| Home Maintenance Choices 4 You! |
People are creatures of habit. We like knowing what to expect when we go somewhere, or do something new. My younger son insisted we visit his kindergarten classroom, so he would know how to find it when he got off the school bus by himself. Unfortunately houses, unlike cars, don't come with an instruction booklet that explains everything including how often you need to take your car in for routine maintenance.
 We hope our checklists will take the mystery out of maintaining your home, and we welcome your feedback on how we can improve them. First let's look at the ways people approach home maintenance:
- Event driven home maintenance:
- Preparing your home for sale
- Right after you move into your new home
- When something breaks or you find a leak
- Family event like a wedding or special company
- Schedule driven home maintenance:
- Seasonal checklist ... most common
- Monthly checklist
- Room-by-room checklist, i.e. attic when putting holiday decorations away
- Project driven home maintenance:
- Painting 1-2 rooms each year
- Updating a bathroom
- Re-decorating the living room
- Setting up a home office
- Budget driven home maintenance
- Budgeting % of assessed home value
- Allocating % of disposable income
There isn't one right way to maintain your home. What's important is picking one approach and sticking with it, which will simplify the demands of home ownership. If you fix things when they break, great. If you prioritize by project, then keep a running list of items in one place and use it as a guide to select the next project, you'll get ahead of the curve on breakdowns & repairs - and the associated stress. Believe me, just knowing there is a list will reduce your stress! The biggest challenge often is finding one approach that works for you AND your significant other. |
Spring Checklists
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We're experimenting with different checklist formats. Your feedback will help us find the best format, which we'll use to create new checklists to support most of the approaches above. For our Spring Home Maintenance Checklists, we offer you several choices:
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Spring: exterior home maintenance checklist
