Now that you are at home 24/7, you have time to notice the things that need repair in your house.
Did you observe your door to be squeaky? Is your washbasin in the comfort room or the kitchen sink drainage clogged? Are there any lights that are blinking or about to be busted? Is your AC working as good as before? Are there any water leakages during rain? Now that everyone is advised to stay at home, it would also be best to be the good handyman of your own house. No choice huh?
Here are some tips to prepare you for such works:
1) Check all your old stuffs and tools and put them all in one toolbox (if you don't have box you can at least put in a drawer or bag).
For instance, you may have bought screwdrivers before and just put it in one cabinet while the other tools are in the store room. In this way, it would be easy to find them in case of home emergencies or home repairs you will do.
2) Learn the basics of home maintenance and how to do them properly.
Since, today is an age of information, you may read e-books, tips on the internet, videos for D-I-Y home repairs that may come through you tube or blogs like this. Basic understanding of electrical, plumbing, carpentry works and even AC system (in case you have) is very useful.
3) Practice a well organized problem solving.
Like what we have learned during our elementary days, we will use the 4W's and 1H - What, where, when, why and how.
3.a) WHAT is the maintenance issue?
WHAT are the tools that you can use?
3.b) WHERE do you exactly need to fix?
For example, there was a main circuit breaker trip. You may have to check all appliances and if you have plugged in a faulty machine, or check if there are any burned outlets. Once you are able to locate, you can isolate the circuit by turning off the branch circuit breaker, and reset the Main circuit breaker.
3.c) WHEN does the issue usually occur? Or WHEN did the problem start?
This can best be understood by knowing the history of the issue. For example, you suddenly noticed your wooden entrance door is disaligned and almost all hinges are loose already. As you observed further, there are some bearing of the hinges that are missing. Your kids may have played with the door hinges. You may ask them when did they notice the hinges to be loose / broken? This may have been alsoonly may only one missing bearing on the hinge first then got worse after few weeks. Then you may encourage everyone at home to be more aware of these kind of things.
WHEN is best time for repair? Since you are in home quarantine and all are in the house, you should also take note of your schedules. Use the time on days that the other family members are in different location so no one will be messing up your work.
3.d) WHY did the problem occur? You have to know what caused the problem to understand and learn how you can fix it. The most convenient way is the FISH BONE DIAGRAM METHOD. (I will discuss this on a separate article)
3.e) HOW can you solve the problem?
You have to know how to isolate the issues that are minor and major. For the minor works, you may fix all of them by yourself, or with the aid of your friends that you can call through phone. However, for major works, you may learn how to CONTAIN the problem.
Note: Containment is the process of preventing more damage to a property, machine or anything that has also fault or problems.
Containment means stopping water leakage, making remedies for very noisy drops of water, resetting electrical breaker when there is power trip, turning off of angle valve for broken water pipes and stopping water supply for affected areas.
