Home Maintenance Tips

A practical guide to the vents you can clean yourself, the ones you shouldn't touch, and why your dryer has been quietly staging a protest.

There is a specific kind of confidence that comes over a person standing in a hardware store aisle on a Saturday morning. You came in for one thing. You are leaving with seventeen things, a vague plan, and the quiet certainty that you can absolutely handle this yourself. YouTube said it would take two hours. It is going to take two hours. You are a capable adult who owns tools.

Sometimes this goes great. Sometimes this is how you end up with your water shut off at 9pm on a Sunday, a pipe situation that has escalated significantly beyond the original pipe situation, and a plumber's emergency rate on a Sunday night that you will not be sharing with anyone.

The difference between a satisfying DIY weekend project and a preventable disaster almost always comes down to knowing — before you start — which category the job falls into. This is that guide. Save it somewhere you will actually find it on a Saturday morning.

Let's talk about something that is happening in your home right now, at this exact moment, that you cannot see, smell, or touch — and that most of us never even think about until someone in the house develops a mysterious cough that lingers for six weeks and the doctor asks, "Have you checked your air quality?"

Let's talk about gutters. Specifically, let's talk about the gutters you have been meaning to check since last fall and somehow still haven't gotten around to. No judgment — life got busy, winter came and went, and the gutters just kind of… stayed up there, quietly doing whatever gutters do when no one is watching.

Here is the thing though. What gutters do when no one is watching is collect every leaf, twig, shingle granule, seed pod, and mystery debris that your yard and the sky above it have to offer. And once enough of that accumulates, your gutters stop doing their actual job — which is to move water away from your home — and start doing a completely different job, which is to hold water against your home and cause a truly impressive amount of expensive damage.

The good news is that checking and cleaning your gutters is one of those home maintenance tasks that sounds more intimidating than it actually is. It does not require special skills. It does not require expensive equipment. It mostly just requires a free afternoon, a ladder, some gloves you don't mind getting dirty, and the knowledge that it actually needs to be done.

So let's start there.

Here is the thing about roof damage — your roof is not going to send you a text message when something goes wrong. It is just going to quietly let water in until one day you notice a stain on your ceiling and suddenly you are googling "how bad is a roof leak" at 11pm in a mild panic. The good news is that catching problems early is a lot easier than you think, and you don't have to be a contractor to know when something looks off. You don't even have to get up there.

Here's a question for your Friday morning – how many unnecessary holes does it take to get a picture hung straight? For me, at least five. You know the drill – you go to hang a picture, feel along the back of it to find the hook, hold your finger in place on the wall while trying to set the picture down and juggle the hammer and nail, then you hammer it in. Up comes the picture – which somehow has the hole in a spot an inch from where you put the nail. Here is a handy trick to stop the madness:

If you are anything like me, things like the inner-workings of the machines around your house aren't something you normally consider. But at least once or twice a year, you should probably give a thought to a few of the insides around you. Specifically filters. Spring is a great time to check and replace: