The Home Maintenance Journal
This is one of those ideas which come to you that could either be brilliant, or just a bit silly in the way of overdoing it. As I was going over various news reports, I came across a study that showed when people kept a food journal they were more likely to loose weight. Later in the day, I was reading a book which contained a section about journal writing as a means of improving your mental acuity. Working on my old Beetle, I found my maintenance book from a Beetle that I had back in the seventies. At the end of the day, I write up my appointments and tasks in my calendar. The idea of a journal was obviously floating around my mind by this points, and then I remembered a problem that vexed me when I was a senior manager at a facility: staying on top of maintenance issues.
Here is a scenario that very well may have played out at your home. You are walking along to your destination when you notice something wrong. For example, your coming home from work, and you want to go in to relax. You see that the door handle is loose. You know this is an easy fix, but you want your meal, and you want to unwind, so you let it pass. This keeps happening that other things come up, and the door handle is not fixed. Eventually, you come to the point where you do not notice it anymore. Now consider all of the things that you might notice over the course of a month, but you do not address them right away. At a certain point, you will decide that you can live with these problems.
What if you changed you habit ever so slightly? I use my calendar as a journal for my business. My wife uses a calendar for her work and events in the family’s life. She records things to do on it. Maybe you have a calendar in your kitchen which serves the same purpose. When you notice a problem, write it down on the calendar or some other journal to keep track of your home. At the end of the week, or the end of the month, check the issues that you noted, so you can have them repaired. Little problems can lead to larger ones. You will be fixing them before they cause more damage.
I like keeping a folder for invoices that deal with work done on the home. Next to that folder, I keep another with all of the manuals for equipment in the home. Having a little notebook or sheet of paper here would not be too hard, but you might forget to take it out, that is why I think the calendar could become a maintenance journal.
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