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?
In: 68
Air, water, and animals.
A house stays in good shape so long as those 3 things stay *outside*. Bust a window or leave a door open and wind blows in debris, water flows in, and raccoons throw a party. Water especially just wrecks shit.
Because all the damage you see started from small issues that, in a lived in house, someone notices and (hopefully) fixes before it gets too bad. That is the reason why ignoring a small problem can lead to huge issues in a house.
Additionally, abandoned houses often have had deficient maintenance far before being abandoned. My father let his leaky roof get worse for over 10 years before the house got declared unfit for habitation, then it got condemned for over 5 years.
My understanding is that the temperature is a factor as well. Humans have a very narrow range of temperature that we enjoy. As such, we tend to keep our houses within that narrow band.
When a house is abandoned, the temperature variation will often increase dramatically, depending on the environment, which mucks up a lot of stuff in the house.
Also: water and animals… I just added temperature because I did not see it in other answers.
Lived in houses are constantly being maintained. Insect traps, fixing leaks, keeping out animals, cleaning gutters, mainta8ning environmental controls…etc
The thing is that problems start small, but can compound fast. If you find a bit of rotting wood, it starts very small, and you can fix it, but a rot left untreated, rapidly grows, as it is a multiplying organism s0readin out, that is doing the rotting.
If an animal chews a hole and gets in, you quickly remove it, but if you don’t, it moves its whole family in, and now they all chew up stuff.
Homes without environmental controls are great for mild to flourish in. Homes with gutters not being cleaned damage the roof and water overflows, damaging the outer walls and foundations more quickly.
Once you become a home owner, you quickly learn how shit is co Stanly breaking and needing fixing.
Even though you might not do it OP, someone washes your house, clears the gutters, fixes a squeaking window. Also your lawn is probably mowed and bushes tidy. All those things when not done get noticed a lot more than when they do.
Just plainly heating a house in winter does wonders for preservation. In the wet and cold period, heating dries and warms the house. Wood does not get soaked, insulation stays effective and mold stays out. If the home is not heated moisture will get everywhere which will start doing more and more damage. In just one cycle it is cleanable but after a couple rot might really set in.
Humidity too. Heating and A/C help control humidity.
Even things such as cleaning up leaves and other yard waste can impact humidity.
Leaves and yard waste also create additional places that rodents and insects set up home near houses.
Mice and snakes love leaves left in yards.
an abandoned house was probably abandoned in the first place because it was a peice of shit house probably allready falling apart……then the falling apart process just keeps progressing over the years if nobody is there to fix the problems…..now this is the dilapidated house your looking at here today in this thread
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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