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047: Organising home maintenance and repairs
504 Plays3 years ago
This episode will give you Mia and Dinah’s top hacks for managing maintenance and repairs to your home.
While completing home maintenance and repairs is not life admin, planning it, scheduling it, organising equipment and supplies and finding and engaging tradespeople are all squarely life admin tasks you have to do.
Mia and Dinah start the ep by discussing how you can get motivated to tackle this. Strategies they discuss include:
- reframing home maintenance as a quest for beauty within the sanctuary of your home to elevate it from the humdrum
- considering the costs you will save by attending to small maintenance items before they result in a need for major repairs
- improving household harmony by establishing a system so you can share responsibilities with your partner
- ensuring the safety of your home
- considering the environmental impact saving energy can have.
Mia and Dinah discuss hacks for:
- establishing seasonal reference lists for household and garden maintenance
- having a to-do list for minor repairs so you can batch them
- scheduling in your important recurring maintenance tasks
- establishing the minimal acceptable standard for tasks so you can minimise disagreements with your partner and more easily share the load
- making sure you understand what is included within your home insurance including possible access to home assist services
- considering subscribing to home assist services like RACV Home Assist to get easier access to tradespeople 24/7
- learning how to do repairs and maintenance by using Youtube or doing a course
- having a list of contacts for tradespeople and other outsourced suppliers so you can readily access an outsourced provider when needed.
They also discuss the equipment you may need for home repairs and maintenance and that you don’t need to buy to save money and storage space. Other options include:
- borrowing from neighbours, friends and family
- community tool libraries
- peer to peer services like toolmates.com.au
- renting from hardware stores.
- The Architecture of Happiness - Alain De Botton
- Fair Play - guidance on establishing a minimum acceptable standard
- Home Maintenance schedule example
- Ep 4 - Mastering To-Do Lists
- Ep 022: Outsourcing personal and household tasks
- Tool Mates
Note that the Open Shed tool sharing app mentioned in the episode is unforutnately no longer available.
SHAREPlease head to e Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook or Insta pages to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Dana Rea Roberts, an operations manager who thought I would love DIY, but after a few home improvement projects, I realised I should stick to spreadsheets. I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer who loves the seasonal rhythm of attending to house maintenance.
00:00:29
Speaker
in this set will be hacking home maintenance and repairs. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks.
Engagement and Community Building
00:00:36
Speaker
Before we get into today's topic, I want to say thank you to our latest reviewers and particularly elegant Sue Nixkey on Apple Podcasts who won't love this. What a wonderful find. Short and sweet, thank you. We aim for every episode to give you something of value to note down.
00:00:52
Speaker
I wanted to walk away with a little gem. So if you've picked up some tips and hacks that have made a difference, please pay it forward and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It means a lot to us to hear from our listeners and know how you're feeling about what's happening in each app. You might also like to subscribe to the monthly momentum newsletter at lifeadminlifepacks.com. You'll receive a monthly nudge to help stay on top of your life admin tasks, including things that need to happen at this time of the year.
00:01:21
Speaker
And as mentioned in our latest edition of the monthly momentum newsletter, we're trialing a life admin concierge service and are looking for beta clients. So if you'd like us to help you find a better health insurance deal, a private health insurance deal, and you're willing to give feedback on your customer experience, we'd love to hear from you. So please reach out on our email, which you can find on our website. The first five peeps to volunteer will be our lucky guinea pigs. So reach out people.
Home Maintenance Strategies
00:01:49
Speaker
OK, let's talk about home maintenance and repairs. We decided to get into this topic because it's a squarely life admin. This is stuff you need to organize, need to plan, you need to schedule. And there are some great results, obviously, in terms of your house looking good. You can save money by preventing damage or hazards, avoiding emergencies.
00:02:11
Speaker
You can bring some household harmony to this space if you actually talk about it and plan it. If you're in a partnership, you want a shared understanding of what needs to be done by when and by whom and to what standard, which we'll get into in a moment.
00:02:26
Speaker
There's peace of mind, obviously living in a well-kept home. And it's really about making your environment a sanctuary. And as I was researching this and thinking about it, it reminded me of a book I read a long time ago called The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. And the book is about, it talks about homes and buildings and surroundings and what they mean to us and how they contribute to your
00:02:49
Speaker
sense of security and well-being. And there's this idea that, you know, you're home, you want your home to reflect the best of yourself. We design our spaces to reflect certain moods and ideas and we want to be reminded of those and what matters to us. So if home maintenance is something that you're kind of like, oh, home, another thing to do, you might want to reframe it as, look, we get to tweak our house or tweak where we're living and protect that vision of
00:03:17
Speaker
what our life is like and that quest for beauty in your life. So elevate it from the humdrum into something a bit more transcendent. Is that a bit too much to ask for home maintenance? That's where my head goes. That's how I get motivated about it.
00:03:31
Speaker
Mine goes a little bit more practical. I think about, you know, those little things like cleaning out the gutters, doing something small to stop it turning into something big. If you don't clean the gutters, you can end up with water damage. If you don't paint your windows, you might have to replace them. And there are also kind of the safety issues like smoke alarms and fire extinguishers. But one of the other things that really I hadn't thought much about, but when I was researching for this episode was
00:04:00
Speaker
Some of the tasks can also really help with saving power. So you can also frame it to be more environmentally conscious or to save money by really focusing on those tasks that will help reduce your energy consumption. Yeah. So you either going out this risk mitigation mindset or maybe environmental or I need to save money and prevent disasters happening or the quest for beauty.
00:04:27
Speaker
So what works for you people? Whatever works with you. So in this episode, we're going to talk about hacks for scheduling in-home maintenance, how your home insurance can assist in emergencies and where to find equipment and services that you might need.
Preventive Maintenance Tips
00:04:44
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess what's in scope here is it's the exterior, it's the interior, it's your appliances. You got to think about your heating and your cooling systems, keeping them running smoothly. It might mean plumbing or security, depending on where you live. It might mean gardening or other kinds of electrical systems, depending on what kind of dwelling you have. And I guess, you know, some people just respond to repairs. So they sort of,
00:05:10
Speaker
take that reactive approach or ideally you're taking a proactive and preventative approach. But really depending on your type of home and its condition and the weather in your location, you might need to plan regular maintenance tasks.
00:05:25
Speaker
One way to approach the whole home maintenance issue and all the things you need to do and to avoid overwhelm is to make a list of seasonal tasks. So for example, things you need to do every autumn to prepare for the winter or every spring to prepare for the summer or other tasks might be monthly.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yep. And I guess this is where you might want to get into the lists. So you might have reference lists or checklists. If you've got, you know, whatever your list making app of choice is, like notes on your iPhone, you've got a lot of maintenance tasks to perform regularly. You might want to have a reference list and then you create a checklist for that year. And there are checklists aplenty on the internet if you Google home maintenance tasks to give you the actual laundry list of all the things you might need to do around your home.
00:06:12
Speaker
And I think one of the advantages, if you do set these lists up, it's really easy to add to them. So if you buy new appliance and it has some maintenance issue, or even if you buy a new plant, rather than just simply throwing away, you know, the little plastic sticker that comes in the plant, you can easily add the detail of like when to prune or fertilize. And it's so much easier to add one more task if you've already got an established system. So if you get a plant and it says,
00:06:39
Speaker
you know you need to prune it once a year or something do you actually put a little thing in your schedule. I haven't but I am going to now this episode I'm like oh I really need to like is that don't have a great approach to the plants and I'm always googling when to fertilize the lemon tree and now I'm like oh I'm gonna change that system and make it better.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's been my saving grace for household tasks, because I don't have a lot. I don't have a lot of tasks that I need to do, but I do want to avoid having to Google every year, when am I supposed to be doing this thing? Some of them make sense, like cleaning the gutters. I know that I need to do that in autumn, before winter and spring rains hit. So that's just sort of, it feels obvious. But other things, like how often am I supposed to be flipping in mattress? I don't know. It's just, you know,
00:07:29
Speaker
Anyway, putting these things in the schedule is very helpful. You can also have a to-do list for adding the smaller things that aren't regular, like little repairs that need to do. Then you can batch them into a home maintenance session or even combine them into an outsourcing job. Having another list of little repairs can also be really helpful.
Collaboration and Outsourcing
00:07:51
Speaker
So I guess if you have a partner, you need to work out how you'll share the load when it comes to this home painting. It's not fair to just assume that it's all going to be left up to one particular person unless they absolutely love it and are happy to run with it. You might want to talk about the priority of things so that no one's nagging. When are you going to get around to the blah? When are you going to get around to the thing?
00:08:13
Speaker
and the time frames when you are going to be doing things and the minimum acceptable standard, which we've talked about in other episodes. Do you want to outline what that means, Diane, for people who haven't
00:08:26
Speaker
So that's the E. Modsky thing from her book, Fair Play. So she talks about sitting down and agreeing that you might have very different views of what's an acceptable standard between the two of you. So agreeing the level of care and finish that's going to be required of that task so that you can more easily outsource it with both partners, understanding what the level it's required to be done to for the other to be
00:08:53
Speaker
Happy. So it's kind of reaching a compromise usually. Yeah reaching a compromise and then letting go. That's right.
00:09:03
Speaker
And there are lots of things that you probably might need to outsource because of the skill level involved or the equipment or just things that you do not want to do because you want to free up your time for more important things. And we, in episode 22, did a deep dive on outsourcing. And what makes outsourcing easy is if you put together a list of
00:09:25
Speaker
Help us trade these services before you actually need them. So ask friends, ask family, ask Facebook to recommend create a document in your cloud storage or your password manager, where you've got the names and the contact details for these different services. And then you can also hunt down people on task request websites like Air Tasker or obviously local small businesses or franchise services like tradey lady, hire a hubby,
00:09:53
Speaker
And of course, gyms group with their ever expanding range of maintenance services. And if you can't afford to outsource it and you're not sure how to do it, there are YouTube videos on almost anything to do with home repairs and maintenance. Or you can even do a short course. I did one when we bought our first home on just basic home maintenance, just to learn about how to use a drill and those sorts of things, which made me much more confident on what I could tackle myself and where I needed a professional.
00:10:23
Speaker
And where did you do that short course? Was that like a CAE Council Adult Education thing? Yeah, it was CAE course. So it was actually really good and actually made me realize I can't do a lot of these things. So it was good because I didn't waste money trying to tackle things that I would never be able to confidently do. So very useful.
Tools and Resources
00:10:43
Speaker
OK.
00:10:43
Speaker
Another thing to know in terms of finding tradespeople and professionals is you might have home assist included within your home and contents insurance, or you can also buy a home assist a bit like the roadside assistance through providers like RACV or RACQ. And those services can help you find a tradesperson 24 seven and often provide a contribution to the cost of the call out fee can be super helpful if you lock yourself out of the house or a
00:11:13
Speaker
pipe burst or you break a window on a Sunday afternoon. So it's really good to know what is included in your home insurance or to look into those services if that's something that you think might be important for you. So what I personally did, we have Allianz HomeAssist with our home and contents insurance. So I've added a link to that in the notes that I've got with all of the tradesperson phone numbers.
00:11:36
Speaker
So it just reminds me to quickly check there before I might ring anyone else. It's also important to know if you've got accidental damage cover with your home and contents insurance because you might be able to make a claim when things need to be repaired. So you need to make sure you contact them before you do the repairs yourself. So putting a reminder somewhere useful can be really helpful there. Yeah, I wasn't aware of that service. That's
00:12:01
Speaker
right? That there's a sort of the essentially the equivalent of the roadside assist to your house. Come and do those repairs.
00:12:08
Speaker
So not all home and contents insurers offer it. So it's also something to consider when you're shopping around about whether that might be something that's important to you. Often you still might have to pay for the professional, but just even being able to get access to people who might be able to come. I think RACVs say that the most cases the tradesperson can be there within an hour. And I think that could be kind of great if you lock yourself out of the house, for example. Yeah, or if there's a pipe burst and there's only so many buckets.
00:12:36
Speaker
That's right. Okay. The other thing that can get in the way of regular house maintenance and making it streamlined is having the equipment you need on hand. You don't necessarily need to buy all of the things you might need if you're not going to use them regularly. I know, but we were looking
00:12:54
Speaker
Mike's husband was really looking at any excuse to buy one of those high pressure water hose things. We used to borrow it from a friend and we'd borrow it from a weekend and three months later they're like, are you giving that thing back? It is methodically just walking around, what can I use this on? It's so much fun. You don't need to buy everything you can borrow from friends and neighbors. You can put it out to your Facebook neighborhood group.
00:13:20
Speaker
But there are also now community toy libraries. Tool libraries, I think. Sorry. There are also community tool libraries. There are also toy libraries. It depends on how much you like tools, Diana. Maybe they are toy libraries, grown-ups. Yeah.
00:13:37
Speaker
Everyone's wanted to get their hand on a multi-tool and see what it can do. So yeah, depending on where you live in Australia or other parts of the world where you're living, you might have a community tool library that's close to you where you can become a member. You can go and borrow tools for a certain period of time and obviously take it back when you're done. There are also those peer-to-peer economy apps and websites like toolmates.com.au an open shared app.
00:14:01
Speaker
where you can borrow tools off people who have profiles and say, these are the tools that I have. And just like, you know, Uber and Airbnb and all of the other peer to peer economy examples. It's up to you as an individual if you want to go and use other people's tools and you can make them available for whatever price you think is fair.
00:14:23
Speaker
And you can also rent them from hardware stores. So often those, you know, floor sanders or even big ladders or, you know, things that are quite expensive. You can rent those just for the day so that you don't need to, can make the job much easier to do, but you don't need to buy the equipment yourself if you only need it every now and then.
00:14:43
Speaker
Have you ever rented one of those carpet cleaning things? Sometimes you can get them at the different supermarkets as well. Yeah. Have you ever rented one? Years and years ago and thought afterwards, because the carpets were so wet, the next time I'm paying for a professional. Sometimes it's just fun to get your hands on that equipment. I've done it with floor sanding as well. We hired a sounder once and did our own floorboards.
00:15:06
Speaker
Ah, fun times. You need to watch some YouTube clips. You do. So when we've been researching, you know, there's all these lists of things that you should be doing. So what were some of the things on the list that you were surprised about or have never done that you're thinking, oh, I really should do now? Well, for me, you know, you scan the list and it's about, you know, cleaning drains and rotating mattresses and changing
00:15:34
Speaker
Filters in fans and batteries, in smoke alarms. The one around vacuuming your fridge coils. I was like, huh? And it makes sense. I mean, every time I've ever had to pull out my fridge, if I've, you know, one of the kids' little balls is rolled underneath and they've got to pull it out, or you think, is something dead back there? There's a funny smell. Let's pull out the fridge. There's just always so much dust.
00:15:57
Speaker
And it's recommended that you actually either vacuum it or brush the dust off so that there's no electrical hazard, but also it makes the fridge run so much more efficiently. So you save a lot of power and save electricity costs. Yeah, I was a bit surprised about that one too. I mean, it makes sense, but it's just, you know, it's one of those out of sight, out of mind things.
00:16:20
Speaker
How about you? Were there other things? Well, not so much surprising, but I just had a few light bulb moments. So one of the things on there was to check and oil all your locks. And we've got quite a few locks in our house that stick. And I'm like, why have I not actually just put some WD-40 in there to make those better? So definitely adding that to the list the next time we're doing a bit of maintenance just to make opening locks much easier.
00:16:46
Speaker
And I did read one about if you have floorboards and you have squeaky floorboards, you can put down baby powder in between the cracks and you just keep on putting the baby powder and test it out and keep doing it until the squeak goes away. So there might be all these things in your home that you're tolerating, like just these tolerances of little things that aren't quite working or that are slightly annoying.
00:17:07
Speaker
that you're kind of used to, but there's still a little thorn in your side. The internet has answers for all of those things and some of them are quite swift to deal with. So it might be worth, if you're sitting in a room and just scan the room, look at it afresh with cold eyes and think, all right, what do I need to deal with here? If it's getting scuff marks off walls or painting little chips out of the skirting board or whatever it might be, there are often answers on the internet.
00:17:37
Speaker
Great. So, Mia, how do you go about making sure that all of your home maintenance and repairs tasks get done? I just schedule it. I don't actually have lists in my notes app. I just schedule at the start of autumn to get the gutters cleaned, depending on how busy and where we're at while I do it ourselves, because sometimes it's fun to get up there and see the roof garden that we have.
00:18:05
Speaker
being growing after the pandemic. Oh my gosh, we had basically farmers with the stuff that was growing in our gutters. But in the in sometimes we've had to just get that outsourced because
00:18:18
Speaker
of time. So I schedule it. I have a recurring reminder on an annual basis. It's like, get the gutters cleaned. Similarly with carpet cleaning, I do my annual call to... It used to be annual. Now, the kids seem to be grubbier. So it's bi-annual call to Dry Tron and Michael from Dry Tron has been coming out for years. You'll be expecting that call at the same time every year.
00:18:44
Speaker
How about you, Diana? Well, we have a to-do list where we add all the jobs that we need doing. So it's really just as we see something or we notice it. So if I see some greenery growing out of the gutters, I would just add it to the list. And so then we either schedule in some time in our calendar to do it or batch a whole heap of things to outsource. We also have a shopping list for Bunnings. That's a shared shopping list, our same, you know, to-do list app.
00:19:10
Speaker
where we can add all those little things that you need to buy so that we make sure that, you know, just light globes and bits and pieces, lemon tree fertilizer and things like that, so that we can make sure that all the things we need when we get motivated to have that time doing those maintenance and gardening, that it's all there. And we do batch other jobs to our handyman. He actually lives in our street, so winning. That is the definition of handy.
00:19:38
Speaker
It is handy and ask him telling us a few things that they're doing. So I'm pretty lucky that I've got someone close by who can do all those sorts of things. But I do try and make sure that it's a couple of hours work for him rather than asking him to come for 10 minutes.
00:19:53
Speaker
And I am inspired by this app to make seasonal reference lists to think about being a bit more systematic. So watch this space. So our top hacks for this episode to get you on track with home maintenance, schedule in your important tasks or have seasonal reference lists that you can consult.
00:20:11
Speaker
Know what your house insurance covers and if you have free access to Home Assist Services, and consider borrowing or hiring equipment to make tasks easier and save money and space from storing infrequently used items. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com and if you're a fan,
00:20:34
Speaker
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