Aside from paying off the mortgage, owning a home comes with plenty of other responsibilities, from keeping it clean and presentable to maintaining all the infrastructure that makes it livable and safe. All that maintenance can be overwhelming—one survey found 68% of homeowners were seriously stressed about home maintenance tasks.
First, a disclaimer: Some home maintenance tasks require way more than five minutes. You won’t be re-caulking your bathroom or restaining a deck in just five minutes.
The secret is to block off five minutes every day for home maintenance—and start with a five-minute assessment of the house. Walk around and note anything that needs attention—loose stuff, stained stuff, scratched stuff, stuff that isn’t working anymore or isn’t working properly. Every now and then, use your five minutes to inspect specific areas—the roof, the basement/crawl space, the yard—that need a little more focus. If you perform a quick inspection whenever you don’t have a specific project to do, you’ll be on top of those small problems the moment they manifest instead of discovering a much bigger problem weeks or months later.
Five-minute fixes
Tighten cabinet screws. Your kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors see a lot of action. All that opening and closing can loosen the screws on the hinges, which can have a subtle impact on their function. In five minutes, you can inspect the hinges on your cabinetry and tighten any loose screws you find. Suddenly, your doors won’t swing open on their own or rub against each other when you close them, reducing wear and tear and extending their lifespan.
Fix dents in walls. If your drywall has a dent or small hole, it’s a very easy fix using a patch kit available at most hardware stores. Granted, the entire repair will take more than five minutes—but it can be split into two five-minute stages. First, apply the patch and spread the spackling compound over it as instructed. The next day, lightly sand. Finally, paint over the patch. Five minutes per day over three days and your hole is gone.
Clean appliances. Keeping your various appliances in good working order is key—replacing them is expensive. It takes just a few minutes to clean your dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, and refrigerator coils, and doing so will extend their useful life markedly.
Lubricate windows. If your windows are sticking a little, don’t just watch them become immobile over time. A blast of dry lubricant in the tracks will loosen them up and keep them working like new.
Clear drains. Waiting until a drain backs up gross gray water into your life is no way to live (but is a way to level up to an expensive visit from the plumber). A set of drain-cleaning tools can rip clogs out of the drain in minutes, long before they become bad enough to cause damage.
Clean aerator. Your faucets have a round device screwed onto the end called an aerator. It mixes water with air to make the stream smooth (and reduce usage). It can easily become clogged over time, limiting water pressure (or causing the water stream to come out in unpredictable ways. Cleaning it will only a few minutes of actual work broken up over the course of a day. Just unscrew it (you can often do this by hand, but a pair of pliers might be required), soak it in vinegar overnight, give it a light scrub with a toothbrush in the morning, rinse, and reattach.
Remove mold and mildew. If the caulk in your bathroom has become a thriving farm of mold and mildew, replacing it is a moderately big job. But you can clean it in just a few minutes using a product like this. Apply it in a few minutes, go about your business for a few hours while it sits on the caulk, then return and wipe it away with a damp sponge.
Run tests. If you don’t have anything else on your five-minute fix list, test something. Sump pumps, alarms, rarely-used power outlets—making sure everything in the house is working as it should be takes a few minutes and can clue you in to bigger problems that might be brewing right under your nose.
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