Home Maintenance in Sun City Anthem

Where we work here

Sun City Anthem sits on the hill above Anthem in Henderson — the Del Webb age-restricted community, roughly seven thousand homes, with the Anthem Center and Independence Center at its middle. We cover the whole of it, and we're regularly on the surrounding Anthem streets below it as well.

What the homes are like

Almost all of it went up between the late nineties and the mid two-thousands, and almost all of it is single-story by design — this was built as a community you can age in, so the floor plans keep everything on one level. That removes the stairwell-light problem we deal with constantly in Summerlin and North Las Vegas.

It does not remove the ladder. Single-story here still means nine and ten foot ceilings in the great rooms, recessed cans throughout, ceiling-mounted smoke detectors in every bedroom and hallway, and outdoor coach lights either side of the garage. Every one of those is above shoulder height, and in a community where the median resident is well past sixty, "above shoulder height" is the whole argument. Falls from household ladders are the reason most of our Sun City Anthem customers called in the first place, and we would rather bring our own ladder four times a year than have anyone up on a chair.

The age of the housing stock is the other factor. Homes built in 1999 with original hardwired detectors are twenty-five years on from manufacture — more than twice the ten-year service life. Those units still chirp, still test, and are demonstrably past it. Reading the date off the back of each one and telling you plainly what it says is a five-minute job that a surprising number of homes here have never had done.

Water and softeners

Sun City Anthem is inside Henderson and on the City of Henderson's utility, supplied with Colorado River water through the Southern Nevada Water Authority — the same 16 to 18 grains per gallon hardness as the rest of the valley. Softeners are very common here, a great many of them original builder installations now well into their second or third decade, which is old enough that the brine tank bridging problem shows up more often than average. A bridged tank looks full from the top and is doing nothing at all, so we break the crust and check underneath every visit rather than glancing at the level and moving on.

From the log

[TODO: owner to supply a real anonymised job note from a Sun City Anthem home. Note the example in the brief — "A two-story in Anthem was going through five bags a quarter until we moved them to bimonthly" — describes a two-story home, so it belongs on the Henderson/Anthem page rather than here, where the stock is single-story.]

Where to start

For most homes here the answer is Hands-free — it's the tier that includes both the salt hauled in and poured and the bulbs we bring the ladder for, which are the two jobs this community most consistently wants off its hands.

We're also happy to bill one address and call another. A lot of our Sun City Anthem plans are arranged by an adult child living elsewhere — tell us who to reach and who to invoice and we'll keep them separate.