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Notes -
You will have people advertising their services too you directly for the sorts of things you need when you own a house(eg home repairs and maintenance services, pest control, alarms, etc). All of the direct advertisers cost more for a lesser quality of work than contractors you can find on your lonesome, and this is not an exaggeration. Keep a capacitor on hand for your air conditioner(you can order one off of Amazon for like 10% of what an HVAC company sells them for) and swap it out off of a youtube video before you call a company.
Save up for property taxes- it's cheaper than escrow.
If you have wooden subflooring, just ripping the carpet up and staining it will probably look quite nice. This is extremely easy to do and you can buy stain and some rags from home depot, and get a friend to help you for pizza. If you have concrete subflooring home depot linoleum is extremely cheap and similarly easy. Likewise, painting is pretty easy- but use primer(which is much cheaper than regular paint) for two coats, then one of paint. You will never match paint colors perfectly and for your top coat of paint, you do get what you pay for.
Keep trees away from your house. There's foundation issues, roof damage, it invites additional pests, etc.
On plumbing- take your p-traps apart and clean them under each sink when you move in and then every year, and flush tree killer down your toilets every year. The good stuff will be labeled something like 'not for sale in blue states'. Plumbing youtube is generally very easy to follow and has most homeowner-friendly repairs in multiple easy-to-find videos- and major plumbing companies sometimes publish tutorials on stuff like fixing toilets as a form of advertising.
You can get good used appliances for like half the price- both from professional used appliance dealers who offer a warranty, and from randos on craigslist who don't need them anymore.
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