Living in a home without a professional maintenance staff on hand can be hard. While you might know how to change a light bulb or replace the batteries in your fire alarm, you’ll need to know a lot more to keep a house or condominium in good shape. Some people love turning their home into a project, but others prefer to keep their hands off and let the professionals handle big repair jobs. Still, it quickly gets expensive if you let them handle every job, and there’s a lot you can do even if you aren’t the DIY type.
Basic Toilet Fixes
There are a surprising number of things that can go wrong in a device that only needs a little water pressure to work. Fortunately, many of these problems have quick and simple fixes anyone can perform.
- If the bowl clogs, you can use a plunger to force the clog out of the pipe. If a plunger doesn’t work, a toilet augur can help, and it’s not much more expensive or harder to use than a plunger.
- If the water keeps running, it’s probably because the flush valve isn’t all the way down. You can fix this by jiggling the handle, flushing the toilet again, or opening the tank up and untangling the chain between the flush handle and the valve.
Fill Drywall Holes
There are many ways holes can end up in your walls. The most common cause is paintings and pictures that need a nail to hang from. Fixing these holes is easy. All you need is a little spackle to fill the holes, a putty knife that can flatten the spackle to the wall, and some paint that’s the same color as the wall. If you don’t have the right color on hand, you can get color swatches from any home improvement store to check against your walls.
Keep Your Furnace Safe
While you might want to leave the annual furnace inspection and cleaning to the professionals, there are a few jobs that are easy enough for anyone to do. For instance, most furnace designs make it simple to pull out the furnace air filter and replace it with a clean one. Plus, air filters are cheap even if you get a high-quality design.
You can also keep track of your furnace by installing carbon monoxide detectors in your home. Apart from that, you should remember to clean your vents regularly to remove some of the dust buildup.
You can also find other things to do around the house like keeping the floors clean, keeping the shelves and tables dust-free, and stopping too much hair from going down the shower drain and clogging it. There’s a lot to remember, but fortunately, you almost never have to remember it all at once to stay on top of the problems that might come up. If you can space out your maintenance days, you should never end up feeling overwhelmed by the job of keeping your house in good shape.
