Author: J.D. Roth / Source: Get Rich Slowly
Yesterday was an exciting day at the Rothwards household! After three weeks of demolition and construction, we installed our new hot tub.
It took six men an hour of maneuvering before we managed to set the spa into place…but we did it. And we didn’t break anything.
Now it’s a matter of completing the decking and roofing, then Kim and I will be able to enjoy our remodeled outdoor oasis!
We’re eager for construction to be over. Since buying our “English cottage” last summer, we’ve poured tons of money and time into a variety of renovations. It’s been a non-stop construction zone.
You see, during the seventeen years the previous owners lived here, they performed very little maintenance and upkeep on the home and property. When we had the place inspected before purchase, the inspector raised a lot of concerns:
After we did decide to buy the place, I vowed that I’d be a proactive homeowner. Instead of allowing things to fall into a state of disrepair, I wanted to fix everything that was broken and then stay on top of home improvement in the years to come.
Today I want to share four specific actions I’ve taken to try to be a proactive homeowner.
Develop a Schedule for Regular Maintenance
A great place to start with home improvement is to find (or create) a regular maintenance schedule. While you’ll definitely have projects specific to your own house (about which more in a moment), there are certain chores that ought to be done on a routine basis.
Here in Oregon, for instance, gutters should be cleaned both at the start and the end of the rainy season (late October and late April). Spring is a good time to wash windows, inside and out. It’s also time to clean and set up outdoor furniture. During the summer, I like to trim trees and shrubs back from the side of the house. Fall is a good time to inspect the attic and crawlspace.
To create our maintenance schedule, I started with this home maintenance checklist [Google Doc] based on an article from The Art of Manliness. I tweaked the document to fit our needs, adding and removing things specific to our home.
I’ve also discovered that it’s useful to add certain recurring tasks to my digital calendar. (I’m never going to remember to change the furnace filter unless I make an appointment with myself to do so.)
Create a House-Specific To-Do List
While it’s helpful to have a general maintenance schedule to remind you of regular tasks, it’s even more important to keep an up-to-date to-do list that’s specific to your home.
I keep our to-do list in Basecamp, a web-based project-management tool that I already use for other projects. (I’ve heard good things about Asana too, although I’ve never used it.) You might keep your to-do list in a spreadsheet or even a spiral notebook.
For each room in the house and area of the property, I keep a separate list of tasks that need to be completed. To start, I populated these lists in two ways:
- I went through the pre-purchase inspection report and added every problem the inspector had flagged. Some of the stuff he noted was minor. In these cases, I made sure to mark the task as “low priority”.
- Kim and I made a slow tour of our home and yard in order to catalog other projects we wanted to complete. For example, every room in the house needs new paint. Every corner of the yard needs to be weeded and re-landscaped.
We refer to our to-do list constantly. Whenever we have a free weekend for home maintenance (as we did last weekend…and this coming weekend), we check the list to see which tasks are most pressing and/or most appealing.
Finally — and this is important (if somewhat obvious) — whenever we find a new project that needs to be tackled, we add it to our list….
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