Owning a house or any other property will always involve an element of maintenance – particulary during the winter months. These jobs are essential yet it’s amazing how many families prefer to allocate that funding elsewhere – usually towards the two week summer holiday. If having this responsibility is overwhelming, why not take an hour and make a list of all the jobs that a regular odd-job man would recommend as your ‘to do list’ and work out the best way to get each one done. If there are 12 jobs for example, they could be spread over the year. Do the ones in winter that obviously need to be checked when the bad weather is about, otherwise you can’t see if there is a problem. It’s no good looking for water ingress in dry weather with no rain. This involves checking gutters in very rainy weather, Walk around outside looking up, is there a cascade or rain coming over the top of the gutter, down the garage roof or down the wall, instead of via the downpipe as it should do? This can cause water ingress through gaps in the mortar and long term, will cause a damp issue.
One of the first but easiest jobs, is to check the smoke alarm and carbon monoxide alarms are working, with new batteries. Cleaning out the tumble drier of all fluff and extraneous matter is not often thought about but smoke and fire related issues can arise. I do mine regularly, as it’s an old unit, it still has a filter within the door housing and I collect the fluff and pop it in my garden compost bin. Clean out cooker hood and dishwasher filters.