047: Organising home maintenance and repairs

Life Admin Life Hacks

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.

RESOURCES

• 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.

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