Just follow Martha Stewart's website, you'll find there are several thousand hours worth of chores you should be doing weekly!

It took us years to compile the list and it’s paid for itself many times over.

But to jump start the list in a future place, especially a traditional house, I’ve considered hiring a housing inspector or general contractor to give us a walkthrough of key maintenance timelines. Many things could be decades away but easy to forget until it’s a much bigger job. Notes from that interaction would essentially be the bones of “the list.”

That's a rough one. I know a good place to start is anything large you buy, make sure you read the maintenance portion of the manual and make a couple notes.

Then I start asking myself about important things like "how do I make sure the plumbing doesn't get fucked? " or "how do I make sure the furnace doesn't die?" and I start googling.

Not a great answer but it helps. I recently realized I didn't give much of a thought to well pump maintenance and I've been down a massive rabbit hole on that one. I feel like you just pick one thing at a time and work on it and you learn as you go.

Case in point: I replaced my coffee machine with a chemex. So much easier to maintain.

Wipe the gasket on your laundry machines

You're not my mom, you can't tell me what to do.

Clean your dryer vent

More importantly, clean your dishwasher vent.

If you didn’t know it had a vent, enjoy cleaning out that mold.

Yeah, the only problem is, only now I'm starting to realize some things. I'm 53 - but hey, it's never too late...

When building his house, my father took many shortcuts and often picked the cheaper option, even if it would be more costly in the long term. And even when a cheap piece of crap breaks becuse it's a cheap piece of crap, he goes and buys another cheap piece of crap to replace it.

For example, he refuses to connect to the city water supply, instead he built a well. This can be a good way to save on water costs, as long as your regularly replace filters and test the water to make sure it's safe, and descale it if too hard.

However, he rarely replaces the filters and refuses to install a water softening system. We got sick a few times because of the water (now we just buy bottled when visiting), and all appliances, faucets, water heater are clogged with limescale that cause low water pressure. Fixing or replacing all of them is going to be super expensive.

Similarly, he bought the cheapest doors, and we got stuck because the door handle broke. The house is full of improvised electric stuff. The fridge is so bad it regularly breaks, and even when it's working sometimes food spoils after just 1-2 days because it doesn't cool evenly. He is also a bit of a hoarder, and has a terrible taste in furniture and decorations.

I am the most likely to inherit the estate, and I'm honestly not looking forward to having to deal with all that crap.

Thank your lucky stars you've never had to descale a toilet...

Read the manual. It might have a descale mode that pushes some descaling chemical through the pipes without heating it.

Source: I did it like a month ago. The water that came out was quite pulpy.

I usually just run vinegar through it every once in a while and then run a few pots of just water to get rid of any residual vinegar. Beware, it'll make the house smell like vinegar for the rest of the day.

White vinegar works, or you can pick up "sour salt" in the Kosher section, which is citric acid and since you don't need much the rest is handy as a substitute for lemon juice. Dilute with plenty of water, run the machine, it removes calcium deposits.

The saddest I’ve seen is a 70 yr old “from a different era” who had to now learn how to make macaroni with cheese for the first time in his life because his partner passed away.

That’s where I think shit has gone really wrong for way too long when trying to adult. Like prepare that you may have to live alone for at least a portion of your life and be the type of person you can stand to be around alone.

We take the opposite approach: never assume your spouse is going to deal with it; see a problem, deal with it yourself.

Our marriage is still a mess, but it's a mess that's not breaking up any time soon. Mostly we both need to stop drinking.