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Overview

Our Daily Home Improvement Projects are designed to increase the organization, efficiency, safety and appeal of your home. But how will you track and measure the success of your projects over time? Just like an effective diet plan, the “before picture” is key. It’s a great reminder of where you started and provides tangible evidence of your progress.

We’re not talking about a literal picture (although you’ll want to take some before and after pictures of your best projects to share). We are talking about an assessment of your home’s organization, energy efficiency, safety, and problem areas. For example, knowing your energy consumption patterns and how much you typically pay for utilities during your peak months can help you set realistic goals.

Take a few minutes to get to know your home.  The following steps will help you gather the info you need.

Difficulty: Easy (about 1 hour)

Tools Needed: None

Resources Needed:

- Quicken, MS Money or Mint if you want to analyze your utility expenses the easy way.
- Otherwise you’ll need records of utility bill amounts for the past year.
- Home and major appliance warranties
- Dates of recent major home repairs or renovations

Action Steps

1. Review your utility bills (electricity, water, gas, phone, cable, internet, etc.)

This job is much easier with Quicken. Just filter on utility bills and you can drill into the details.   For this review, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• How much did you spend last month on: electricity, water, natural gas (or other), phone, cable, internet, etc.?
• For each of these expenses, are there any surprises? Are there any outliers? Any recent spikes?
• Are there any troubling trends?

This review is helpful for many reasons. Beyond having a better understanding of your expenses, this type of review has helped homeowners discover water leaks, a broken online bill-payment systems (avoiding disconnection), and fast detection of an expired “introductory offer” on a bundled cable package.

2. Understand the seasonal trends in your utility bill.

Utilities are going to vary widely with the season. It’s important to compare apples-to-apples when looking to improve energy costs. For example, compare this September with last September for a meaningful measure. Again, this is going to be much easier with Quicken or MS Office. If you don’t have these tools, you can try using Mint which is an web tool to help you track expenses.

Tip: While you have your utility bills handy, program the repair/support numbers into your cell phone for each utility. When your cable modem goes out (taking Vonage with it), the last thing you want to do is dig through mail looking for the right contact info.

3. Locate and File Warranties properly.

Do you have any home warranties? What about major appliance warranties? Locate them and file properly. It’s best to locate them now, rather than searching for them frantically when something goes wrong.

4. Make a list of major home repairs and renovations, both past and planned.

Make a list of major home repairs or renovations over the past few years, as well as upcoming projects on your wish list ( e.g. new deck, exterior painting, installed irrigation, finished basement). This will help with long term planning. Be sure to include dates and contact info for companies and contractors that performed previous work.

5.  Write down the dates for recent minor maintenance.

Write down a rough timeline for recent minor maintenance (replaced air filters, replaced smoke alarm batteries, checked fire extinguishers). This will help us build a no-worry home maintenance calendar and checklist.

6. Write down the biggest problem areas in your home.

What bothers you the most about your home? Is it a cluttered garage? Does it take too long to find things? Are there maintenance projects that you’ve been putting off? What about safety, security and energy efficiency?

As you think of the areas that bother you, write them down. Even though you will not be able to get to these projects right away, you’ll feel better knowing that you’ve captured them on a list. No need to prioritize them now, we’ll come back to the list later.

7. Store this info in a file and electronically

Store this information in electronic format so that you can quickly retrieve and review it. Assume that you may need it at any time over the next 5 years. I like to send this type of information to my GMail account for easy searching. I also keep this type of info in a file included in my online backup.

Once you’ve captured this information, you have a great “before picture” of your home. We should be able to look back at this review in a month, 6 months, and a year and see significant progress.

Now let’s get started!