If you want to learn more about home maintenance, whether it’s because you’ve just purchased your first home or you’re finding that you can rely on your landlord as much as you’d like, there are a few things that you can do to help you feel much more confident in your ability to care for the home in which you’re living.
To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for learning more about home maintenance.
Start With The Basics
For most homes, there are a few things that tend to need to be maintained or that get broken more often than other things. So if you know how to do some of the most basic tasks, you should be able to take care of a lot of the most common issues that you’ll run into with home maintenance.
Some of the first things that you should learn how to do include resetting a tripped circuit breaker, turning off the water, snaking a drain, fixing a running toilet, patching a small hole in drywall, re-caulking something like a window, and fixing something that’s squeaking. None of these tasks take much time to learn. And once you learn how to do them in one property, this knowledge is very easily transferable to any properties you might move into in the future.
Learn Signs That Something’s Wrong
When you’re new in a home, it can be hard to distinguish between what’s normal for that space and what might be an indicator that something’s wrong. But if you leave big issues sitting for too long, you could run into bigger issues like flooding, failing transformers, foundation problems, and more.
In most cases, if you notice something this’t working as it once should, this is a sign that you should take a look at what’s going on. Additionally, if you notice that small issues or cracks are getting bigger, especially in areas like your foundation, you’ll want to get things taken care of quickly before the problem gets worse.
Make A Plan For Regular Upkeep
Along with fixing things as they come up and need repairs, you should also learn how to plan for regular upkeep for things around your house.
The most ideal way to do this is to think about home maintenance as a seasonal thing. As you come up to a new season, think about what things you’ll need to take care of with your home, like cleaning out your gutters, taking care of landscaping issues, tuning up your HVAC system and more. Put these tasks on your calendar so that nothing slips through the cracks as the seasons change.
If you want to get better at and learn more about home maintenance, consider implementing the tips mentioned above.
