CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1    BACKGROUND
Building maintenance is a major activity in most countries. Any reduction in resources applied to building maintenance will have a visible effect on the economy.
Few years ago, a rapid growth of housing construction clearly appears as a part of the country development. The number of modern houses increases and more houses are being constructed. As a result, more maintenance work is required in order to cope with this type of construction.
Due to the growth of housing with the lack of building Standards, more maintenance, rehabilitation, and renovation work have become necessary to ensure the serviceability and safety of the constructed houses. In addition, the existing houses need to be sustained as long as possible. Therefore, ways must be found to reduce the maintenance cost works due to ageing of the buildings while keeping the same quality.
Building maintenance is seriously neglected area of research and study. Few schools of architecture or building include it in their curriculum and only recently has work commenced on the research and development in this subject.
Few building owners regard planned maintenance as a matter for serious concern, and yet cannot afford to allow buildings, old or new, to decay through neglect. As it is clearly impractical and even undesirable to replace building, whether as owners, designers, constructors, or users should take a serious interest in this vast problem of building maintenance.
1.2    BUILDING MAINTENANCE OVERVIEW
Maintenance assists retaining economic life of buildings. Moreover, it is a productive activity both at the private and the national levels. At the private level, proper maintenance leads to lower depreciation costs (due to longer economic life) and consequently leads to higher profitability. While at the national level, proper maintenance leads to lower expenditures on replacement. Thus, allowing more expenditure on expansion into new productive investment (Ikhwan, 1996).
The Committee on Building Maintenance in British defined maintenance as: “Building Maintenance is the work undertaken in order to keep, restore or improve every facility, i.e. every part of a building, its services and surrounds to a currently acceptable standard, and to sustain the utility and value of the building”(Mills, 1980).  
In addition, maintenance is defined in the British Standards (BS 3811:1974) as “A combination of any action carried out to retain an item in, or restore it to an acceptable condition” (Mills, 1980).
A more functional definition is that “Maintenance is synonymous with controlling the condition of a building so that its pattern lies within specified regions”. (Shear, 1983)
Moreover, building maintenance cost can be defined as the cost of any actions carried out to retain an item in, or restore it to an acceptable condition but excluding any improvements other than those necessitated by inability to replace obsolete materials or components (Seeley, 1976).
The objectives of building maintenance are therefore (Alner and Fellows, 1990):
•    To ensure that buildings and their associated services are in a safe condition.
•    To ensure that the buildings are fit for use.
•    To ensure that the condition of the building meets all statutory requirements.
•    To carry out the maintenance work necessary to maintain the value of the physical assets of the building stock.
•    To carry out the work necessary to maintain the quality of the building.
Maintenance can be done in different stages. Each stage will have different characteristics. Liska defined those stages as follows:
•    Planning and Design Stage: the planning and designing of the facility should be based on the identified function and be as maintenance free as possible. In this stage a lot of money can be saved with the proper plan and design. For this reason, the building manager and maintenance personnel should be consulted during the early stages of the building design.
•    Construction Stage: in order to achieve minimum level of maintenance during the building life, work performed during the construction phase must be done with the highest quality in term of workmanship. As a result, expert contractor should be selected to perform the project.
•    Maintenance Stage: in this stage, maintenance is performed after the building has been constructed and occupied.