I have seen so many videos on YouTube of homes that have been abandoned for 5-10 years and they are just falling apart, But then my house hasn’t been renovated or anything in 8 years or so, and it’s in good condition. Wouldn’t the same thing happen to my house since it’s unchanged?
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A lot of natural stuff keeps its distance from humans. Squirrels, mice, bears, raccoons, etc. You might think this is false because you still get pests who invade your space but actually there would be a lot MORE of them if you weren’t there.
Once a house stops being “that place where the humans always are” and becomes just “a weird boxy tree to shelter under”, the animals move in.
To some extent the same is true of plants, although they don’t think about it – they just get bits broken off when those bits get in humans’ way. Even a human who doesn’t spend a lot of time on maintenance will still break off a tree branch that starts making annoying scraping sounds against the house. Even mowing the lawn, although it might not feel like “house maintenance”, makes a difference. By chopping their heads off before they get big, you are preventing all the potential more “woody” plants like shrubs and tree saplings from getting started. Leave them alone and they’ll start invading the foundations and walls. Also, if you stop preventing the dirt from “getting in”, and you now have soil for plants to take root in, INSIDE the house.
Weather is also an issue. Even if an abandoned house was locked up before it was abandoned, such that all its openings (windows, doors) are closed. If nobody is there to care about it then the first time a window breaks from a tree branch, or a hailstorm damages a roof tile, nobody is there to get annoyed that the weather is leaking in so nobody stops it.
A subset of weather is just seasonal temperature variation, especially if the house is located in a climate where it sometimes snows. When you live there, you aren’t allowing the inside of the house to get below freezing temperatures. When you leave and turn the heat off, then the interior experiences freeze/thaw cycles that can be brutal on materials that weren’t built to expect it. (There’s a reason that interior paint and exterior paint come in different cans. Interior paint isn’t designed to handle weather variation.)
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