Misusing your garbage disposal

Garbage disposals are garbage (if you ask me, anyway), but if you have one, you probably use it. And if you use it, you might be setting yourself up for a big repair bill in the future because people seem to believe that garbage disposals are magical bags of holding that simply make anything disappear. The list of stuff that will wind up clogging your pipes and/or septic system includes most fats, oils, and grease (including stuff like peanut butter or heavy cream), egg shells (or any kind of shell, actually), vegetable peels, and corn husks. The list is so long you might wonder what even is the point of a garbage disposal, anyway, and you would not be wrong.

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