The building inspection tells you if the house is falling down. It does not tell you where the water shutoff is, or why the third power point in the lounge does nothing, or whether the antenna on the roof has been connected to anything since 2013.
Those are the things you find out in the first fortnight, usually at a bad moment.
Here is a first week list for anyone who has just moved into an older home. Not a renovation plan. Just the small stuff that costs almost nothing to check now and a lot of annoyance to discover later.
Find the switchboard and read it properly
Open the meter box on day one. Take a photo of it.
You are looking for two things. Are there safety switches, or just fuses and circuit breakers? A safety switch trips when current leaks to earth, which is the thing that protects a person. A circuit breaker protects the wiring. They are not the same, and plenty of houses built before the mid nineties have breakers but no residual current device on every circuit.
The second thing is the labelling. Older boards get relabelled by whoever did the last job, which means half the labels are wrong. Take an afternoon, switch each one off, and write down what actually goes dark. Do it now, not during a fault at 9pm with a torch in your mouth.
If the board has ceramic fuses with rewirable fuse wire, book an electrician. That is not urgent in the sense of danger tonight, but it is a job worth doing in your first year.
Test the smoke alarms and check their age
Press the button on each one. That tells you the battery works. It does not tell you the alarm does.
Photoelectric smoke alarms have a service life of about ten years and there is a manufacture date printed on the back or the side. Take one down and look. If it was made in 2011, replace it, even if it beeps when you press the button.
While you are up there, count them. In a lot of older houses there is one alarm in the hallway and nothing else. That is not enough for a two storey home or a house with bedrooms at both ends.
Locate the water shutoff and the gas meter
The water main is usually at the front boundary near the meter. Turn the tap. If it is seized, get it freed now, because the day you need it will be the day a flexible hose under the vanity lets go and the bathroom is filling up.
Also check the flexible hoses themselves. They sit under sinks and vanities, they have a rubber inner and a braided steel outer, and they fail without warning after about ten years. Look for rust or fraying on the braid. Replacing four of them is cheap. A flooded ground floor is not.
Note where the gas meter is and how to isolate it.
Change the locks, then work out the keys
Change the front and back locks. You do not know how many keys are out there.
Then do the boring bit. Label every remaining key. Old houses accumulate keys for the shed, the meter box, a window lock nobody has opened in a decade, and a gate that was removed in 2008. Sort them once and put the spares somewhere you will remember.
Check the window locks too, especially on ground floor windows. Insurers care about them, and a lot of older windows have locks that were painted shut years ago.
Sort the internet before you need it
Order the connection early. Depending on the technology at the address and whether the previous owner disconnected, it can take days or weeks, and it is not a job you want to start on the Monday you go back to work.
Find where the line enters the house and where the modem is going to live. In many older homes there is exactly one phone socket, it is in the hallway, and it is the worst possible spot for a wireless router. You do not have to fix that in week one, but knowing about it early lets you plan.
Check the TV reception before you blame the TV
Plug a TV into each wall point and run a channel scan. Do it on more than one point, because that tells you something a single test cannot.
If one point is fine and another is dead, the problem is the cabling or a splitter inside the house. If every point breaks up, drops channels or loses signal in the wind, the problem is up on the roof.
Antennas in Melbourne take a beating. Two decades of sun, hail and westerly wind loosens the mast clamp, corrodes the connections and lets water into the balun. The antenna can look perfectly fine from the footpath and still be feeding a signal that pixelates every time a truck goes past.
The other thing you often find in older homes is a stack of splitters in the roof space feeding four or five rooms off one antenna, with an amplifier somebody added later to compensate. Amplifiers boost noise as happily as they boost signal, so a badly set up system can be worse than a simple one.
Before you spend money on a new television because the picture is poor, get someone to test the signal at the wall. If you are in the western or northern suburbs where reception varies street by street, look up TV Antenna Installation Melbourne and get a couple of quotes so you know whether you are looking at a new antenna, a new cable run or just a splitter that needs to come out.
Run the heating and cooling out of season
If you move in during summer, turn the ducted heating on anyway. Let it run for twenty minutes. Listen for it.
Gas heaters that have sat idle need servicing, and a heater that has not been checked in years is worth having looked at properly. Book it in autumn, not on the first cold night in June when every technician in town is booked out three weeks.
Same in reverse for the air conditioner. Test it in winter. Clean the filters. It takes ten minutes.
Look at the gutters and the roof from the ground
You do not need to get on the roof. Stand in the yard with a coffee and look up.
Sagging gutters, rust at the joins, a downpipe that discharges next to the foundation, a lifted ridge cap, a TV antenna leaning at an angle it was not installed at. All visible from the ground.
After rain, walk around and see where water is pooling. Older homes often have decades of garden bed build up sitting above the damp course, which is a slow and expensive problem you want to catch early.
Write the list, then leave it alone
By the end of the first week you will have a list of about fifteen things. Most of them are not urgent.
Split it into three. Things that are a safety issue, things that will cost more if you wait, and things that are just annoying. Do the first group now. Budget the second over the year. Ignore the third until you feel like it.
The point is not to fix an old house in a fortnight. It is to know what you have got, so that nothing on the list surprises you at the worst possible time.