For a lot of senior citizens, home can become a comfortable place with a thoroughly “lived-in” feel. When the same person or family lives in a home for many years, the home simply takes on a quality of, not disrepair by any means, but having been well-loved and, for lack of a better term, worn over time. This is one of the real delights of holding onto a family home for an extended period of time.
However, it also means that as we grow older many of us face regular repairs and upkeep that we might not have counted on. This doesn’t tend to be a huge problem and every repair is different. But keeping that in mind, here are five general tips for home maintenance that might be beneficial to seniors.
Practice Your DIY Skills
If you’re one to tackle home maintenance and improvement projects on your own, it always helps to practice your hand at DIY efforts. Interestingly enough, this list of home improvement tips puts two helpful ideas back-to-back. Those are to decide whether or not you’re a DIY’er and to hone your home improvement skills. This means practice, practice, and more practice. But what a lot of people don’t realise is that you can do some of this just for fun. Many of the people who are best at home repair and upkeep projects are those who do similar projects as hobbies, whether that be updating paint jobs, designing decorations, or simple crafting work. Working with your hands in a creative and/or constructive capacity is great practice for tackling home maintenance.
Maintain Your Equipment Inventory
Another thing that can happen in a home that has been lived in for many years is that toolkits can become depleted or fall into poor condition. However, if you’re one to plan on tackling home maintenance projects on your own, you’ll probably need an updated and working set of tools on hand! This site can serve as a useful guide, laying out top trade-rated tools in a clear and organised fashion. You can get an idea for what you might me missing, what you may already have, and which new, high-end pieces might be useful by looking through different categories of tools. This can all be done at any time, but if you’re looking to address some work around the house you may as well look into your tool situation sooner rather than later.
Act Quickly
When the need for a repair actually arises, one of the most important tips to keep in mind is to act quickly. This is expressed pretty clearly here in a list of “don’ts” for home repair, with the general idea being that fast and thorough action leads to the best work. A leaky ceiling, rotting wood, chipping paint, or even something like termite damage can require immediate attention. So, when you’re addressing home maintenance it’s usually best to be decisive and attempt to fix the whole problem as soon as possible (rather than putting a band-aid on it).
Don’t Be A Hero
Finally try not to get ahead of yourself when it comes to home upkeep and repairs. There’s definitely something satisfying (not to mention affordable) about doing maintenance on your own, particularly if you’re working with a home that you’ve lived in for years that really feels like it’s yours. But if a particularly challenging job comes up, or if you don’t know how to go about a project, it’s almost always wiser to seek help. That doesn’t necessarily mean hiring a professional either. It might mean anything from calling a friend or neighbour for advice, to consulting one of dozens of mobile apps with home repair tips on them. The point is not to go it alone if you don’t have to!
These are only a few things for seniors living at home to keep in the back of their minds. Home maintenance can be very satisfying if gone about in the right way, and ultimately it can keep your home comfortable and in good condition.
