 Ladies and gentlemen, we all agree that with interest rates so low and the economy being down it is a buyer's market. Unfortunately there are people who have lost their jobs and are now forced to sell their properties. Most of them are getting below market value for their properties because they have not done regular maintenance and savvy buyers are negotiating very good prices. I'm going to show you what maintenance to do which will not bankrupt you but will improve the way buyers look at your property. I will prove to you that it's cheaper to do maintenance than to replace items and I will guide you on how and when to do maintenance. I believe that property owners don't do maintenance because they don't know when to do maintenance, they don't know how to do maintenance and they are totally confused with all the products that are available and often use the wrong products. If you do not maintain you will complain. I am Marisha Robes. I have 12 years construction experience and 8 years inspection experience and I have acquired my knowledge in the field and not from a textbook. I'm an Abyss certified master inspector and I would like to ensure that you get the best possible price for your property when you sell it. I have done maintenance inspections for a variety of clients, private home owners, sectional title complexes, property investors, commercial and industrial companies to name but a few. I recently inspected three properties for the Embassy of Vietnam. I inspected the Embassy building itself, the Ambassador's residence and the staff accommodation. The reports were just over 480 pages. Here I am handing over the report to His Excellency the Ambassador of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Mr. Wong Phan Loi. The first secretary of Vietnam, Mr. Pham Trong, was very impressed with the reports. He forwarded it to the Vietnam government to get the funds approved to continue with the maintenance. Maintenance inspections of commercial properties are much easier when there is a forklift to deposit me on the roof. It is very important to inspect the roof as part of your maintenance inspection. I'm an ITC certified roof inspector and I love roof trusses. Aren't these trusses just absolutely beautiful? You get a manual with almost everything you buy. You get one with your car, with your computer and you even get a manual for your husband. But when you buy a property you are only told pay the bond, pay the rates and taxes and pay the utilities and you do not know what else to do. Don't worry, the proud homeowner is to the rescue. It is a book that was written specifically for homeowners. It will give you advice on how to supervise the site when you are building a house. The do's and don'ts of alterations. We have entire chapters on damp, cracks and roof leaks and we have a chapter on maintenance. Order your copy today at theproudhomeowner.co.za. What is maintenance? It is prolonging the life of capital assets by minimising the rate of wear and tear. People love autumn, the leaves are falling and the temperatures are not as hot anymore. But it is a sad day for roofs because all of a sudden the roofs and gutters are covered in leaves. It is important to clean the roof. As you can see from this photograph, the waterproofing has not been maintained regularly. Now you have the added problem of leaves on the roof. When it starts raining, the water is not going to drain away. It is going to pond on the roof and deteriorate the already poor waterproofing even further. In my estimation, it will not cost more than 50 rand of your gardener's wages to remove the leaves from the roof. Flat roofs and their waterproofing must be maintained. Waterproofing is normally derby gum, which is a torch on product. And in most cases, a reputable company will give you a 10-year guarantee. But read the guarantee. It states that the waterproofing must be maintained annually. I recommend to my clients to get the company who fitted the waterproofing to also do the maintenance annually. Then they have no excuse not to honour their guarantee. But you can also maintain your waterproofing by painting it with silver reflect of paint annually. If you do that, the waterproofing will last much longer than the 10 years guarantee you receive. Please take note of brown spots on flat roofs. That is an indication that water was ponding here. And the waterproofing will deteriorate first in these areas. Climb on top of your roof and go and have a look at what is going on there. I do not advise that you leave this mess like this. The moss is growing, water is standing in the geese tray and the geese is being rusted from below. Do not leave this mess like this. The seller declared that there was a roof leak in the cottage and he had no idea what was causing it and how to repair it. But he never climbed on top of the roof. The valleys were totally blocked by leaves and debris. So what happens when it rains? The water has nowhere to go but push in under the roof tiles. It is very important to clean the roofs before the rainy season starts. But in this case my first point of advice was trim the tree back from the roof. I often find valleys that were waterproofed. But in this case it was not helping much. Can you see how the leaves and debris are still stuck in between the waterproofing in the valley? When it rains, water will still not be able to drain away fast and will push in under the roof tiles. It is much more advisable to rather open the valleys, cut them open neatly and water will be allowed to drain away freely. This is what a close and an open valley should look like, sprockets. The exposed roof timber of the roof is an extension of the roof trusses, therefore it is important that you look after it. If you want to treat the sprockets of the house on a normal 3 bedroom house, it will cost you between four and a half and five and a half thousand rand. But to replace about 40% of the sprockets on the same 3 bedroom house will be in excess of 60,000 rand. To me it is a no brainer. My client offered 200,000 rand less on this property because of this mess. If only the seller had spent four and a half thousand rand treating the exposed roof timber, the sprockets would not have broken and this section of the roof would not have collapsed. This is how you must repair the rotten sprockets. You remove all the rotten timber on the outside. You now have to remove a brick next to the truss and bolt another piece of timber onto the truss. It has to overlap onto the truss, double the length it was protruding. So if it was protruding 300 millimeters, it has to overlap the truss by 600 millimeters. It has to be bolted and nailed in a zigzag pattern every 150 millimeters. Most importantly, as soon as you have done it, treat the old and the new timber with creosote. Keep an eye on the under tile plastic. After a long time it starts to disintegrate and you will now have a lot more dust in your roof as well as roof leaks. My client nearly had a heart attack when he got my maintenance report. The roof trusses were severely damaged by fire. He did not have an inspection done before he bought the house and he did not know that there was fire damage. The under tile plastic was new but the roof trusses had been scorched. The seller had not disclosed the fire neither at the agent and my client had no recourse because the seller had immigrated already. He now had a huge ball in replacing some of these roof trusses. I get asked a lot by my clients, how does sand end up in gutters? The wind blows sand and dust onto the roof and when it rains it washes down into the gutters. If you do not clean the gutters with a hosepipe every year before the rainy season starts the sand is going to stay there. And now what is going to happen is that the seeds of plants and weeds are going to start to grow in the gutters. This is not advisable because the water will now have nowhere to go but pond in the gutters and the gutters will rust through. In my estimation part of your gardener's labor and the water will cost no more than a hundred and fifty rand to clean the gutters before the rainy season starts. But if the gutters continually blocked and water and leaves pond in the gutters you will have to replace the gutters and on a normal three bedroom house it will be about fifteen thousand rand. But a savvy property buyer will argue that it is going to cost more in the region of twenty five thousand rand. Here's a tip for you, you do not have to climb on top of the roof every week to check if the gutters are blocked but if a downpipe drips continuously and slowly and long after it has rained it is an indication that the gutters are blocked. This is not a beautiful piece of artwork, it is actually a rusted downpipe. Although it is beautiful I do not want that on my house, ensure that you keep the gutters and downpipes clean at all times, rising damp, it is ugly, it is a major problem in South African houses and it is very expensive to repair. When you see the telltale signs at the bottom of the wall, do something about it immediately. Do not wait until it looks like this. When it gets to this stage you will also have rising damp on the inside of the house. Rising damp is because of a construction error by incompetent builders. It is very clear from this drawing which is from national building regulations as well as NHPRC guidelines and it is in the proud homeowner that the DPC must protrude ten millimetres. This means that water will rise up, hit the DPC and go down again. It will not rise to 900 millimetres high and damage the entire wall. A much better idea is to build the houses with a facebrick plinth, in other words below the DPC you have facebricks, you will not see the damp damage at all. Stormwater is normally only of importance once there has been a flood. Have a look when you buy a property. Look at the levels of the garden, which way is the ground sloping and most importantly are there enough weep holes in the boundary walls for the stormwater to drain out. Prevision requires that the lowest stand accepts the stormwater from the highest stand but you are not expected to accept all the stormwater from the higher property. The property owners must make provision to discharge some of their stormwater into the stormwater drains and most importantly of all do not close weep holes. Stormwater is very strong and I have seen numerous boundary walls being pushed over by stormwater. Building regulations require that the paving slope away from the house in order for stormwater to drain away from the house and not flood the house. It is very clear that this building contractor did not know that regulation and ignored it completely. There are a lot of different types of cracks, 15 to be exact and in the proud home owner we go into them in detail and explain why they have formed and also how to repair not patch them. These are crazing cracks not dried out mud. These are mapping cracks and their cause is totally different than the crazing cracks. If only this seller had waterproofed the parapet walls, the whole entire house would not have looked like this. My client offered 300,000 rand less on this house because he had a huge repairable to get the house looking properly again. Structural cracks are the serious ones and the very expensive ones to repair. The easy way to identify a structural crack is it is bigger on the side where it has started than on the other side. In this case the wall was moving in the direction of the arrows and the foundations must be underpinned. It is important with cracks to first of all identify them. Then to ensure that they have settled, live cracks cannot be repaired, they will appear again. Make sure they are not live anymore and that they are static cracks and then repair them with a correct product. Do not worry if you cannot remember everything that I have said now. In your maintenance report you will get expert guidance and explanations on how and when to do maintenance and which products to use and which products not to use. Here are a few more tips for maintenance. This door must now be replaced. It is very important that outside wooden doors are treated annually with a good oil based product. Do not use a varnish. But why is this door so severely damaged at the bottom? It is due to water ingress from the bottom. The door was never treated at the bottom. When you treat a door, please remember it does not only have two sides, the front and the back. It actually has six sides and all six sides must be treated. The front, the back, the top and the bottom, the left and the right hand side. Then you will not have damage such as this. Garage doors must also be treated on all sides. How expensive do you think it is to replace a garage door? Six and a half, seven and a half thousand rand whereas to treated once a year will cost you in the region of 200 rand. Do not leave your steel window frames until they have rusted through. Paint them with a good quality enamel paint. Some of the enamel paints are guaranteed for 12 years. They are a little bit more expensive. But I prefer to paint once every 12 years than have to paint every two to three years. And please remove the paint completely every three to four painting cycles. If you don't, the paint becomes so thick on the window frames that the windows can't open eventually. Maintenance was so much cheaper than to replace the van at the zinc unit. A tube of silicone is about 150 rand and your time to seal around the zinc with a silicone maybe 10 minutes. But to replace the zinc unit is now going to set you back three and a half thousand rand. Make a definite date to do these little maintenance items in our household. It's the first weekend of June. Then we replace the silicone around the zinc around the basins, the shower, the bath, and that will ensure that water ingress will not totally rot that the worktop and the unit below. You have to make a choice. Do you want to do regular maintenance on your house or are you going to replace items at a much higher cost? Do you now believe me that it is much cheaper to do maintenance than it is to replace items? You will benefit from our knowledge and experience. Book your maintenance inspection today and ensure that you get a better price for your property when you sell it one day. Please click on the link below and download a maintenance booklet with some valuable tips and also remember that I can then get in contact with you when our maintenance program is available later this year. I thank you for your time and I hope that you will now do maintenance with more confidence. Thank you.