We may earn a commission from links on this page.
Aside from paying off the mortgage, owning a home comes with plenty of other responsibilities, from keeping it clean and presentable to maintaining all the infrastructure that makes it livable and safe. All that maintenance can be overwhelming—one survey found 68% of homeowners were seriously stressed about home maintenance tasks.
It doesn’t have to be like that. One reason home maintenance seems so dreadful is how most of us approach it, assuming that the only way to “do” home maintenance is to devote an entire weekend (or longer) to huge projects. Handling home maintenance that way turns it into something to avoid, a weekend-ruining nightmare. There’s a much better approach: Instead of putting it off and devoting whole days or weeks to home maintenance, do it every day for just five minutes.
Quick inspections
First, a disclaimer: Some home maintenance tasks require way more than five minutes. You won’t be re-caulking your bathroom or restaining a deck in just five minutes.
But devoting five minutes a day to maintaining your home will accomplish a long list of small but vital jobs that will reduce the frequency of those bigger jobs. Small repairs can prevent bigger problems, and regularly maintaining appliances and HVAC systems will prevent breakdowns and extend their lifespans.
The secret is to block off five minutes every day for home maintenance—and start with a five-minute assessment of the house. Walk around and note anything that needs attention—loose stuff, stained stuff, scratched stuff, stuff that isn’t working anymore or isn’t working properly. Every now and then, use your five minutes to inspect specific areas—the roof, the basement/crawl space, the yard—that need a little more focus. If you perform a quick inspection whenever you don’t have a specific project to do, you’ll be on top of those small problems the moment they manifest instead of discovering a much bigger problem weeks or months later.
Five-minute fixes
When your five-minute inspection turns up a problem, make it tomorrow’s five-minute fix. Here’s a list of home maintenance jobs that take just a few minutes but have a huge impact on the condition of your house and the frequency of larger repair and maintenance jobs:
-
Tighten cabinet screws. Your kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors see a lot of action. All that opening and closing can loosen the screws on the hinges, which can have a subtle impact on their function. In five minutes, you can inspect the hinges on your cabinetry and tighten any loose screws you find. Suddenly, your doors won’t swing open on their own or rub against each other when you close them, reducing wear and tear and extending their lifespan.
You can also tighten any door hinges that have worked loose while you’re standing there with a screwdriver in your hand.
-
Fix dents in walls. If your drywall has a dent or small hole, it’s a very easy fix using a patch kit available at most hardware stores. Granted, the entire repair will take more than five minutes—but it can be split into two five-minute stages. First, apply the patch and spread the spackling compound over it as instructed. The next day, lightly sand. Finally, paint over the patch. Five minutes per day over three days and your hole is gone.
-
Touch-up paint. Painting a whole room is a big project, but covering up a small scuff or repair takes a few minutes unless you need to be cut around trim or other obstructions. If you’ve got a spot in the middle of a wall that needs a hit of paint, it’s an ideal five-minute fix.
-
Clean appliances. Keeping your various appliances in good working order is key—replacing them is expensive. It takes just a few minutes to clean your dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, and refrigerator coils, and doing so will extend their useful life markedly.
-
Clean/change filters. A lot of things in your house have filters, and changing/cleaning them takes just a few minutes each. Do one a day for a week and your house will smell better, have better air quality, and everything will last just a little longer.
-
Lubricate windows. If your windows are sticking a little, don’t just watch them become immobile over time. A blast of dry lubricant in the tracks will loosen them up and keep them working like new.
-
Fix wallpaper seams. If you have wallpaper with loose seams, ignoring it will just lead to what scientists call Total Wallpaper Failure. To prevent that, grab a bottle of seam adhesive and apply—a few minutes of your time and your wallpaper will be like new again.
-
Clear drains. Waiting until a drain backs up gross gray water into your life is no way to live (but is a way to level up to an expensive visit from the plumber). A set of drain-cleaning tools can rip clogs out of the drain in minutes, long before they become bad enough to cause damage.
-
Bleach ceiling stains. If you had a small leak that left a stain on your ceiling, you might look at it every day and imagine how much work it will take to fix. But it can be taken care of in just a few minutes. Mix up one part bleach with five parts water in a spray bottle, douse the stain, blot, and repeat. If you’d rather not bother with that much effort, you can also buy a can of “up shot” sealer, which will do a decent job of masking stains on a white ceiling in about two minutes.
-
Clean aerator. Your faucets have a round device screwed onto the end called an aerator. It mixes water with air to make the stream smooth (and reduce usage). It can easily become clogged over time, limiting water pressure (or causing the water stream to come out in unpredictable ways. Cleaning it will only a few minutes of actual work broken up over the course of a day. Just unscrew it (you can often do this by hand, but a pair of pliers might be required), soak it in vinegar overnight, give it a light scrub with a toothbrush in the morning, rinse, and reattach.
-
Replace weatherstripping. The weatherstripping in your doorway is insulation all around the opening that forms a seal when the door is closed, preventing drafts and the loss of cool/hot air. Like everything else, it needs to be replaced once in a while (especially if it’s visibly ratty-looking). The job can take just five minutes, as you can see here.
-
Remove mold and mildew. If the caulk in your bathroom has become a thriving farm of mold and mildew, replacing it is a moderately big job. But you can clean it in just a few minutes using a product like this. Apply it in a few minutes, go about your business for a few hours while it sits on the caulk, then return and wipe it away with a damp sponge.
-
Run tests. If you don’t have anything else on your five-minute fix list, test something. Sump pumps, alarms, rarely-used power outlets—making sure everything in the house is working as it should be takes a few minutes and can clue you in to bigger problems that might be brewing right under your nose.