Home Maintenance Repair
Home maintenance repair is, in my opinion, a dying craft. Years ago, fathers and mothers would teach sons and daughters home maintenance & repair skills. It was just as natural as doing laundry, cutting the grass, or any other chore. But for some reason in the 1980’s, the home-improvement service industry saw explosive growth. If you want my opinion, it was directly related to the irresponsible expansion of consumer credit that is part of the reason the economy of 2008-2009 is in a shambles. People could easily put a home repair on a charge card, or they took out a home-equity loan. But I digress.
Many folks now are discovering they made a mistake by not trying to do more home maintenance and repair themselves. Not everyone is in this boat, as statistics show that about 25 percent of the population of the USA are do-it-yourselfers. That’s tens of millions of people. My personal statistics show that this group is primarily the under-30 crowd and the over-60 crowd. Both of these groups tend to have limited incomes and lots of time on their hands. That’s a great recipe for sharpening your home-maintenance skills.
If you’ve not attempted any home-maintenance repairs, don’t worry. Many tasks are not that hard, even changing out an electrical switch or outlet. What’s more, as you start to educate yourself, you’ll get enormous satisfaction as you complete small jobs.
For example, let’s say you want to change out an old tubular doorknob. This job may be intimidating if you’re working on an exterior door, so I suggest you start with an interior door. These interior locksets generally have just a few screws that hold them together. Then you just have two screws that hold the moving latch that goes in and out of the edge of the door. Replacing a lockset like this takes just 15 minutes, often less than that. The biggest thing you need to do before you start the job is make sure you get a new one that has the correct backset.
The backset for a door knob is the distance from the edge of the door to the center of the door knob. Usually this distance is 2 and 3/8ths inches for an interior lockset. It can be 2 and 3/4 inches, as this was the size I always used on my own homes and houses I built. This larger size gives your hand more space so knuckles don’t rub against the door jamb.
To improve your hand-eye coordination, you should try to practice at caulking. When I say practice, I mean it. This is an area people make mistakes. They try to do a job they’ve never done before in an area seen by many. So take two pieces of scrape lumber and nail them together along their edges making an inside corner. There will be a crack there, so take some inexpensive acrylic caulk and fill the gap. Use your finger to smooth the caulk and a wet sponge to dress the caulk so it’s as smooth as a baby’s bottom.
If you want to attempt rough carpentry repairs, practice by possibly making a dog house. This sounds crazy, but a dog house requires you to discover how to measure, cut, nail, install siding, cut roof rafters, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Aside from the satisfaction you gain from doing home repairs yourself, you can save boatloads of money. Yes, there is a time factor involved depending upon how much you value your time, but if money is tight, you just can’t always afford the hundreds or thousands of dollars it might cost to hire a pro. Installing a simple water heater can save you hundreds of dollars. The trick is to read up on the process now, practice soldering scrap copper pipe, not the day your heater springs a leak.
Concrete and blacktop repairs are something you can tackle as well. Caulking cracks in concrete and blacktop is easy. To disguise the caulk, always be sure to get some sand that matches the color of the sand in the concrete or blacktop. Use the matching color of caulk as well. After installing the caulk carefully, and I mean just 2-foot stretches, sprinkle the dry sand on the fresh caulk and tap it lightly with your finger to make a great bond. The sand will disguise the harsh caulk line. If the crack is wide, push small stones into the fresh caulk that match stones in the blacktop.
When you start to learn how to paint, start inside a closet. Make all the mistakes in there. Once you have perfected your technique, then move into the main part of the room. Just think where you can test your skills doing the least amount of damage.
Take your time and enjoy yourself. You can do many home repairs if you put your mind to it. Carry a great attitude into the project. Keep telling yourself it’s a church job. Craftsmen of old who built churches always did their best work there for several reasons, not the least of which was that the entire community knew who worked in the church!
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