It might be a pain to do home maintenance, but if you don’t do it, you’ll end up with a much bigger and more expensive job. As well as costing more in the long run and making it more likely that you’ll need to hire an expert to do the work instead of doing it yourself, putting basic maintenance off can be very dangerous. Fire hazards or unsanitary conditions could make your family sick.
Getting into the habit of checking and quickly doing some basic DIY home maintenance tasks is therefore a good idea. Once you get used to it, you may even start to enjoy pampering your home a little more. Here, we look at a few tips and tricks that will make the process easier, faster, and more fun.
Avoid Hinges That Rust or Squeak
If you live in a humid area or near the sea, rust is a normal part of life. Whether or not you use a spray-on 3-in-1 oil lubricant, it’s worth going around the house and garden with it and giving hinges, locks, padlocks, and other moving metal parts a light coat from time to time. It also makes your home quieter and reduces the chances that you’ll have to replace new ones. It only takes a few minutes to do.
Clean Out Your Gutters and Check Your Fascia Boards Often
You need to make sure your gutters are cleaned out, because one of the main causes of water in your basement is clogged gutters that can’t properly direct water away from your maintenance. Make sure your gutters get the attention they deserve. It’s important to get rid of leaves and other debris by hand at least once a year (or more often if you live in a very leafy area).
Then use a garden hose to rinse it clean. To make sure your gutters aren’t falling off, make sure they’re firmly attached to your fascia boards. Make sure to fix or replace any sections that look worn or are rotting.
It’s easy to make old walls look new
As a person who likes to change things up and redecorate from time to time, you might have a lot of holes where pictures and mirrors used to hang. Pick up some spackle at the hardware store and fix these up. Let them dry and sand them down before painting.
Painting a whole room is a big job. To make things easier, make sure to buy a little extra paint each time so you have some left over when you need to touch things up again. In the case that you don’t have any left over paint, you can get it tinted at the hardware store. As a reminder, you should know that the color probably won’t match perfectly. If you just do a light coat over the whole wall, you won’t notice the difference, and you won’t have to redo the whole room again.
Check Your Appliances
There’s always going to be a lot of unused appliances, whether they’re broken or just sitting around because they were replaced by something better. Organize them all in one place and see if they work, then figure out how to sell them. Make sure to get in touch with an appliance repair company if you have some potentially valuable repairs that need to be fixed. They can give them a new lease on life. It can be both a good way to make money and clean up your home at the same time.
Find and fix leaks in the toilet
In the first place, you can find out what’s wrong with your toilet by adding food coloring to the tank or cistern! If water is dripping from the tank into the toilet bowl, you’ll need to change the flapper. Turn off the water at the wall valve, remove the flush chain from the lever, and slide the old flapper out of the overflow tube until it’s free. As soon as the new one is in place, the leaking will stop.
Sometimes, a running toilet is caused by a kinked toilet chain. As an issue, slide a little plastic straw over the chain (try to cover about two-thirds of the length) and reattach it to the arm. The problem is solved!
You should call in a plumber if the leak is happening somewhere else and you don’t know how to fix it on your own. You don’t want to deal with a lot of water damage or have to make other repairs.
Get a Small Drain Snake
Even though there are a lot of great ways to avoid clogs, they do happen from time to time. You can make sure you don’t put fats and oils down the kitchen sink and that you have hair filters in the bathroom drains, but clogs do happen.
These harsh chemical drain cleaners can do a lot of damage to your pipes over time. If you want to manually clean out your pipes, buy a small drain snake. This will help you keep your pipes in good shape for years to come.