Keeping a home improvement projects to-do list

My Christmas curse continues! You see, for a very long time now — nearly thirty years — Christmas has develop into synonymous with house issues for me.

This all began within the first house that Kris and I owned again once we have been newly married. We woke one Christmas morning to search out that the water heater had overflowed, flooding the laundry room and far of the transformed storage. Unfazed, we cleaned up the mess and spent our vacation with out scorching water. It was enjoyable!

Since then, I’ve skilled a protracted line of house issues on Christmas day: frozen pipes, damaged gutters, fallen fences, and extra. And this 12 months? Nicely, this 12 months’s problem was minor…however could result in a serious restore.

The home that Kim and I purchased final August is in good condition. We made certain of that in the course of the inspection interval. Nonetheless, no house is ideal — and a home constructed fifty years in the past has a number of warts.

“Do you know one thing’s improper with the ceiling within the corridor toilet?” Kim requested on Christmas morning after she completed her bathe. “The paint on the ceiling appears to be peeling.”

“What?” I mentioned. I went to have a look. Kim was proper. The paint on the ceiling gave the impression to be peeling.

“I am going to wager that is from moisture,” I mentioned. I discovered a footstool and climbed as much as take a better look. I turned on the air flow fan. “Wow,” I mentioned. “The fan does not appear to be pulling any air. That is the basis problem.”

I toyed with the peeling paint, which was a mistake. The brittle stuff crumbled and fell to the ground in massive chunks. “That is so unusual,” I mentioned. I picked up a number of items of particles. “Is that this solely paint? It appears so thick.”

“It appears to be like prefer it’s simply paint,” Kim mentioned. “However many layers of paint. Who is aware of? It may very well be one thing else beneath.”

So, now now we have the primary pressing house undertaking in our new place. It isn’t an enormous deal, clearly, nevertheless it’s one thing we need to restore sooner moderately than later. It is only a matter of discovering time. (This looks like one thing we should always be capable to repair ourselves moderately than hiring out.)

This problem has truly been a blessing in disguise. In every single place I reside, I preserve a grasp checklist of repairs and tasks. However I hadn’t but drafted that checklist for our house right here in Corvallis. This morning, I remedied that.

My Homeownership Initiatives Checklist

If you purchase a house, you additionally purchase a parade of tasks. No house is ever totally purposeful at any given time. There’s all the time one thing that must be repaired or upgraded or inspected.

As a fellow who struggles with ADHD, this unending stream of house tasks can overwhelm me. There’s a lot that must be executed that my inclination is to do nothing. However, after all, doing nothing solely results in extra tasks sooner or later. I’ve realized that it is vital for me to make fixed, incremental progress on duties round the home.

To remain targeted, it is important that I keep homeownership to-do checklist.

Longer in the past, I created my undertaking checklist with pencil and paper. These days, I preserve the checklist digitally. At our final home, I maintained a textual content doc with all the issues that wanted to be executed. For our new home, I am experimenting with Apple’s built-in Reminders app. This enables me to share the checklist with Kim, add notes and pictures and deadlines to duties, and extra.

I suppose there are lots of methods you would select to construct your private checklist of house tasks. For me, it is all the time been best to make use of the house inspection report as a place to begin.

“I take advantage of your report as a to-do checklist,” I advised our house inspector in August.

“Should you do, you are the one one,” he mentioned, laughing. “No one appears to take these items severely. It frustrates me to return and examine a house I noticed a number of years earlier than, and never a single problem has been addressed. That occurs on a regular basis.”

To start, I let the inspection report kind the construction of my checklist. For this home, the report was divided by main techniques, similar to: Roof, Grounds, Exterior, Attic, Plumbing, Electrical, HVAC, and so forth. And inside every part of the report, the inspector graded gadgets as OK, MM (for marginal or “wants upkeep”), or RR (for “restore or change”).

I divide my checklist into the identical sections because the inspection report. As a result of this specific report did not break down particular person “inside rooms”, I added a bit for every house inside the home: Kitchen, Residing Room, Kim’s Workplace, Corridor and Stairs, and so on.

As I web page by the inspection report, I copy over every flagged merchandise as an motion step. The inspector’s remark about moss progress on the roof turns into “Take away Moss (RR)”. I add notes and feedback, if I’ve them, and I would even pencil in a tentative date to deal with the undertaking and/or contact information for a contractor I need to rent.

However the inspection report is barely a place to begin.

Subsequent, I stroll s-l-o-w-l-y by the home, going from room to room and excited about our plans for the longer term. I take notes as I’m going. I write down something that bugs us (“set up thresholds into rooms downstairs”, “set up carpet runner for stairs”) and I be aware any upgrades we need to make to the home (“purchase heater for deck”, “fully rework corridor toilet”). I attempt to write down each single factor I can consider, irrespective of how small. My goal is to get these items out of my head and onto (metaphorical) paper.

As a ultimate step, I make certain to ask Kim if there’s anything I ought to add to our checklist of tasks. She’ll usually have plans and goals of her personal that she hasn’t but shared with me. It is good to get these on the grasp checklist, too.

After this braindump, I am going to have a listing crammed with dozens of duties that need doing round the home. These duties will probably be divided by subsystem and/or room (which makes the roles simpler to “batch”), and so they’ll even be ranked by precedence.

Closing Ideas

My grasp homeownership to-do checklist has proved invaluable previously. The checklist offers me motivation and path. It helps me to prioritize the duties that should be accomplished quickly, as opposed to those who are straightforward or enjoyable. Most significantly, it helps us to handle drawback areas in a well timed style as a substitute of permitting them to fester.

I ought to be aware that this is not the solely checklist of house tasks that we use. We additionally preserve an ongoing checklist/calendar of upkeep duties. This began as a easy checklist that I had pulled from some e book about house upkeep, however over time it is develop into a collection of calendar reminders that Kim and I modify frequently.

For instance, I needed to blow off the roof and clear the gutters twice this autumn as a result of our home is surrounded by huge tall evergreens. The needles are a nuisance. Every time I cleaned the roof, I positioned an alert in my calendar for a similar time subsequent 12 months as a reminder. We do the identical for any common upkeep job that we do not need to overlook.

Dwelling upkeep and residential enchancment can actually be a headache at instances, however I’ve discovered that the ache will be mitigated by (a) holding an up to date checklist of house tasks and (b) commonly plugging away on the checklist — even when doing so in an unorganized style.