What a Central Texas house actually needs.

Three things make Central Texas different from wherever the generic checklist was written.

The soil moves. Expansive clay swells when it rains and shrinks in drought. Over a summer that can lift and drop one corner of a slab by enough to stick a door and open a crack in the drywall. Watering the foundation perimeter evenly is not folklore; it is the cheapest structural maintenance available.

The heat is a duty cycle, not a season. An air conditioner here runs from April to October. Equipment rated for a national average duty cycle wears out early, and a filter that is fine for ninety days elsewhere is choking by day thirty.

The freeze is rare, which is the problem. Houses built for heat have pipes in exterior walls and hose bibs with no shutoff. February 2021 was not a one-off; it was a demonstration of what an uninsulated line does when the temperature holds below freezing for three days.

The numbers below are national. Central Texas makes most of them worse rather than better — a longer cooling season and a soil that moves add work rather than replacing it — but they are the clearest picture of what a house asks of the person who owns it.

It is more jobs than anyone plans for. Angi’s 2023State of Home Spending Report puts the average homeowner at 11.1 home service projects a year. Three quotes each — the number most financial advice recommends — is 33 separate contractor conversations in twelve months, before a single one of them is scheduled twice.

So most people stop comparing. A 2024 HVAC industry study published by ACHR News found 55% of homeowners take only one quote before hiring. Not because the second call is hard, but because it is the fifteenth call of the year.

The weight of it is measurable. A Thumbtack survey found68% of homeowners feel overwhelmed by maintenance. Frontdoor’s December 2024 sentiment survey of 984homeowners put 54% reporting real stress or burnout, rising to61% among millennials, and Real Estate Witch found1 in 4 saying upkeep has affected their mental health.

What gets deferred does not stay deferred. A 2024Sears Home Services survey found 54% of homeowners fix things only once they break. Thumbtack and FinanceBuzz data from the same year put92% carrying at least one repair they have not got to. A2023 Hippo Insurance survey found 32%regret having delayed maintenance — sharpest around HVAC, roofing and plumbing, which are exactly the categories where a deferred job becomes an emergency invoice.

And the housing stock is old. The median American home is around47 years old by Census American Housing Survey data. Austin has plenty newer than that, but a house built in the 1970s or 1980s needs a different schedule from one built last year, and most advice is written as though every house is the second kind.

Sources for every figure above are listed at the foot of this page.

All of it is doable. None of it is hard. The reason it does not get done is that it competes with everything else, and the consequence of skipping any single item is invisible until it is expensive.

If you want to run it yourself, the working method is a calendar, not a list: put the seasonal items on actual dates, book the HVAC service in February rather than July, and keep a record of what was done so the next owner — or the next contractor — is not guessing.

If you would rather not, that is roughly what Candoo is.