Maintenance
The First Year in a New Burnaby Custom Home: Maintenance and Warranty Playbook
Settlement cracks, doors that stick, grout that seasons, an airtight house through its first wet Burnaby winter. Here's what's normal, what's a warranty claim, and how to keep the year-one paperwork tight.
What should you expect in the first year of a new custom home?
Expect a new house to move a little. Through the first heating season, framing lumber dries from its installed moisture content toward equilibrium with your indoor air, and that drying shows up as hairline cracks where drywall meets door and window openings, the odd nail pop, interior doors that need a hinge adjustment, and grout and caulk lines that tighten and set. None of that is a defect. It's a house settling into the climate you're now living in.
We tell every client the same thing at handover: write things down, don't panic, and don't start patching in month two. A crack that's still hairline at the year-end walkthrough is a one-time fill-and-paint. A crack you chase with filler four times before the house has finished drying just creates more work. The first year is for observing and listing, not for renovating.
What follows is how we coach owners of a new Burnaby custom home through year one, what's normal seasoning, what belongs on a warranty list, and the handful of maintenance moves that actually matter for an airtight, heat-pump-served house through a wet Lower Mainland winter.
Settlement, seasoning, and the things that aren't defects
A new house is full of materials still finding their resting state. The big one is wood. Framing, subfloor, stair stringers, door jambs, they all carry moisture at framing, and once the heat comes on, they release it. As they shrink slightly, you get small movement at the joints.
Here's the short list of what's normal in the first 12 months:
- Hairline cracks at the top corners of doors and windows, and along the occasional drywall seam.
- Nail or screw pops in ceilings and walls as framing dries.
- Interior doors that start to rub or won't latch cleanly, almost always a quick hinge or strike-plate adjustment.
- Grout and caulk lines that hairline-crack or pull slightly, especially at the tub-to-tile and counter-to-backsplash joints. These are wear-and-seasoning items, re-caulked once the movement settles.
- Trim and baseboard gaps opening a hair at mitred corners.
The reference that warranty providers actually use to judge this stuff is the BC Housing Residential Construction Performance Guide. It sets out, item by item, what counts as a coverable defect versus normal performance, finishing tolerances, what a provider will and won't accept on cracks, gaps, and finishes. We're not going to put a crack-width number on the page, because the Guide treats different assemblies differently and you should look at the actual section for your item. The point is this: there's a published standard, your warranty provider works from it, and "I don't like it" and "it fails the Guide" are two different claims.
The first heating season is the house exhaling. Half of what gets called a defect in February is just lumber doing what lumber does, write it down, don't chase it with a putty knife.
Icon Projects Team
The 12-month materials and labour window, and how to use it
The first layer of the BC 2-5-10 home warranty is 12 months on materials and labour, mandatory on every home built by a Licensed Residential Builder under the Homeowner Protection Act. It's the broadest year of coverage you'll ever have on the house, defects in materials and workmanship across the whole build. There's a second tier worth knowing too: a 24-month layer covering, among other things, the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC distribution systems, and exterior cladding, caulking, windows and doors where a defect could let them detach or cause damage. The deeper layers run out to five years on the building envelope and ten on the structure. We walk through all of it in our Burnaby read on the 2-5-10 warranty.
The thing that trips owners up is that warranty coverage isn't open-ended goodwill. It's tied to deadlines, and you have to submit. So in year one, run a simple system:
- Keep one running list, a note on your phone is fine, with the date, the location, and a photo of each item.
- Separate "I think this is a defect" from "this is a question." Send the questions to us as they come up; hold the defect list for the year-end submission unless something is urgent (a leak, a failed appliance, anything safety-related goes in immediately).
- For anything that might be a warranty item, submit it to your warranty provider in writing before the relevant deadline. A claim is the written, dated submission, not the conversation in the driveway.
- Keep your handover package together: the warranty certificate, appliance manuals and registrations, and the list of finishes and paint colours we hand over so you can match a touch-up.
Most of what you list in year one, we'll handle at the year-end walkthrough in one visit. The discipline is just making sure the list exists and the clock-sensitive items get submitted on time.
HRV/ERV filters, heat-pump service, and the mechanical rhythm
A modern Burnaby house breathes mechanically, not through leaks. Your heat-recovery or energy-recovery ventilator (HRV/ERV) is the lungs, designed and balanced to CSA F326, and it only does its job if the filters are clean. This is the single most-skipped maintenance task in a new home, and it's the easiest one.
- HRV/ERV filters: pull and check them seasonally, roughly every three months, and more often in the first year while the house is still shedding construction dust. Most are a rinse-and-reuse or a cheap drop-in. A clogged filter quietly drops your ventilation rate and makes the unit work harder.
- Heat pump: keep the outdoor unit clear of leaves and debris (Burnaby's tree canopy guarantees you'll have some), and book a service visit in the first year to verify refrigerant charge and airflow. The system was sized to a CSA F280 heat-load calculation for your specific house; a service check confirms it's running the way it was sized to run.
- Range hood and bath fans: clean the filters and grilles. In an airtight house, a powerful range hood can pull more air than the house can replace, so make sure you understand how your make-up air is handled.
If the HRV, heat pump, and humidity all feel like a single connected system to you, good, because they are. We get deeper into how they work together in our piece on radon, ventilation, and healthy-home systems.
The first wet winter: managing humidity in an airtight house
This is the part that surprises people most. A house built to current airtightness targets, Burnaby's baseline sits at the upper end of the BC Energy Step Code, holds moisture in. That's a feature: it's why the house is quiet, even, and cheap to heat. But it means the water your household generates (cooking, showers, laundry, breathing, that rack of drying coats by the door) doesn't just leak away through gaps the way it did in an older house.
Through the first Lower Mainland winter, you'll likely notice condensation on the coldest glass on cold mornings, especially in bedrooms and bathrooms. The fix isn't to seal things tighter or to assume a window is faulty. The fix is ventilation and humidity management:
- Run the HRV/ERV. It's the designed path for stale, humid air to leave and fresh air to come in.
- Use the bath fans during and after showers, and the range hood while cooking.
- Watch your indoor humidity, especially in the first winter when the building materials themselves are still drying. A simple hygrometer tells you whether you need to run ventilation harder.
A bit of morning condensation on the coldest pane in January is the house finding its balance, not a window defect. Persistent water, frost on the frame, or moisture between the panes is a different story, that goes on the list and, if it's the glazing unit itself, into the warranty. We cover the window side of this in our guide to windows and glazing for a Burnaby winter.
Exterior caulking, the rainscreen, and the year-end walkthrough
The outside of the house has its own first-year rhythm. Burnaby gets enough rain, comfortably over the 1,000 mm annual threshold, that the BC Building Code requires a rainscreen, a drained and vented gap behind the cladding (the code's second plane of protection). That cavity is doing real work all winter, letting any water that gets past the cladding drain and dry. You don't maintain the cavity itself, but you do want to keep its drainage paths and weep openings clear, and keep an eye on the exterior sealant.
Exterior caulking, at trim, penetrations, and transitions, is a wear item. It moves with temperature and sun and will need attention over the life of the house; the 24-month warranty layer covers exterior caulking where a failure could let water in or cause damage. In year one, the move is to walk the exterior in good light, photograph anything that's split, gapped, or pulling, and add it to the list.
That list is what the year-end warranty walkthrough is for. Before the 12-month materials-and-labour window closes, we come back and go through the house with you, item by item. It's the same disciplined sweep as the pre-occupancy deficiency walkthrough you did at handover, except now you've actually lived in the place through all four seasons and you know which doors stick in the wet months and which corner gets the condensation. Settlement cracks get filled and painted, doors and hardware get adjusted, caulk and grout get touched up, and anything that's a genuine defect gets submitted to your warranty provider before the deadline.
The owners who get the most out of year one are the ones who treat it as a relationship, not a transaction that ended at handover. We're still your builder in month eleven. Many of the "regrets" people carry into year five trace back to small year-one items they never wrote down and never raised while the window was open.
Frequently asked questions
Are cracks in a new home covered by warranty? It depends on the crack. Hairline cracks at door and window corners and along drywall seams in the first year are normal drying and settlement, not a defect, and are typically handled as a one-time fill-and-paint at the year-end walkthrough. Cracks that exceed the finishing tolerances in the BC Housing Residential Construction Performance Guide, or that indicate a structural or envelope problem, are a different matter and should be submitted to your warranty provider.
How often should I change my HRV or ERV filters in the first year? Check them about every three months, and more often in the first few months while the house sheds construction dust. Many filters rinse and reuse; some are inexpensive drop-ins. A clogged filter quietly cuts your ventilation rate and makes the unit work harder, so it's the highest-value five-minute task in the house.
Is condensation on my windows in winter a defect? Usually not. An airtight, energy-efficient house holds the moisture your household generates, so a bit of condensation on the coldest glass on cold mornings is the house finding its humidity balance, the answer is running your ventilation, not sealing tighter. Persistent water, frost on the frame, or moisture between the panes is worth listing and, if it's the sealed unit itself, submitting as a warranty item.
What is the year-end warranty walkthrough? It's a return visit before the 12-month materials-and-labour window closes, where we go through the house with you item by item after you've lived through all four seasons. Settlement cracks, sticking doors, and caulk and grout touch-ups get handled, and any genuine defect gets documented and submitted to your warranty provider on time.
The first year isn't a test you pass or fail. It's the season where the house and the people in it learn each other, and where a short, well-kept list turns "is this normal?" into "handled it at the walkthrough."
Related on the Journal
