While not an exact predictor, average lifespan is still a valuable piece of information. For example, let’s say you are buying an 20-year-old home with its original shingle roof, air conditioner, and water heater. If you look at the listing of expected lifespans below, you’ll see that all three of them would be either right at, or past, their average life expectancy.
I don’t know why I found this so fascinating, but I did. You just better hope that a few of these things don’t all fail in at the same time.
I lived in an apartment building during a time when a specific part of the toilet pipe assembly began failing in multiple units, almost simultaneously. The super was not happy that week.
12 years in and I’m starting to panic. 😉 Thanks for sharing!
When we bought the house we’re in now, 23 years ago, the building inspector went through every system in the house with us. And, the owner, was an amazing guy (a retired engineer) and had all the original paperwork on everything in the house (he had it built).
We knew about when we’d be replacing things and almost everything was going to need to be replaced. We had a list, approximate costs and ideas for replacement. There was no rush until something failed.
We started doing double hung window right away and we went high end: Marvins at about $500 a pop. Took many years but we got them all including two picture windows.
The roof needed replacing but we did a big remodel that included skylights and so, we did them both at once.
The house was old enough to have a buried 1000 gallon oil tank and the state of Connecticut insured the tank against leakage. But, we were told one year that that insurance was ending so, we needed a new tank (330 gallons, inside) and we did the furnace/boiler at the same time. Thank god the old buried tank had no leaks.
We did another remodel that included taking some walls off so we put Cat 5 in the walls (too bad 5e and beyond weren’t out yet) and put in a new electrical panel with a whole house surge suppressor.
We recently repaved the driveway and did it right. It had been paved in the 1960’s so it was a battlefield.
No doubt we’ve done more but each of these things cost some serious money and had we had to do any two of them in a given year it would have hurt (or worse).
When young folks ask me about buying or owning a house I tell them all we’ve put into ours, which, was not a fixer-upper, just an older house that would eventually need work. It gives them pause…