Home Maintenance and Repairs
Maintaining your home can be challenging. You don’t get a home owners manual when you buy your house, although a home inspection report will describe the condition of your new home. At Home Tips 4 Women, our goal is to help you understand why you need to maintain your home and the benefits of doing so (read What’s Your Home Maintenance Strategy?).
There are great books to help you learn how to “do it yourself” and even more information online, in the form of articles, videos and more. The problem is most of this home information focuses on how to do things! Contrast this with focusing on preventive maintenance to avoid repairs (see Saving Money with Preventive Maintenance). What’s missing is the road map you need to understand what needs to be done, a schedule for doing things and whether it makes sense to do it yourself or call a home professional.
| At Home Tips 4 Women we want to help you understand the basic building blocks that make up your home. This will provide the foundation for learning what maintenance your home needs, what repairs make sense for you to tackle yourself and when to call a home professional. You’ll get enough information that when it’s time to call a plumber, you can make that call with confidence! |
Understanding Your Home
A house is a system of interconnected systems. Starting with the exterior skin of a house, you move inside to the floors, walls, ceilings and roof. The key systems include electrical, plumbing, heating and cooling along with the features that support our lifestyle — the kitchen, bathrooms, lighting, appliances, electronics and more. It’s no surprise then, to realize your home is comprised of 1,000s of components that must all function properly. Ongoing maintenance from caulking a bathtub to replacing your hot water heater, keep everything working.
Home Maintenance Priorities
While you remain warm and dry in your home, your home’s exterior is exposed to the elements year round, from rain or snow to heavy winds and sunlight. These create wear and tear on the materials used to protect your home’s interior. By following a consistent maintenance schedule for your roof, gutters, siding, windows, doors, etc, you will minimize the need for more expensive home repairs.
When you have limited time or money for home maintenance, these priorities will help you keep your family and home protected.
- Personal safety is your top maintenance priority.
- Preventing water damage comes next as water is your home’s worst enemy.
- Repairing water damage follows because once water gets inside your home, it causes more damage and increases repair costs.
- Maintaining your home systems will lower energy costs and extend the life of these systems.
- Improving your home’s energy efficiency comes next.
- Basic home maintenance includes lots of projects to make things run more smoothly.
Home Maintenance Professionals
Can I tell you a secret? I’ve hired 100s of handyman technicians, written several 100 estimates and more than 500 hundred articles. I can figure out problems and solutions, tell the quality of work done but I don’t do the work, and I’m not comfortable with my drill because I don’t use it every day! Early in my handyman career, I thought about learning to tape and mud drywall but realized it would take 20/more hours of practice which didn’t make sense. You should learn to do home repairs that are needed often and ones you enjoy doing like painting and gardening.
Unless you like working with your hands, power tools and an assortment of materials, you’re better off building your team of home professionals. Every homeowner needs an electrician, plumber, heating/ventilation/air conditioning (HVAC) contractor and handyman. We’ve known Ed (plumbing and HVAC) and Dan (electrician) since we remodeled our home in 2002. My handy husband likes giving the work to my handyman technicians.
Home Maintenance Resources at Home Tips 4 Women
Our article library has 100s of articles to help you learn home concepts and terminology. There is nothing worse than reading something and recognizing information without understanding what it means. Organizing this library is a bit complicated. The library articles are grouped into 6 major categories based on where you are in the home ownership experience (these categories are listed horizontally on the orange bar):
- Buying, Re-Financing or Selling a Home
- Building or Remodeling Your Home
- Home Maintenance and Repairs
- Decorating and Organizing Your Home
- Working and Relaxing at Home
- … and oops, the 6th categories is about Green Homes and Saving Energy, today’s hot topics.
Under each of these major categories, you will find sub-categories and that’s where the challenge lies. For example, when building a house you design a kitchen, then you move in and have kitchen repairs and often you’re decorating the kitchen like changing hardware or a light fixture. In fact kitchens are the #1 selling point for home buyers and lots of entertaining happens in the kitchen, so you could put kitchens into all 5 phases of the home ownership experience.
The problem occurs mostly deciding if new flooring is a repair or decorating? Here’s how we’ve tried to organize the information between these 2 phases of the homeowner experience, to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for.
- The “Home Maintenance & Repair” category addresses topics like the type of problem you’re experiencing, the technical skill you believe is needed to handle and/or the person you think can fix the problem.
- The “Decorate & Organize” category talks to the room where the problem exists … the bathroom.
When you place your mouse over the major categories in the right hand column, it will expand to show you the sub-categories within that group. The sub-categories are listed alphabetically, so you can quickly scan several categories to find “Windows” although we’ve grouped “Doors & Windows” together to keep the length of the list manageable. Try finding Windows with your mouse … and then look at the table below, to get a better understanding of how we’ve organized these 2 groups. We’d love to make it easier so if you’ve got ideas, please share them with us as we’re building this site for you!
You can also find information by typing one/more words in the “search” box like you would using a search engine. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, contact us telling describing the problem or project you need help with.
Note: Checklists including home maintenance checklists are filed under “Home Owner Checklists”.
| Maintenance & Repair “Skills” |
Decorating & Organizing “Rooms” |
 |
| Carpentry & Interior Trim | Closets & Storage Solutions Decorate with Trim |
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| Deck & Patio Maintenance | ||
| Doors & Windows | Lighting & Window Treatments | |
| Electrical & Plumbing | Appliance Bathrooms & More Kitchens |
|
| Gutters & Roofing | ||
| Heating, Cooling & Ventilation | Fireplaces & Wood Stoves | |
| Maintenance & Repair | ||
| Siding & Exterior Trim | Decorate with Trim | |
| Walls & Ceilings | Hallways & Entryways Painting & Wallpaper |
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| Water & Wood Rot | ||
| Flooring & Tile Anywhere … plus other categories |
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