Homeownership Archives | The Art of Manliness https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/ Men's Interest and Lifestyle Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:06:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 Podcast #973: A Butler’s Guide to Managing Your Household https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/podcast-973-a-butlers-guide-to-managing-your-household/ Tue, 25 Nov 2025 14:55:32 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=181352 Note: This is a rebroadcast. It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and cleaned. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tip-top shape? My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field-tested, insider advice […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Note: This is a rebroadcast.

It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and cleaned. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tip-top shape?

My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field-tested, insider advice to offer. Charles MacPherson spent two decades as the major-domo or chief butler of a grand household. He’s also the founder of North America’s only registered school for butlers and household managers and the author of several books drawn from his butlering experience, including The Butler Speaks: A Return to Proper Etiquette, Stylish Entertaining, and the Art of Good Housekeeping.

In the first part of our conversation, Charles charts the history of domestic service and describes why the practice of having servants like a butler and maid ebbed in the mid-20th century but has made a comeback today. We then turn to what average folks who don’t have a household staff can do to better manage their homes. Charles recommends keeping something called a “butler’s book” to stay on top of household schedules and maintenance checklists. We then discuss how to clean your home more logically and efficiently. Charles shares his golden rules of house cleaning, the cleaning task you’ve probably neglected (hint: go take a look at the side of the door on your dishwasher), his surprising choice for the best product to use to clean your shower, how often you should change your bedsheets, and much more.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and clean. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tiptop shape? My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field tested insider advice to offer. Charles MacPherson spent two decades as the majordomo or chief butler of a grand household. He’s also the founder of North America’s only registered school for butler’s and household managers, and the author of several books drawn from his butlering experience, including The Butler Speaks: A Return to Proper Etiquette, Stylish Entertaining, and the Art of Good Housekeeping. In the first part of our conversation, Charles charts the history of domestic service and describes why the practices of having servants like a butler made ebbed in the mid 20th century, but has made a comeback today.

We then turn to what average folks who don’t have a household staff can do to better manage their homes. Charles recommends keeping something called a butler’s book to stay on top of household schedules and maintenance checklists. We then discuss how to clean your home more logically and efficiently. Charles shares his golden rules of house cleaning, the cleaning task you probably neglected. Hint, go take a look at the side of the door of your dishwasher, his apprising choice or best product to use to clean your shower, how often you should change your bedsheets and much more. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/butler. All right, Charles MacPherson, welcome to the show.

Charles MacPherson: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Brett McKay: So you have served as a professional butler for over two decades, and you now run an organization that trains butlers and other professional domestic staff. And I think most people when they think of butlers, they think of butlers as men who served English aristocrats and American robber barons, the 19th and early 20th centuries. But butlering is still alive and well today. And I wanna talk about what it looks like today. But before we do, can you kind of give us a brief history of domestic service? What was it like 100 years ago? When did it reach its peak, etcetera?

Charles MacPherson: So that’s a great question because I think understanding history allows us to really understand where we are today. So let’s very briefly, let’s start back 150 years ago or so, we’re in the Victorian era, Queen Victoria’s on the throne, and there is a huge amount of domestic staff. In fact, it’s the second largest employer, if you will, in the United Kingdom compared to farming, right after farming, which is number one. And so these people are required that the amount of domestic staff are required because the homes of the day didn’t have rain water, didn’t have electricity. And so for the wealthy to live, as we all know, when we watch PBS and watching Agatha Christie and so on, that took a mountain of people to be able to undertake. And so that’s the height of the most number of domestic people. And then we go Queen Victoria dies, her son King Edward, so we go into the Edwardian era, World War I, and now for the first time in history, we have people leaving domestic service.

And so all of a sudden, this is when men start to leave domestic service really. And so now this is where women are starting to really become prominent in domestic service and they’re now serving at the dining room table, which society is shocked by to see a woman in the front of the house. And then all of a sudden we go through World War II, now we’re into the 1950s and all of a sudden the world has changed. And there is now the modern conveniences based on the war. So we have clothing that’s available, we have food that’s available, we can go to grocery stores.

And so being a domestic service is a dying art. And as we go into the 60s, into the 70s, there is no one going into domestic service. It’s really has come to an end and it’s just the very few that are left. But then we get into 1980 and Ronald Reagan becomes President, Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister, and we have Reaganomics. And now all of a sudden, we have a huge amount of wealth that’s being created by a very small group of people. And so as they acquire their wealth and they start to acquire toys of homes and boats and airplanes, they want to live comfortably. And so all of a sudden there’s, well, let’s hire a butler, but there really are no butlers except some old timers.

And so all of a sudden there’s this demand for butlering and people start to go back into private service. And so all of a sudden as we get into 2000 and up, all of a sudden there’s a huge amount of demand for private service because the wealthy continue to be wealthy and to generate money. And so it’s incredible the career that it’s become. And so now it’s really a career where you can make a lot of money and where it’s no longer being in servitude like you were 150 years ago, but being in domestic service today is actually an honorable career. And so it’s really interesting how it went from the height to almost being extinct in the 60s and early 70s. And now all of a sudden here we back are at 2024 and there is more demand for domestic service than can actually meet. So the supply, we just don’t have the supply.

Brett McKay: That’s interesting. So at its peak when in the Victorian era when you had just a household of staff, if anyone’s seen Downton Abbey, they’ve probably…

Charles MacPherson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: That’s what people typically think of domestic service. Like how many people did a typical aristocrat have in their home?

Charles MacPherson: Well, so when you think about it, it really comes down to what was the size of the house. But some people could have 20, 30, 40, 50, or 100, so it was all… Remember, farming was all done by hand, so there was a huge amount of people on the estate just in dealing with the farms, which generated income for the estate. But to run the inside of the household, there’s no microwave, there’s no fridge, there’s no electric mixer. So just in the kitchen alone, to be able to produce the meals they did, you needed an army of people. And then the washing of all the dishes and all that stuff was done by hand, of course ’cause there were no dishwashers, there’s no electricity. And so those houses often had 20, 30, sometimes 40 people because that’s how much staff it took to be able to make all that happen.

Brett McKay: And the butler at that time, like his job was just to oversee that, manage all that?

Charles MacPherson: So the butler at the time… So if we go in the 1800s, the butler at that period is really… Yes, he’s running the household and he’s the one who serves that table and he’s the lead, but he’s really running the front of the house. So he’s running everything that the guests and the family see. And it’s the head housekeeper who runs the back of the house, who is dealing with the housekeepers and the laundry and all that kind of stuff. And then chef was responsible for the kitchen. And if you were really fancy back then, you had a French chef that was de rigueur of the time. So butler really is front of the house, head housekeeper is back of the house, then chef is the kitchen. So it’s still interesting that there’s still three very senior positions, but the butler ultimately was responsible for overall everything.

Brett McKay: And then you highlight in this history that you did of domestic service, that in the 19th century and early 20th century, there’s all these really detailed guides written by butlers and other domestic servants on how to do what they do with the professionalism. Like they really took their job seriously.

Charles MacPherson: Yes, absolutely. And I think that, well, what’s interesting is that when Mrs. Beeton wrote her book on Household Management in 1861, that’s considered the first self-help book to ever be written. And that was as we’ve gone through and we get the first industrial revolution, we’re getting into the second industrial revolution in the 1870s, so all of a sudden we have the birth of this middle class, and so they want to live, but the problem is they don’t know how to live. And so Isabella Beeton writes this book on household management, teaching the middle class how to run a home, and if they are lucky enough to have a servant or two, how to manage them and so on. So it’s actually quite interesting. So as that first book kind of takes popularity and is still in print today, which is quite interesting, and that is then we have other people who see that and everyone kind of jumps on the bandwagon and everyone says, well, if she can write a book, I can write a book. And so that’s where you have all these books being written in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Brett McKay: But I think it’s interesting speaking of how domestic service started to wane in the 20th century. I think it’s interesting that whenever I read biographies or histories of famous people who were… They weren’t rich, they were probably solidly middle class, maybe upper middle class, even in the early 20th century, they would usually have a maid and a cook. And you rarely see that today.

Charles MacPherson: Well, when you think about it, again, those homes were hard to manage. They didn’t necessarily have running hot water. A lot of things were still oil lamps or candles at nighttime, so all that had to be taken care of into the dust and the soot, which is actually how spring cleaning came to be ’cause everything was closed up all winter. And so you had all this dust in the house from your lighting implements. But if you were middle class, you usually at least had a housekeeper or I should say a maid. A housekeeper is different from a maid. They’re two different things.

Brett McKay: What’s the difference?

Charles MacPherson: So a housekeeper is truly a professional who is able to manage the household, if you will, employees can report to her. Where a maid is just the worker bee, if you will. The maid isn’t in management position. So the management position is really the housekeeper or the head housekeeper.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so yeah, through the mid 20th century, many upper middle class families had that, but then eventually it went away.

Charles MacPherson: Well, it went away because the world is changing and first of all the cost is becoming prohibitive. But what’s fascinating is that during World War I, world War II, we were able to mass produce to be able to keep the war machines going. When the war comes to an end, there’s this excess of capacity for production. And so that’s why all of a sudden foods and clothing and everything become so readily available after World War II because the capacity of these factories is there and they have nothing else to do. And so they start producing for the mass markets. And as we get the burst of the middle class that continues to grow in the 1950s, it allowed you to be able to function without staff.

Brett McKay: ‘Cause you have washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners, all that stuff.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly. All those things are starting to come in. And so those appliances that are saving time. At the time, when you think about it, particularly in America, the dream was 2.2 kids and a dog and a white picket fence and mom stayed home and took care of the house while dad worked. And so she kind of fairly or unfairly becomes the maid and takes over, but at least she has the appliances to be able to make it easier. It’s not easy, but to make it easier.

Brett McKay: Okay. So domestic service started going down throughout the 60s and 70s, but then in the 80s you started to see the revival of it.

Charles MacPherson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: How did you get involved in butlering, and then how did you learn how to be a butler when it kind of became a lost art?

Charles MacPherson: So what’s fascinating is that in the 1990s, I was in the catering business. I was in the off-premise catering business. And one of my clients was one of Canada’s wealthiest families that every Canadian knows and loves. And I had mentioned to the lady of the house one day just in conversation, I was thinking of maybe leaving the catering world and to do something else. And she said, oh my God, what are you gonna do? And I said, I haven’t figured it out. And she said, well, Rick, my butler is going to be leaving soon, so why don’t you come and work for me? And so I said, well, let me think about it. And I told my mother. My mother said, absolutely not. I don’t want you to be a servant. I said, well, I think it’s a good job. And I thought about it, and of course I did the opposite of what my mother recommended, and I took the job.

And so it was the lady of the house who taught me how to butle. And so that is a verb that you can use correctly. And so every week she would give me lessons on how do you drive the car so the person in the backseat isn’t nauseous? Or how do you get the grass stains out of her children’s t-shirts and jeans? What’s the difference between a breakfast table, a luncheon table, a dinner table? Where does the oyster fort go? How do you open the door for someone? How do you take their coat? How do you put their coat back on? How do you walk with someone with an umbrella? It was quite fascinating. So after a year, I was the majordomo for the household. The family had three homes. I had up to 30 full-time staff that were reporting to me throughout the year. And it was really an incredible opportunity.

And I call it my Shirley MacLaine moment, you don’t know if there really is reincarnation, but if there is such a thing, if I am fortunate enough to be reincarnated from a previous life, I was very lucky I was either a butler or a nobleman who had a butler because this career just seems so logical to me and so evident of just what to do. It was never a mystery. As I was learning, I realized that what my job was about was logic and just to think about, well, what’s logical? And that’s really how my education became, was because of this lady and just continuing to learn on my own and meeting others.

Brett McKay: So back 150 years ago, the duties of a butler was to take care of the front of the house. What are the duties of a butler in 2024? What’s a typical?

Charles MacPherson: So in 2024, the butler is now an expensive commodity, but the butler is actually managing the household. And so some households, the butler may be in the front of the house for serving. In some households, the butler doesn’t serve, the butler is purely an administrative position. But when you think about it, the butler is actually managing the household from a perspective of that the average household spends more money and has as many or more employees than very small businesses in the US. So you’re really a business person taking care of a business. And so you’re taking care of everything from, whether it’s staff management, whether it’s putting together operational manuals of how the household’s going to run, when are things cleaned and when are things maintained, taking care of accounts, when plumbers are coming or electricians to fix things because things always break down in those homes.

Making sure that those bills are authorized for payment and that that work’s been completed. Making sure that the household is running. And so the butler today really is trying to be at least one or two steps ahead of their employer to always be thinking and anticipating what’s going to happen, what needs to happen for the family. And so it’s quite fascinating actually, but it’s not as much of a service role, but it is a very detailed role that keeps you really busy. When you think of these large homes, they’re actually commercial facilities with the amount of when you’re talking about 10, 20, 30, 40,000 square feet, we’re talking about commercial cooling units and commercial kitchens. And so it becomes complicated. It’s not just the little furnace that you and I grew up with and probably still have in our homes today.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like a butler today is like a chief operations Officer.

Charles MacPherson: [laughter] That’s a great way to put it. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Does domestic staff still live with homeowners like they did a century ago?

Charles MacPherson: Oh, great question. And so the answer is no. Domestic staff today have a life. They have a family and so they don’t live in, and in fact, it’s hard to find people who want to live in and if you’re going to live in, you actually can make more money than if you live out ’cause that’s considered a premium to be able to live in versus live out.

Brett McKay: Okay. And the way you’ve made it sound like is that being a butler or being on domestic staff like this could be a lucrative, very fulfilling career.

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. Where can you go to butler school, which is 4, 6, 8 weeks and you walk out with a job starting at 65, $70,000 a year, and a good butler by the time they’re within 5 years with the right experience, they’re at a 100, 125,000 plus benefits, full benefits and the retirement plan. And we have butlers that are making anywhere from a quarter of a million to $350,000 a year based on the home that they’re managing and the work that they do. So you can make a lot of money if you’re good at it, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I think it’s an honorable career to be able to manage a household. And what I love is as I jokingly say, but it’s you’re kind of seeing history happen from being a fly on the wall and watching the movie stars or the captains of industry or the politicians that are coming to the household for your family and seeing what’s happening and knowing what’s gonna happen before the rest of the world knows what’s happening. And I think it’s pretty fascinating. I think it’s a really great career and I think a lot of people don’t actually think of it as a genuine career.

Brett McKay: So you’ve written several books based on your insights and experience as a butler that can help the average person who might not be able to afford a butler, how they can improve different facets of their lives. And I wanna focus on this conversation today on what we can learn from butlers about managing a home and making it not only a place that runs efficiently, but it’s pleasant to spend your time in. And I start off, you talk about that butler’s traditionally had this thing called the butler’s book. What’s the butler’s book? What sort of information does a butler keep in a butler’s book?

Charles MacPherson: So the butler’s book is really the bible for the butler of how the household run and it keeps track of everything. So whether it’s contractors telephone numbers or how do you use the remote control to go from the DVD player to the satellite dish to regular cable television so that you’ve got the kinda like the cheat sheets in there, or you’ve got household schedules of when employees are working, you have things like inventory. So for example, in my butler book, one of the things that I used to keep was all the inventories of the different Chinas so that when we were entertaining and when I’d be sitting with Mrs in a meeting and the chef and we’d be discussing about a party that would be coming up and everyone would say, well it would be nice to use the green dishes for that thing.

And then I’d be able to look in my butler’s book and say, well, there’s 36 people coming for dinner and we have 35 dinner plates, so we’re short of plates, so either we have to change to a different service, or I have to go buy some more of this green service if I can find it kind of scenario. So you keep cheat sheets like that that are there for you or master things on when are you taking care of certain inventories or mechanical things around the household or what are the spring cleaning projects and all that kind of stuff. So all that’s in the butler’s book. So the butler’s book really is the Bible. It’s the one place when you need something that’s where you go.

Brett McKay: And I can see this being useful for just anybody who has a house.

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. My wife and I run into that experience where we’re hosting a party and we think, well, do we have this thing? And we’re like, well, I don’t know, we kind of, we have to spend 30 minutes looking for it. And we’re like, well, we can’t find us, let’s go buy another one. So you buy another one and then after the party happens, like, oh, here’s this thing that we were looking for, we just waste of money.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly, exactly. No, but I think the butler’s book would be able to tell you the kind of thing where you keep those things and as long as you put them back where you’re supposed to, then you’re in good shape. But the butler’s book is really this tool that makes you more efficient and more successful at doing what you want to do.

Brett McKay: So what sorts of information do you think just a lay person should keep in their own butler’s book for their household?

Charles MacPherson: I think that just keeping simple things like all your telephone numbers for the plumber, the electrician, where is the electrical boxes if you have more than one in your household, and where’s the main disconnect to turn the power off? And when do you open your pool if you have a swimming pool, and when do you close it? So kind of keeping a calendar. Or when do you wanna clean the eavestroughs? When do you wanna be able to deal with certain things in the yard or when do you wanna clean the windows or put the storm windows on, or take the storm windows off? When do you wanna do a bit of a deep clean inside the house? And so what’s interesting is that when you start to look at all these projects, when you look at the calendar, it allows you to be able to spread it out throughout over the years so that there isn’t one month where you have nothing to do and in the following month you can barely keep up.

So that’s what’s great about the calendar within the butler’s book is that it allows you to plan things, so that way you can plan things ahead of time so you know that you wanna have your windows washed in April, and so in January or February as you’re just kind of looking ahead of things that you wanna do, you say, oh, let’s schedule the window cleaner now and let’s get it done so that at least they’re scheduled. So it’s not the last minute when you’re trying to get ahold of them when everyone else is. And so the butler’s book is really there as the tool to help you plan and just to remind you of what needs to be done.

Brett McKay: Where do you recommend keeping your butler’s book? Is this in a physical book that you keep around?

Charles MacPherson: Well, traditionally the butler’s book was always kept in the butler’s pantry, which is between the kitchen and off the dining room kind of scenario. But most of us don’t have butler’s pantries today. So I always love it in the kitchen somewhere because I think that’s where everyone can find it. And I’m also a really firm believer that the butler’s book is a living, breathing document. And so you shouldn’t be afraid to write in it when something changes or when you learn of something. And so maybe it’s something that just is always kind of handwritten or maybe once a year you sit down and you type out all the changes and then you just print off a clean copy. But I think that the butler’s book needs to be in a place where everyone knows where it is, everyone has access to it and where you’re not afraid to write in it, to update information.

Brett McKay: And I was doing some research before this conversation about modern butler’s book. There’s actually software that modern butlers can use these days where they basically create a butler’s book, but it’s in the cloud. So I know a lot of butlers for really affluent families who have maybe two, three, four homes, they have to know what’s going on in all these different homes. So they have all this stuff just on the internet.

Charles MacPherson: Yes, but I’m not a firm believer in things becoming overly computerized in a household. I think that it becomes overly complicated and you end up being a data entry person versus a manager. And so I’m actually a real firm believer that the butler’s book, as an example, should just be in a three ring binder that’s in a place where everyone knows where it is. Now you can keep the master document in a word file, for example, that’s in the cloud so that you can check it from wherever you are if you need to look something up. But I’m not a firm believer that everything should be in the cloud because if the power goes out or you can’t turn the computer on for whatever reason, how are we gonna access this information in the cloud while we’re in this emergency kind of scenario? I think the theory is always really great and this great fantasy, but I don’t think it actually works in reality. And so I think it’s much easier to be able to have it printed where you can take the book with you to the mechanical room that’s telling you how to do something so you can follow the steps. I think just makes it easier.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned one of the things you can keep in a butler’s book is a calendar of home maintenance. I know it’s gonna vary from location to location and home to home, but generally what sort of home maintenance regimen do you recommend people keep to keep their home running in tip top shape?

Charles MacPherson: So I think you need to first of all think about where you’re located. So for example, if you’re gonna be, for example, in Florida or you’re gonna be somewhere warm, you’re gonna have obviously very many different requirements than if you are going to be up in the north where there’s snow, for example. So first of all, based on your physical location, where there’s snow, which is where I happen to be right now, the butler’s book would say to me in October, for example, okay, so you need to get ready because winter’s coming. So do you have salt? Do you have sand? Do you have a good brush to take the snow off the car? Do you have enough windshield washer fluid? So it kind of gives you those checklists of things to do as you get ready so that once you have that first snowfall, it’s not a panic kind of scenario of not being ready for it. Or you’re going to the hardware store to go and get sand or salt or whatever, and it’s all sold out because everyone’s thinking at the last minute.

And then when you’re down south, simple things like how do you get your house ready for hurricane season if you’re in Florida, for example? Or what do you need to think about if you’re in Arizona from a temperature perspective from the outside of the physical house? What are you gonna do for the air conditioning unit? Does it need an overhaul once a year? And if so, what time of the year are you gonna do that? So I think you start with the location of where your house is, and then the kind of home you have. Whether it’s an apartment or whether it’s a physical house or a townhouse or whatever, everything needs some kind of maintenance. And so the other thing, the reason I like the binder concept is that as you put your calendar in the butler’s book, you might not think of everything right away.

And so you can start to fill it in over the year as you go through the life in your household. And so when it’s the first day of that first snowfall and you’re not ready, you think, okay, now I know I need to get ready. And so now you make a note in your book of what you need and to get ready for that particular item. Or when are you gonna open the pool if your pool closes in the winter because you’re in the north? And when do you open it again kind of thing? Or when do you wanna be able to fertilize or do what you need to do to your roses that are in your garden? So I think there’s always something. And I think it comes to you really easily as you go throughout the year in the life of living within your household.

Brett McKay: Okay, so your household maintenance routine, it’s very seasonal. And as you say, it’s gonna vary by where you live. But you have a good annual list in the book that can apply to most everyone. So for example, in winter, you have things like vacuum your fridge coils, flip the mattresses. Spring, change batteries on smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors, wash the outside of the windows, have AC inspected, get your outdoor grill ready. Summer, you’ve got clean out and organize your garage, wash out garbage and recycle bins. And then fall, you’ve got have chimney cleaned and expected and then clean the dryer vent. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something else I’m curious about, one of the things I’ve had problems with with managing my own home is finding good contractors and maintenance workers. Do you have any advice on that?

Charles MacPherson: So finding a good person, they’re worth their weight in gold, if you can find them. But once you do, you need to be able to stay in touch. So that’s… First of all, when you are looking for a trades person, go to your neighbors, go to people you trust, read reviews online, but you need to be able to be clear about what are you looking for so that when you actually speak to the trade person, you can actually ask them intelligent questions. ‘Cause you’ve thought about what do you need or why something needs to be fixed or repaired or why you wanna build something. It doesn’t matter what the situation, but you need to have a clear plan of what do I need this person to do so that you can be clear to them so that they understand what your needs are, so you can compare.

And I think that when you interview two or three people, you kind of get a gut feeling right away, who’s the good one and who’s not. And listen to your gut instinct, and then make a note of things in your butler’s book of okay, so we tried John the electrician, he was really good, but he wasn’t really clean. So the next time he comes, I need to make sure he knows to take his boots off before he comes in my house and so on and so forth because the work is good, but he just was a bit messy. And so just to remind yourselves that the next time John comes over, you can say, okay, John, remember I need you to take your boots off. Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, no problem. So I think that being clear about what you’re looking for is really important ’cause I think that’s where the relationship breaks down is that both parties aren’t communicating well with each other.

Brett McKay: Okay. And yes, if you find a good one, make sure you put that in your butler book for…

Charles MacPherson: Put in the butler book, but also, for example, pay them on time because then they’ll want to come back kind of scenario. So you gotta think of things like that too, and be nice to them and offering them a glass of water on a hot day or a cup of coffee. I remember as the butler, what we used to do is we used to make muffins and coffee for every trade that would come to the house every day. And so we became the popular house because they all wanted to come to us first thing in the morning to get their coffee and their muffin for free. That’s how I kept the trades happy. And so being nice to trades, you get it back tenfold. First of all, you should just be a nice person, and they’re doing a job that you need. But second of all, if you keep them happy, they’re gonna be more willing to come back the next time you need them.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about managing the inventory in our home. So we mentioned dishes or things for parties. But I was actually having this conversation with a friend the other day, and he wanted to know, he was like, how much toilet paper do I really need to keep? And how do I know when I need to restock ’cause I’m tired of having to when I need it the most, it’s all gone? So any advice there on managing just household inventories. Could be dishes, cleaning supplies, paper towels, toilet paper, et cetera.

Charles MacPherson: So you’re talking about two different inventories. And so if we’re gonna talk about furniture, fixtures and equipment, which we call FF&E, that stuff like dishes and furniture and art and all those kinds of things. So that’s one kind of inventory that you’re keeping. So usually we do a picture of it, and then we record how many of that item there are in inventory and where it is in the household. But the inventory that your friend is talking about is what we call a consumables inventory. And so what we’re actually consuming, so everything within the kitchen, whether it’s a spice or a meat or anything that’s in the freezer, but then that’s also cleaning supplies. And there’ll also be toiletries, it’ll also be makeup and shaving cream and all that kind of stuff. So those are all consumables. And so the easiest thing to do, first of all, so let’s take the toilet paper, let’s answer the question to your friend, how much toilet paper do I need? So first of all, you need to figure out, how many bathrooms do you have? So you have two bathrooms or three bathrooms. So right away, that’s gonna be one roll in each of those bathrooms. And then you wanna have potentially a couple of rolls that are there for a change underneath the counter.

So if we have three bathrooms, we had three rolls plus we have two extra. So that’s nine rolls already just to keep the bathrooms full. And then on average, you’re going through, for the sake of the argument, you’re going through a roll a week. And so you’ll know at the end of the month kind of how much you’re consuming and how much you need, or you’re using two, three or four a week or a month. And so what we do is we do what’s called a minimum-maximum inventory number. So what’s the minimum number? We know we never wanna have less than nine rolls of toilet paper, but we never really need more than 24. And so once a month or every two months, you count the toilet paper. And when you get down to nine, then you know you need to order the balance to get you back up to 24. So you need to order 16 kind of thing. So it’s actually simpler than you think. Once you come up with the minimum-maximum, then you just set an inventory date and maybe it’s once every three months kind of scenario.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I thought that was really interesting. You mentioned the FFE, the furniture, fixtures, and equipment inventory.

Charles MacPherson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: This would be good for any household to do ’cause this is important for insurance purposes, right? You wanna know if you have art or furniture, you wanna have a picture of it and like value of it ’cause if your house God forbid burns down, you’ll be able to have a reference to your property. You say, here’s what I had and you start making claims.

Charles MacPherson: So what’s interesting is that most people are underinsured, and the insurance companies will tell you. And so nobody really wants to spend their weekend doing a household inventory. But let me tell you, God forbid you should ever need it, you’ll be the happiest person in the world to have that. Because if God forbid something happens to your house and you need to make an insurance claim, they’re gonna wanna see all that kind of stuff. And what’s interesting is the insurance company, if you’re insured for the sake of the argument for $100,000, the insurance company doesn’t just write you a check for $100,000, you have to actually go and buy the stuff and the insurance company reimburses you. So that’s I think important to know right there. And second of all, maybe you’re insured for $100,000, but maybe you have 150,000 worth of stuff that you didn’t think about. And so now all of a sudden you have less than when you started. So do you have a stamp collection or do you have China or silverware or jewelry? Do you have books kind of stuff? What kind of art do you have? What kind of household tools do you have? All that kind of stuff is important. And so doing an inventory really helps you understand what kind of insurance coverage you need and then what you have in case of an emergency.

Brett McKay: Okay. We talked about home maintenance, talked about managing toilet paper inventory, talked about managing your big inventory in your house. Let’s talk about keeping our homes clean. First question is, what do you think are the pros and cons of cleaning your own house versus hiring someone to clean it for you?

Charles MacPherson: I think the main thing is if you’re gonna do it yourself is do you have the time to do it properly? And if you do and if you want to do it on your own, then I think that’s great. Then go for it. But if you don’t have the time and you want to hire someone, that’s okay too. But the biggest mistake is that people aren’t clear about what they want. And so a cleaning person will come in and do what they think needs to be done and then you’re upset. Well, I can’t believe they didn’t clean the chandelier, da da, da, da. I was like, well they only had three hours to be in your house, they can’t do everything. Or they didn’t iron the sheets. Well, are they supposed to? Did you talk about that before you hired them? And so most people don’t have a proper job description in place. And that’s I think where things fall apart the most is that the expectations are one thing and the deliverables are another and no one’s speaking to each other about what they’re going to do and so people are disappointed. So I think being clear about what your needs are, if you’re going to hire someone, but I think that whether you hire someone or you do it yourself, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way. I think it just comes down to time and if you can afford that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. In the book, you make a distinction between house cleaning, housekeeping and deep cleaning. What are the differences between the three?

Charles MacPherson: Yeah. So deep cleaning is really when you’re pulling something apart. So you’re cleaning the chandeliers, you’re wiping the baseboards, you’re lifting the carpets, you’re taking the pillows and off the couch and you’re vacuuming inside the couch and underneath the couch. And so you’re really pulling the room apart is a deep cleaning. House cleaning is really just taking care of the house on a weekly basis, usually, or twice weekly where you’re vacuuming, you’re dusting, but you’re just keeping things going, you’re not doing the deep cleaning. And then housekeeping is really making a house a home and making it feel inviting that things are where they should be and that you need. So the housekeeping is everything overall, how do you feel within that space? House cleaning is what we do on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, or twice weekly. And then deep cleaning is those special projects. When we flip the mattresses, when we turn carpets around so that they wear evenly in every direction. So those are always the big jobs.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about just house cleaning. You have these golden rules of house cleaning. What are some of those golden rules of house cleaning?

Charles MacPherson: Well, the golden rules of housekeeping or cleaning are really about making sure that you’re organized and that you have the right tools, that you have the right chemicals, and that you’re working methodically throughout the household. And you’re starting in one place and you’re working towards another so that you know where you are at any one point. And so the golden rules are making sure that we don’t cross contaminate. And so making sure that we understand that we have different cloths for different locations. And so we’re not using the bathroom cloths in the kitchen or in the bedroom and so on and so forth. And one of the golden rules that we remember also is remember that when you’re cleaning from a room, you always start from the top and you work your way down because dust of course falls. So that’s why you don’t wanna work from the bottom up. And so the golden rules are just about being logical about what we need to do.

Brett McKay: So one of the ways you recommend being logical and efficient about cleaning your house is to have a cleaning list. So just as your butler’s book should have a maintenance list for your home, you have different cleaning lists broken down by daily, weekly, and monthly. So here in the book, you got daily cleaning on the list, tidy clutter, wipe down counters and stove tops. Weekly, you wanna give each room in the house a good cleaning, dust all the surfaces, vacuum all the floors, clean the bathroom, that includes cleaning the shower, toilet and counters, replace the sheets on your bed. And a point you make on the weekly cleaning is that you don’t have to do all this in one day, you can break it up throughout the week. So one day you do the bathrooms, another day you do the bedrooms, and the next day you do the kitchen. And then for the monthly list, you have things like scrub shower grout, descale showerheads, clean doorknobs and handles, and dust vents.

Charles MacPherson: So to your point, it’s weekly, monthly, yearly kind of scenario, whatever, but it’s about what do I need to do every week in my bathroom? So I know every week I’m gonna need to be able to clean the shower and the sink and the counter, and I’m going to need to clean the toilet and the floor. But I don’t need to every week pull the medicine cabinet apart, or I don’t need to take the shower curtain off if it’s cloth and wash it kind of scenario. I don’t need to wash the walls down every week because the humidity actually captures dirt or the light fixture above the sink doesn’t need to be cleaned necessarily every week. You might give it a dust with a duster, but you’re not pulling it apart and really cleaning it that thoroughly every week. And so that’s what you’re really kind of keeping track of is every week, what do we need to do? Every month, what do we need to do? And then what are the special projects that we wanna do? And sometimes there’s no special project for that particular room.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And one job I saw on these checklists that people probably don’t think about a lot is clean the dishwasher.

Charles MacPherson: So what’s interesting is that you think to yourself, well, what do you mean I need to clean my dishwasher? But that to me would be something that I would put on my quarterly list. I would say, okay, it’s March. I do it every three months, it’s time to clean the dishwasher. And so the side of the door, so when you open the door and the door is open, there’s the edge that runs on the three sides, the top and the two sides, that gets really dirty because as you’re putting dirty dishes into the dishwasher, food product falls in that area and it doesn’t get washed when the dishwasher door is closed. So you actually need to clean that. You need to… If you have filters in the dishwasher, in the bottom of the dishwasher, sometimes they need to be emptied and cleaned out. Sometimes if you have a very fancy dishwasher, it’ll do it by itself, but you need to keep an eye on all that kind of stuff. I’m not a really big believer that you need to run a chemical through your dishwasher, although there are those that are available, but you need to actually clean the filter if it is necessary and you need to actually clean the door, the sides of the door.

Brett McKay: Okay. So for your weekly cleaning, so this is when you’re kind of, it’s not a deep clean, but just sort of the maintenance cleaning you’re doing to make sure everything looks nice. You recommend to be efficient with this, to have a butler’s caddy. What’s a butler’s caddy and what do you keep in it?

Charles MacPherson: So a butler’s caddy is the caddy that you’re gonna carry around. So what are you going to have when you’re cleaning throughout the house? And so the caddy is gonna have your cleaning cloths in it. It’s going to have whatever chemicals that you happen to be using, your tools. So for example, do you need soaps or do you need any sprays to disinfect something? Or do you need a squeegee? Do you need paper towel? Do you need baking soda? Do you need like a cream cleaner for certain ceramic things that you’re cleaning? So it’s about thinking about where are you going to be cleaning and what are the things that you need? Because the worst thing is, is that as you’re cleaning, you’re kind of carrying everything in your hand and then you realize you’ve forgotten something and you don’t really wanna go back to to the closet, wherever you keep all your cleaning supplies or under the sink or wherever it happens to be.

And so you don’t really do it, you just kind of, I’ll do it next time. And you just kind of forget about it again. So the caddy just makes it easy. If everything’s in there, then no matter where you are in the house, you have what you need. Even for example, like the different color cloths. So I always have said blue for poo and pink for the sink in the kitchen so that we don’t have cross contamination. So that we’re using blue cloths in the bathroom and pink cloths in the kitchen and then a different color cloth everywhere else in the house. All that’s just in the caddy. And so it makes it really easy as you’re moving around the house that you have the right tools.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned about cleaning a room effectively and efficiently. One thing you mentioned is you clean from top to bottom. Any other tips on cleaning a room effectively and efficiently?

Charles MacPherson: So the most important thing is, as you’ve said, is to start from the top and to work your way down, but then you always wanna work in a circular direction. Now, it doesn’t matter if you go clockwise or counterclockwise, but you need to be in a circular direction because at some point you may need to stop so you know exactly where you were in that process, so where to go. But if you’re doing what I call the zigzag method where you’re just kind of moving all over the room, you tend to forget something because it’s not logical. But when you’re going in a circle, you know exactly where you are and what you’re doing. And I find that very helpful.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Do you dust first then vacuum?

Charles MacPherson: So it depends on what kind of vacuum you have because some vacuums actually put dust out. So you have to think about it. So sometimes you’re gonna wanna vacuum first and then dust, sometimes you’re dusting and vacuuming. In my house, for example, I have a central vacuum. So for me, I would dust the room and then I would vacuum the room as I kind of work my way out of the room. So that’s how I do it. But you need to have a good vacuum to make sure it’s not putting dust in the air. What do you want is a good filter on your vacuum.

Brett McKay: Any tips on dusting?

Charles MacPherson: So dusting, the biggest mistake that people make is that they use too much water. You don’t need a chemical, you just need to have a really good cotton cloth. Cotton t-shirts as they wear out in your house are great to be able to cut up for dusting cloths. And so what you do is you wet your hands under the running sink, you give them one shake and then you dry them off in that cloth. And then that cloth at that point is the perfect humidity level to be able to dust ’cause you just want it to be able to grab the dust. But I think that we tend to use too much water, which actually does more damage than good.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about bed making. How often should you change the sheets on your bed? I know it is a contentious…

Charles MacPherson: Oh, my God, it is such a contentious issue. And so there’s surveys, for example, in the UK where the average man changes his sheets every three to four months.

Brett McKay: Holly cow.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly. And that kind of shocked the nation when those surveys came out last year, but you need to do it at least once a week. And the reason you need to do it at least once a week, even if you are the only person sleeping in that bed, is the average person sweats give or take a liter of fluid throughout the night. And so we’ve got this liquid that’s going into the bed, first of all, and you just have skin that this falling off. We all have natural skin, dead skin that’s falling off. It’s not because you’re not healthy or sick, it’s just as normal. So we have that dead skin that’s falling in the bed, we have the humidity that’s in the bed and we all drool at night. We don’t like to think that we do, but we do. So all this kind of stuff is important. And so minimum once a week is when you should be doing your bed.

Brett McKay: Any advice on making a bed?

Charles MacPherson: Well, I wouldn’t make my bed as a kid. My mother and I fought about that bitterly until finally my mother said to me one year, she said, oh, I’m going to give you a present. I said, you are. She said, yes, I’m going to buy you a new duvet for your bed. So let’s go shopping. So I was all excited and I went and I picked out some new sheets with my mother and my mother changed the bed recipe for me. And so what she did is she put a fitted sheet on the bed and she gave me a duvet that had a duvet cover on it. And that was it. And I was told every morning if I wanted to come down for breakfast, I had to just give the duvet a flick so that my bed was made. And it was so simple, I actually did it. So I think it’s about being smart about the bed recipe versus maybe parents wanna have a more complicated bed. So maybe you have a fitted sheet and a flat sheet and a blanket and a duvet. All that’s really great, it’s just a lot more work. And there’s not one right or wrong way to do I, they’re just different. So I think it’s about thinking about the application of who sleeps in the bed, who has to make the bed and who has the time and ultimately what do you want?

Brett McKay: Do you recommend letting the bed air out a little bit before you make it?

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. For that exact reason that because of the humidity that’s in the bed, the bed needs to be able to air out. And bed bugs and bugs, they love that moisture and they love that humidity and they love that warmth. So if you make the bed right away, that humidity stays trapped in the bed, which is something you don’t want.

Brett McKay: Okay, I’m gonna ask you. This is a greedy question. This is for me.

Charles MacPherson: Okay.

Brett McKay: I clean the showers in our home, so I’m always looking for advice on how to do this job better. Any advice on the best way to clean a shower?

Charles MacPherson: So I think the best way is, first of all, is to have a squeegee in the shower and not the one that you buy for showers ’cause they’re not good generally. What I have in my shower is I actually have a squeegee that you buy at the hardware store for windows. So it’s got a proper black rubber tip on the end so that it squeegees perfectly. So first of all, I think you need a professional squeegee. But second of all, if you have the ability to somewhere either under the bathroom sink or somewhere to be able to keep some soap and a brush so that you can actually brush down the shower on a regular basis and then rinse it and then squeegee it. It becomes really easy because the more often you do it, the easier it is to do and the faster it becomes. The mistake that people do is that they wait too long and then the buildup starts and then it becomes really difficult to clean and then you resent it and then you don’t want to clean it. So having the ability to rinse down the shower, having the squeegee right there, that’s a good one for windows, allows you to squeegee whether you’re doing tiles or you’re doing a glass shower door or glass shower wall, which is what I do. It makes it really easy so that A, the bathroom always looks good, but B, I never get enough buildup that I never really resent that once a week when I use the soap or twice a week when I use the soap because it’s really not hard, it’s just a quick rub down.

Brett McKay: So you recommend squeegeeing after every use?

Charles MacPherson: Absolutely, because the problem is, the water marks go onto the glass and they don’t necessarily come off when it gets wet again. And so that just makes it harder to clean. And the problem is, of course, nobody ever wants to squeegee after you shower, everyone likes the ability to be able to just have a shower and thank you goodbye. And so that’s what you need to think about. Are you prepared to squeegee your shower or if not, maybe a shower curtain is the way to go.

Brett McKay: Best product for cleaning a shower?

Charles MacPherson: Well, I think the issue is that you need a soap. And so I’m a really firm believer in dish soap because it’s got a low pH balance, so it doesn’t really affect anything. It works fine on metal surfaces. It works really well on tiles and tubs and all that kind of stuff. So a dish soap actually is a great cleaner. But if you need a bit of a chemical, Pine-Sol is very good at getting rid of water stains. It is a great way to go. I’m not really a believer that you need to bleach the shower because there’s no bacteria per se in the shower unless you’ve got buildup that’s been there for years and years and then you’ve got mold and bacteria. But if you’re doing it regularly, there really generally isn’t a need to be able to use a harsh chemical. And so the most important thing is making sure that the bathroom airs out, that the door is open. And if you have a window, that the window’s open every once in a while to let the air and the humidity escape.

Brett McKay: One tip that I picked up recently that’s been a game changer for cleaning the glass, at least in the shower, vinegar seems to be really awesome, like a vinegar mixture.

Charles MacPherson: Vinegar and water is a great mixture for certain things. Absolutely. And there’s pros and cons to what they call green cleaning products, which in this particular case would be the water and the vinegar. So I think that, again, then it would be having a squeegee bottle with the vinegar and the water already mixed in it, that’s somewhere handy so you can grab it quickly, give it a little bit of a quick spray, and then you can rinse it and use your squeegee. So again, it’s about the easier you make it for yourself, then the more likely you are to do it. And the more often you do it, the easier the job becomes.

Brett McKay: So final question, in The Butler Speaks, you wrote that being a butler is about giving people the little luxuries in life. So after you’ve taken care of the big stuff of keeping a house, right? You’re doing the maintenance, the cleaning, managing inventory. What are some of the little luxuries people can give themselves to make their home a joy to live in?

Charles MacPherson: I think it’s about thinking of anticipating. So, for example, if you like to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, then that cup of tea can be a real pleasure if you have a nice teacup and you have a nice little teapot. You have some of your favorite tea, so that becomes a pleasure. So whether you’re making it for someone else or you’re making it for yourself, that becomes something really enjoyable. Or, for example, my mother, she likes to have a glass of wine in the evening. She uses a nice glass. She uses one of her crystal glasses from the dining room, not because she’s trying to be particularly fancy, but she just really enjoys that glass. And she says, well, I have to wash the glass by hand no matter what glass it is. So whether it’s just an everyday glass or a crystal glass, it’s the same thing. And so she gets more pleasure out of using the crystal glass. Or a simple pleasure can just be, for example, just having your bed made so when you come home and you crawl into bed, there’s nothing I think nicer than crawling into a freshly made bed. So to me, those are the little things that are enjoyable to try to think about.

Brett McKay: So this has been a great conversation, Charles. Where can people go to learn more about the books and your work?

Charles MacPherson: So the books, you can go to Amazon, which is anywhere in the world, and the books are available there. And you can go onto our website at charlesmacpherson.com. And that’s where you can find out about a lot of things there too.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Charles MacPherson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Charles MacPherson: The pleasure has been all mine. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Charles MacPherson. He’s the author of several books, including the book, The butler Speaks. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, charlesmacpherson.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/butler, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get us reviewed on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Keep Your House in Tip-Top Shape: An Incredibly Handy Home Maintenance Checklist https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/keep-your-house-in-tip-top-shape-an-incredibly-handy-home-maintenance-checklist/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/keep-your-house-in-tip-top-shape-an-incredibly-handy-home-maintenance-checklist/#comments Sun, 02 Nov 2025 17:34:49 +0000 http://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=36078 Updates: One of our commenters, Brandon Beeson, was kind enough to put this into a Google Doc as a checklist. Click here to access that document and feel free to print and use as needed.  And Brett created a Todoist template that you can load into that app.  When buying a home, most people probably […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Vintage illustration painting family doing work around house.

Updates: One of our commenters, Brandon Beeson, was kind enough to put this into a Google Doc as a checklist. Click here to access that document and feel free to print and use as needed. 

And Brett created a Todoist template that you can load into that app. 

When buying a home, most people probably first think of the financial responsibility. Don’t let yourself forget, however, about the time and labor that home ownership also requires. Just like regular oil changes for your car keep your engine happy and healthy, keeping up with regular home maintenance tasks will keep you from future headaches and wasted money.

It can be intimidating to think about these various tasks, especially if you’re a new homeowner. It’s a long list — there’s no denying that. The good news is that you can do the majority of it on your own without much experience. Google is your best friend, and if you really get stuck, call up your local handyman to help you out.

In order to maximize your efficiency and actually get all of these tasks done, you might want to create a home maintenance calendar for yourself. Whether online or on paper, you can jot down small, regular tasks for each weekend and not be too overwhelmed. We’ve listed tasks that need to be done monthly, quarterly, and biannually. We’ve also given you a list of tasks to be completed seasonally. Not every expert agrees as to which task needs to be done in which season, so this isn’t a black and white list, necessarily. Do what works for you and your schedule, and as long as all these things get accomplished, your home will be happy for years and years to come.

Monthly

  • Inspect, and possibly change out HVAC filters. Many experts will say to change the filters monthly, but that’s not always necessary. For smaller families without pets or allergies, you’ll likely be okay changing the filters every 2-3 months. If the filter is dirty, change it out, otherwise inspect it again next month. I’ve also been told by handymen to go with cheaper filters and replace them more often versus going with the expensive filters. (You can also get it out of your mind by using a delivery service like Cleaner Filters.)
  • Clean kitchen sink disposal. There are a bunch of ways to do this, but the handiest and best all-around solution seems to be vinegar ice cubes. Put some vinegar in an ice tray and let it freeze, then run the ice cubes through the disposal. It freshens it, but as a bonus, ice sharpens the blades. You’re welcome.
  • Clean range hood filters. If you’ve never thought of doing this, you’re in for a real “treat” when you get that filter off the hood to clean it for the first time. The Family Handyman suggests simply using a degreaser from an auto parts store mixed with hot water. Let the filter sit for a few minutes, rinse it off, and you’re good to go.
  • Inspect your fire extinguisher(s). We’ll assume you have and know how to use an extinguisher. This inspection doesn’t require much: ensure it has easy access (not being blocked by a garbage can or anything else), that the gauge shows adequate pressure, and that it has no visible signs of wear and tear.

Quarterly

  • Test smoke/carbon dioxide detectors. Another simple task; your detectors should have a “test” button. If the alarm sounds, you’re good to go. If not, replace batteries immediately and test again. If it still doesn’t sound, it’s possible there’s simply corrosion on the battery terminal, and it won’t detect new batteries. Clean it and try again. If it still doesn’t work, you’ll likely need a new detector.
  • Test garage door auto-reverse feature. In 1993, federal law required all garage doors to have this feature after multiple child deaths. Test every month by placing a 2×4 on the ground where the door would close. It should reverse after a second or so when the door hits the wood. Also test the photo-electric sensors if you have them by placing something in front of them (not your body). If the door doesn’t immediately go back up, you have a problem.
  • Run water and flush toilets in unused spaces. This mostly applies to guest bathrooms, or any other sinks/water sources you don’t use on a regular basis. The idea is to prevent grime or any other kind of build up. Regularly running a little bit of water through will prevent this.
  • Check water softener, add salt if needed. You shouldn’t need to add salt every month, but better to check anyway, as it only takes about 5 seconds.

Biannually

  • Test your water heater’s pressure relief valve. This will prevent mineral and corrosion buildup, which safeguards against leaks. It will also help your heater run more efficiently.
  • Give your house a deep clean. Take one Saturday every six months with your whole family, and give the whole house a proper deep clean. Appliances, windows, dusting every nook and cranny (including the basement), etc. Keeping things clean and not letting dirt/grime/dust build up over years and years will help keep your home in tip-top shape.
  • Replace batteries in smoke/carbon dioxide detectors. I’d never heard this before, actually. I just assumed you changed it out when it started giving you the low battery beeping noise. This tip was in everything we researched, however. With something as important as this, you can’t be too careful, and batteries won’t break your bank. Change ‘em out every six months.
  • Vacuum your refrigerator coils. I actually learned this tip from a refrigerator repairman, and our research confirmed it. The fridge can use up to 15 percent of your home’s total power, so you want it running as efficiently as possible. Over time, the coils get dirty and your fridge requires more juice. You can save up to $100 a year by doing this, and it’s not at all a difficult task.

Annually (Organized by Season)

Spring

Spring is a big month for home maintenance. They don’t call it “Spring Cleaning” for nothing. Especially focus on the exterior of your home as it’s just gone through winter and is preparing for summer heat, and in some parts of the country, brutal humidity.

  • Check the exterior drainage. Will rain water flow away from the house? Puddles should not stand around your home for more than 24 hours. If water stays, or moves toward your foundation, you have a few options. First, check your gutters. It could be a bad spout or a loose connection there; they may also just need cleaning. Second, you can grade the area around your home yourself with some dirt; this has worked just fine for me in the past. Third, for pavement, you can have professionals come out and raise it so it drains away from your home.
  • Clean out gutters. They’ve likely accumulated leaves from the fall and grime/sediment from the winter snows and/or rains.
  • Inspect the exterior of your home. Is any paint chipping? Is any siding damaged from winter? Are there any holes in your brick? Take a close look all around your house, and make any repairs as needed. Also be sure to check the foundation for any cracks. A good silicone/caulk can fix a lot of your problems.
  • Get your air conditioning system ready for summer; consider having it serviced. This one really depends on your individual home, and even which part of the country you live in. Some places mostly just use window air units, while other places use a big swamp cooler up on the roof — these are fairly basic machines where a quick internet search can help you fix any issues that come up. Also refer to the user guides for specific regular maintenance. Central air is obviously a more complex system. Getting it serviced by a professional should be around $100 or less, and it will save money and headaches down the road.
  • Repair/replace damaged window screens. You don’t want bugs making their way in because you missed a hole in a window screen. And no, duct tape doesn’t count. It can be a quick fix, but don’t leave it for long. It just looks bad.
  • Clear dead plants/shrubs from the house. This could double as a gardening tip, but if you didn’t trim trees or shrubs in the fall, do so now. Plants can weasel their way into cracks and holes on the exterior of your home, causing damage and shortened longevity. Nip that in the bud before it’s an issue. If you have decorative vines on the exterior, pay close attention.
  • Check trees for interference with electric lines. Have professionally trimmed if necessary.
  • Inspect roofing for damage, leaks, etc. Repair as needed; you may need a professional.

Summer

Summer is a great time to focus on the exterior of your home, as well as your lawn and garden. It’s also perfect for having that garage door open and utilizing the prolonged daylight to work on any manly projects you’ve had on the backburner.

  • Check grout in bathrooms, kitchen, etc.; repair as needed. This will prolong the life of your tiled surfaces and just looks better.
  • Inspect plumbing for leaks, clean aerators on faucets. Go around to all your faucets and toilets and check for any small leaks. If you have poor water pressure out of a faucet, the aerator is the likely culprit and it’s an extremely easy fix.
  • Take care of any insect problems you may have. Summer is their playground. You probably won’t have to look too hard to notice any insect problems. Ants, spiders, moths, etc. are all common, and fairly easy to take care of. Keep cobwebs clear, have ant poison handy, make sure all doors are tightly closed, etc.
  • Clean and repair deck/patio as needed. It generally just needs a good washing. A deck may also need re-staining. Also check for any loose boards or posts and repair as needed.
  • Clean out window wells of debris. If you have a basement, you also have window wells. All kinds of things can get down in there from leaves, to trash, to animals.
  • Check and clean dryer vent, other exhaust vents to exterior of home. While the dryer is running, check that the exhaust is coming out. It should smell nicely of fresh laundry. If there isn’t much exhaust, check for blockages as well as you can. You may need a professional. Also vacuum the lint from the hose at the dryer.
  • Clean and organize garage. Cleaning and organizing the garage should be a summer ritual for every man. Keeping it tidy will extend its life (and the life of its contents) and make it easier for you to find the tools/gear/supplies you’re looking for. With all the extra dust it gets from the manly projects you’re working on, you should actually clean it even more. Once a year, however, give a thorough going-through, vacuuming up and blowing/sweeping out leaves/dirt/cobwebs and wiping down grimy surfaces. Here’s an essential key to keeping your garage organized and here are all the items you should finally throw away the next time you do a decluttering. 

Fall

Fall is an in-between season where you’re finishing up your summer home maintenance tasks as well as getting your home ready for winter. Cold, snow, and rain can do a number to a home, so you don’t want to ignore winter preparation.

  • Flush hot water heater and remove sediment. This prolongs the life of the heater and helps with efficiency as well.
  • Winterize air conditioning systems. Remove and store window units. If you have central air, cover the outside unit with a tarp or plastic sheeting and secure with bungee cords.
  • Get heating system ready for winter. Check for any leaks in windows or doors; these can cost an arm and a leg. Make sure heating vents are open and not blocked by furniture. Get furnace serviced/inspected at least every other year, preferably annually. As with the AC, this shouldn’t be a huge expense. Don’t forget about fireplaces if you have them.
  • Turn off and flush outdoor water faucets. Also flush hoses and store them. Winterize sprinkler systems as well, if you have one.
  • Get chimney cleaned, if you have one. Some folks say to do this in the spring, some say fall. Either way, just make sure it’s done once per year.
  • Test sump pump. You don’t want to wait until you need your sump pump to find out it’s not working.
  • Check driveway/pavement for cracks. Make sure to have re-sealed before winter; water can freeze and expand in the cracks, causing more damage.
  • Buy winter gear. Have sidewalk salt, good shovels, etc. ready for winter. You never know when that first snow will come!

Winter

Winter is the time to go around the interior of your home and check for any little things you may have overlooked, or perhaps noticed and said, “I’ll get to that later.” Winter is your later. If you have any interior honey-do projects, whether it be painting, building shelves, etc., now is a great time to tackle those as well.

  • Regularly check for ice dams and icicles. De-icing cables that sit at the front of the roof work well. Don’t let icicles grow, as much as the kids may want you to. They’re not only a danger to people standing beneath them, but they’re incredibly heavy and can cause damage to your home. They also can cause water damage to your foundation when they  melt.
  • Test your electricity to the extent that you can. Always, always be extra careful when working with electricity. You can do a couple things on your own, though. Check that all outlets work; if they don’t, you can re-wire them on your own. Also, test your GFCI outlets. There are wildly varying opinions on how often to test this. Some say monthly, others say annually.
  • Tighten any handles, knobs, racks, etc. Go through the house and inspect anything that could have a loose screw.
  • Check all locks and deadbolts on your doors and windows. If anything doesn’t work right, replace.
  • Check caulking around showers and bathtubs; repair as needed.
  • Remove showerheads and clean sediment. This prolongs its life and helps with water pressure as well.
  • Deep clean and inspect the basement. Basements are notoriously overlooked, especially if they’re primarily just storage areas. Dust ‘em up, clean any windows, make sure there isn’t mold anywhere, etc. Give your basement a good inspection at least once a year.

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in October 2013.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/keep-your-house-in-tip-top-shape-an-incredibly-handy-home-maintenance-checklist/feed/ 77 15 Things Sitting in Your Garage That You Should Finally Get Rid Of https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/15-things-sitting-in-your-garage-that-you-should-finally-get-rid-of/ Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:36:24 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191146 A garage is supposed to be for cars. A workbench. A bike or two. Maybe a garage gym. But most of us end up using it like the junk drawer for the entire house. Big stuff you don’t know what to do with, or you think you might use “someday,” slowly ends up there: unused […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A cluttered garage with shelves full of boxes, tools, paint cans, and various stored items shows classic garage clutter. A lawnmower and a yellow toy vehicle are on the floor—perfect candidates for decluttering tips or things to get rid of.

A garage is supposed to be for cars. A workbench. A bike or two. Maybe a garage gym. But most of us end up using it like the junk drawer for the entire house. Big stuff you don’t know what to do with, or you think you might use “someday,” slowly ends up there: unused materials for DIY projects, that cheap futon you used in college (maybe your five-year-old can use it when he’s in college!), toys your now teenage daughter played with when she was four.

I think we hold on to stuff in our garage because we like to think of ourselves as frugal and resourceful and have that fantasy of being the dad who finally finds a use for the weird scrap of wood he’s been holding onto for twenty years. Unfortunately, the fantasy rarely becomes reality. That weird scrap of wood is never going to be used and just takes up space.

Eventually, the stuff in your garage accumulates to the point where you have to do archeological digs just to find the items you actually need. I’ve had that happen to me a few times in the 14 years I’ve lived in my home. The most recent experience of garage clutter realization happened this past spring. I was trying to get ready for a backpacking trip, but had to move around Gus’s little league bats from when he was seven (he’s a high school freshman now who hasn’t played baseball in almost a decade) and a box of short-circuited Christmas lights.

If your garage junk has gotten overwhelming, it’s useful to know the stuff you can and should get rid of — guilt-free. Below we highlight items to discard to free up space and remove potential safety hazards.

As you go about your garage decluttering, keep this overarching guideline in mind: you may have heard the rule that if you haven’t worn an item of clothing in your closet for over a year, you should get rid of it. A similar principle applies here, except since garage items tend towards more occasional use, make this the rule instead: if you haven’t used something in five years, get rid of it. Some exceptions — things you should discard sooner or keep longer — apply, which I’ll mention for certain items.

1. Old Paint

Every garage has a stack of old paint cans. You hold on to them thinking, “Well, I might need to do a touch-up or maybe when I go to repaint, I’ll need to be able to color match.” Those are legitimate uses — as long as your paint isn’t “expired.”

Unopened latex paint can last up to about 10 years if stored properly, though oil-based paints usually don’t hold up quite as long. Once a can’s been opened, you’ve got about two good years, maybe longer if it’s been sealed well. If you haven’t used those paint cans during those timeframes, get rid of them. They’re useless and a fire hazard. If you want to know the paint color you used in your home for future paint jobs, write it down in your butler’s book.

2. Old Fertilizer and Pesticides

Old Miracle-Gro, weed killer, bug bombs. They get unstable with time and temperature swings. If the bag is sun-faded and crunchy, its contents won’t benefit your lawn anymore. Chuck it.

3. Expired Chemicals and Fluids

Motor oil, antifreeze, and half-empty bottles of pool chemicals often sit for years on garage shelves, taking up space and creating fire or poisoning hazards. If you haven’t touched them in years, you’re not going to. Check your city’s hazardous waste disposal program for a safe way to dispose of them.

4. Oily Rags

Rags soaked in drying oils (like linseed oil) can heat up and spontaneously combust if they’re piled together and exposed to airflow. And while rags soaked in motor oil are less combustible, they’re still a safety hazard. And they’re taking up space. Toss them.

5. Broken and Duplicate Tools

If you were going to fix that drill, you would’ve done it by now. The broken leaf blower? Same story. They’re taking up space needlessly. You can get rid of them. Same goes for the duplicate tools you’ve acquired over the years. Do you really need four hammers and three tape measures? Or two socket sets missing the same three sockets? The answer is no.

6. Leftover Building Materials

Unused 2×4s, unused tile, bags of grout. Unless you’re actively repairing the exact project they came from, they’re just taking up space.

7. Random Hardware

Coffee cans of screws and nails, cables to devices you no longer own, random brackets you can’t identify. If you don’t know what it goes to, you won’t miss it. And if you need it again, you can just make a trip to Home Depot. Screws and other thingamabobbers are cheap.

8. Outgrown Sports Gear

The bike your kid hasn’t ridden since Obama’s second term. The youth baseball bats that have stood untouched, leaning in the corner for a decade. It’s time to pass them along to a family with younger kids.

9. Old Gym Equipment

As a garage gym owner, I’ve accumulated several pieces of equipment that served me at one time, but I haven’t used in years. And all that stuff is just taking up precious real estate in your garage. If you haven’t used that specialty bar or squat rack attachment in the last five years, you’re probably not going to use them in the next five years. Sell them. And good news! You now have more space to put new gym equipment.

10. Old Camping Gear

Our family has accumulated plenty of camping gear over the years. Some of it proved to be useful and necessary and some of it not. Do an audit of your gear and keep the stuff you still use on the regular. Chuck the broken tents and the busted lanterns and find a happy home for that sleeping bag you ended up hating.

11. Old Holiday Decor

The inflatable Santa with a hole. The string of broken lights that you told yourself you’d fix back in 2020, but are still in a knot sitting in a box. If you haven’t put it out in years, you won’t. Get rid of it.

12. Old Furniture

Furniture is practically and psychologically hard to discard — it’s big, it’s expensive, and it’s often attached to old memories. So the garage is where furniture goes when you know you should get rid of it, but can’t quite bring yourself to do it. You tell yourself maybe the kids could use it when they’re older. They likely won’t; it will be out of style, or just not their style. And in the meantime, the temperature swings warp the wood, the cushions soak up smells, and all that furniture is just taking up a ton of space. Unless it’s a true heirloom piece (and if it is, keep it inside), furniture in the garage is just bulky clutter. Sell or donate it if it’s decent; have it hauled away if it’s not.

13. Spare Appliances and Electronics

Think about how many “just in case” machines end up in the garage. The beer fridge that barely chills, the microwave from 1995, or the tube TV from your Halo LAN party days in college. Are you really going to bring that 30-year-old microwave back into the kitchen? Of course not. Sell, recycle, or junk that stuff.

14. Tires and Car Parts

Garages were built for cars, so it’s only natural that car parts accumulate there. If you’ve got a stack of bald, cracked, or more than six-years-old tires sitting in your garage, get rid of them. They’re not safe to use, and they take up space. Same goes for car parts left over from vehicles you don’t even own anymore. Tire shops will recycle the rubber; scrap yards will take the old parts. Free up the space.

15. Paper and Pantry Goods

Stacks of old newspapers, bins of files you don’t actually need, bags of dog food. Paper mildews; food attracts critters. The garage isn’t an archive or a pantry.

What to Do With All the Junk

We’ve already noted what to do with many specific items above, but here’s a general guide to help you clear things out efficiently:

For unused stuff that’s in decent shape, sell it. Facebook Marketplace is your friend here. I’ve sold lots of garage clutter there over the years, from old desks to gym equipment.

If you can’t sell your in-good-condition stuff, give it away or donate it.

For everything that doesn’t sell or donate easily — like broken tools and unusable furniture — calling a junk removal service can save you from making a dozen trips to the dump (if you even have a vehicle capable of getting stuff there). For about $150–$200, they’ll haul away as much junk as you can assemble. You can also check your city’s bulk-pickup schedule.

For hazardous materials like paint, fertilizers, oil and gas products, and old electronics, look up your local hazardous waste disposal facility. Many communities host drop-off events for these materials, ensuring they’re handled safely and responsibly.

The Payoff

When you finally clear out your garage of all the unnecessary crap, you’ll feel like you’ve got a new lease on life. Nothing is more satisfying than reclaiming usable space. And it also makes finding the stuff you actually use easier.

And once the junk’s gone, you can start thinking about how to use the space well. We’ve got guides on how to organize your garage and the biggest key to keeping it that way (hint: get your crap off the floor!). Put “Garage Declutter” on your home maintenance checklist every spring, and it’ll never again get to the point where you’ll need to do an archaeological dig to find your workbench.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Skill of the Week: Board Up Your House Before a Hurricane https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/how-to-board-up-your-house-before-a-hurricane/ Sun, 07 Sep 2025 16:05:28 +0000 http://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=59427 An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Step-by-step guide on how to board up your house before a hurricane, detailing measurement, cutting, painting, labeling, securing plywood, and removing it after the storm has passed.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

A man’s home is his castle and natural disasters are the closest thing to an attacking army. When mother nature chooses to exercise her power on your home, there’s little you can do to stop it, especially during storms that include high wind, like hurricanes. Flying debris and sudden powerful gusts can blow out windows, skylights, and sliding glass doors that spread broken glass throughout your home and let in rain, which can cause serious water damage. If you have time before the next big one hits, boarding up your windows properly can help alleviate some of the damage and halt the invasion.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> 7 Mistakes to Avoid to Keep Your Long-Distance Move From Turning Into a Nightmare https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/7-mistakes-to-avoid-to-keep-your-cross-country-move-from-turning-into-a-nightmare/ Wed, 03 Sep 2025 16:31:22 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190542 Several months ago, friends of ours hired movers for their family’s cross-country relocation. They got bids from three companies and chose the cheapest — International Van Lines — both because of the price and because the delivery date best matched their schedule. The company had negative reviews online, but ChatGPT and Forbes recommended it, and the […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A moving truck is parked outside a house under stormy skies, with a person loading furniture and the text: "Relocation tips to keep your cross-country move from turning into a nightmare.

Several months ago, friends of ours hired movers for their family’s cross-country relocation.

They got bids from three companies and chose the cheapest — International Van Lines — both because of the price and because the delivery date best matched their schedule. The company had negative reviews online, but ChatGPT and Forbes recommended it, and the bargain seemed like a risk worth taking.

When the movers arrived, my friend was concerned to see that the name on the truck and boxes was not International Van Lines but that of a different company. And the crew seemed to be packing things up haphazardly — throwing onions from the kitchen counter into boxes along with toothbrushes from the bathroom.

The movers said they’d drive directly from Oklahoma to the family’s new home in Idaho and get there in a couple of days.

The family headed out to ID themselves and took up residence in their empty house, awaiting the arrival of their possessions. When a few days went by without hearing from the movers, my friend reached out to ask when they might be expected. She couldn’t reach the person she’d booked with and was passed to a succession of new contacts, who said they’d keep her posted as to an updated delivery date.  

A week went by. Then another. The family was sleeping on air mattresses and living with the few possessions they’d brought with them; they had no beds, no furniture, no cookware. When my increasingly frustrated friend would text and call asking for updates, the company wouldn’t respond for long stretches. When they did, they only offered vague assurances that delivery was coming as soon as possible.

Finally, a month after the movers had driven away with their belongings, my friend got word that the shipment was on its way. However, when the truck — much larger than the one loaded in Tulsa — got close, the driver found it couldn’t fit down the street to our friends’ new house. He decided to park the truck in another location, stay the night, and then rent a U-Haul (which the family had to pay for) to ferry the boxes to their house the next day.

The original crew, unwilling to stick around, disappeared, and the driver hastily assembled an impromptu team of sketchy, surly local laborers to unload the truck and finish the job.

After a month of limbo and living out of suitcases, the family finally had their belongings back — although even then, not all of them were intact.

Unfortunately, our friends’ experience isn’t unique. Cross-country moves are fertile ground for scams, stress, and screw-ups.

To understand how to avoid a moving nightmare, I talked with Finn Murphy, a former professional trucker and the author of The Long Haul. Finn’s seen it all, from well-run moves to catastrophic ones. Here are seven mistakes he recommends avoiding to make sure your stuff gets where it’s supposed to, safely and on time.

Mistake #1: Hiring Movers Off the Internet

One of Finn’s fundamental rules is to get off the internet when hiring a mover.

When most people need to move, the first thing they do is Google “Oklahoma City to San Francisco movers.”

Problem is the top result isn’t necessarily a moving company at all. It’s probably a broker: a middleman with no trucks and no crews.

Brokers take your booking, then farm it out to different moving companies. The broker pockets a commission, and you end up with a moving company you’ve never spoken to or vetted. When your stuff is missing, you call the broker, who shrugs: “Talk to the movers.” When you call the movers, they shrug: “Talk to the broker.”

When people’s stuff gets lost or held up for weeks, it’s usually because they hired through a broker. That’s what happened to our friends.

Finn explained what goes on:

Let’s say your shipment is picked up in Oklahoma for delivery to San Francisco. To be efficient and cost effective, the moving company doesn’t want to take just your stuff West; it wants to pick up another load of someone else’s stuff along the way. If that additional load hasn’t materialized yet, your goods get unloaded into a warehouse to wait for one, potentially leaving your stuff sitting there for weeks.

Our friends’ stuff was originally taken not to Idaho, but to a warehouse in Houston, awaiting another westbound delivery to piggyback on. At one point, the company told the family they could expedite a more direct delivery if they paid more money — essentially a shakedown.

A brokered move doesn’t just risk delays. If your things are damaged or lost, liability is murky: the broker claims no responsibility, and the carrier may not even have valid cargo insurance.

The hard part about all this is that it’s difficult to identify when the “moving company” you’ve reached out to is actually a broker. When my friend talked to the agent at International Van Lines initially, she asked him directly if the company acted as a broker, and he said that they did not, that “It’s just us.” He was warm, responsive, and said all the right things, even insisting, “We’re the good guys in the industry.” Lots of other people have had experiences where companies straight-up lied about whether or not they farm the job out.

So what should you do?

Before you sign a contract, consider these things:

  • DOT number. Look this up on the FMCSA’s website. It will tell you if they’re a carrier (good) or just a broker (red flag).
  • Deposits. Brokers usually ask for a large upfront deposit (sometimes 20–40% of the estimate). Legit carriers generally don’t. They might require a small reservation fee, but most payment happens on delivery.
  • Company name. United Van Lines, Allied, Atlas, Mayflower, etc. are legitimate national carriers with fleets. Scammers use sound-alike names (“International Van Lines” vs. “United Van Lines”) or keep changing names to bury bad reviews and dodge accountability. Make sure you’re hiring who you think you’re hiring.
  • Reviews and recommendations. Fake positive ratings abound, and sites like Forbes make a commission by using affiliate links, which, despite claims to the contrary, may influence recommendations. ChatGPT, which bases its advice on a trawl of the internet, will just echo those inflated reviews.

Even legit carriers like Mayflower may transfer your load mid-route, leaving it in a warehouse until another truck headed in your direction is available. The difference is that it stays in the same system; you’re dealing with one accountable company, not a disappearing broker-carrier shuffle.

The best tack to take is to deal with a real, reputable company that has trucks. A company with an actual office, a local presence, and staff that picks up the phone. Someone you’ve gotten bona fide word-of-mouth recommendations for. Someone you could hypothetically bump into at church or your kid’s Little League game. If they’re rooted in your community, they’ve got a reputation to protect.

Mistake #2: Choosing Movers Based on the Cheapest Price

A locally-based, reputable mover can cost more than twice as much as the bargain movers. That can be a tough pill to swallow, but it’s one worth getting down the hatch.

Finn pointed out one of the strangest ironies of moving: people will entrust all the things they value most — their furniture, heirlooms, photos, books, tools, clothes — to the cheapest bidder they can find.

“Think about that for a second,” he told me. “It makes absolutely no sense.”

Yes, moving is expensive. But the surest way to turn your move into a financial and emotional disaster is to hire the rock-bottom outfit. Those bargain companies often turn out to be brokers who cut corners, delay delivery, or outright disappear with your goods.

Get multiple quotes, and if one comes in dramatically lower than the others, that’s not a bargain — it’s a red flag.

A higher upfront cost will often save you far more in stress, damage, and potential loss down the line.

Mistake #3: Skipping the In-Home Estimate

There are several ways a moving company will estimate the cost of your move and give you a bid:

  • Cubic-foot: If a mover quotes you by cubic footage, walk away. Cubic feet are easy to fudge. If the crew loads sloppily, or simply claims your shipment “took up more space than expected,” your price can double once your stuff is already on the truck.
  • Virtual: Some reputable movers now offer estimates via video call. This can work for simple moves, but it’s not foolproof. It’s easy for items to get overlooked, and what gets overlooked gets tacked on as an extra charge later.
  • In-home, by weight: This is the way you want to go. The estimator walks through your house, notes every item, and produces a binding estimate based on the shipment’s weight. Weight is objective and regulated; cubic footage is not. If you disclose everything honestly, the driver can’t later claim “surprise” items and reprice the job.

Finn emphasized this point: when customers skip the in-home estimate, they usually end up under-reporting their stuff — whether by accident or wishful thinking. “If you don’t tell the estimator about the 7,000 pounds of weights in your basement, it won’t show up on the estimate,” he said. “When the driver finds them on moving day, the estimate is no longer binding.”

That omission not only costs you more, it also antagonizes the very guy who’s handling your possessions. An honest, in-person walkthrough keeps the pricing fair and the relationship copacetic.

Mistake #4: Not Thoroughly Checking the Contract

The contract you sign with the movers — the “bill of lading” — is what protects you, or leaves you exposed. A lot of people glance at it and sign, and that’s where the trouble starts.

Here’s what to look for:

  • Name of company that will be picking up your stuff. If this isn’t listed, you may be dealing with a broker, and your stuff could end up with a company you’ve never heard of.
  • DOT number. The DOT number lets you verify the carrier’s licensing and safety record.
  • Type of estimate. Make sure it’s binding or binding-not-to-exceed. A non-binding estimate leaves the door open for the price to balloon once your goods are loaded.
  • Line-item fees. Fuel surcharges, packing materials, storage, “long carry” upcharges — every potential fee should be spelled out. Vague language like “as applicable” is a red flag.
  • Delivery window. The contract should spell out specific pickup and drop-off ranges, not “TBD.” Some contracts give the mover up to 21 business days — which doesn’t include weekends — so in practice they may have closer to 30 days to deliver.
  • Liability coverage. The contract should specify what happens if your items are damaged or lost, and whether insurance is included or optional.

If the contract is fuzzy, or you don’t understand it, don’t sign it. Clarity upfront is what prevents nasty surprises down the line.

Mistake #5: Forgetting About Insurance

By law, interstate movers automatically provide coverage of 60 cents per pound, per item. That sounds fine until you realize it means that your $2,000 MacBook Pro, which weighs three pounds, would only net you $1.80 in compensation.

Reputable companies will offer additional insurance. Sometimes it’s worth it. But before buying theirs, check your homeowner’s or renter’s policy; you may already have coverage that applies to a move.

The key takeaway: know what your stuff is worth, know what’s covered, and don’t skimp where it counts.

Mistake #6: Packing Everything Yourself

Yes, you can save money by boxing up your entire house. But packing is where most damage occurs. Movers will treat professionally packed boxes differently than a stack of random Amazon boxes sealed with scotch tape.

If you can afford it, Finn recommends letting the movers pack. It costs more, but it drastically reduces stress and finger-pointing.

“Throw money at moving,” he said. “Have the moving company do everything. You go out to dinner.”

Mistake #7: Treating the Crew Like Robots

A small but important piece of advice: treat the movers like humans.

When the crew arrives, offer them bottles of water. Show them the bathroom. Learn their names. Maybe buy lunch.

“These guys are handling all the stuff you value in the world,” Finn told me. “Give it to somebody that you value, too.”

A little goodwill goes a long way. The people carrying your piano down the stairs will notice whether you treat them like donkeys or human beings.

Avoid these mistakes, and your move is far less likely to leave you sleeping on an air mattress for a month. Moving cross-country will never be stress-free — it’s too big and too costly to not include some friction. But with things like a reputable carrier and a clear contract in place, it can be hard without being hellish.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> How to Clean a Floor or Box Fan https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/how-to-clean-a-box-fan/ Thu, 17 Jul 2025 14:26:33 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190198 In the midst of the summer heat, I’ve always got a floor fan (or two) going in my garage gym. Lately, as I’ve gone to switch it on, I’ve thought, “Dang, that’s really dirty . . . how the heck do you clean this thing?” I decided to find out and get this job done. […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]>

A Cyclone brand box fan with a circular grill sits on a rubber gym floor, plugged in and ready for use—perfect timing if you need tips on how to clean a box fan after an intense workout session.

In the midst of the summer heat, I’ve always got a floor fan (or two) going in my garage gym. Lately, as I’ve gone to switch it on, I’ve thought, “Dang, that’s really dirty . . . how the heck do you clean this thing?”

I decided to find out and get this job done. Below I’ll share the process, should you need to tackle this chore yourself. It’s an easy one to put off, but dust buildup doesn’t just look bad — it hampers performance, spreads allergens, and can shorten the life of the fan. 

Here’s how to restore a box or floor fan to prime condition (the process is the same for both types).

Tools & Supplies

A vacuum cleaner, a white basin filled with water, a screwdriver, and a yellow cloth are placed on a patterned floor—essential tools when learning how to clean a box fan effectively.

  • Phillips-head screwdriver
  • Vacuum with brush attachment or handheld vac
  • Mild dish soap
  • Bucket or large basin
  • Microfiber cloths or old towels
  • Optional: Compressed air or a can of air duster

Step 1: Unplug It

This should go without saying, but don’t be the guy who gets zapped trying to clean an electric fan while it’s still plugged in. Unplug the fan and move it to a well-lit area — preferably outside or onto an old towel indoors.

Step 2: Remove the Front Grill

A person uses a screwdriver to remove screws from the front grill of a large box fan on the garage floor, showing how to clean a box fan effectively.

Most floor or box fans are held together with a few screws and/or tabs on the back or sides. Use your screwdriver to unscrew the screws, placing them in a small cup so you don’t lose them. If there are also tabs that latch the front grill on, gently pry them apart. Don’t brute-force it — broken tabs mean a loose grill that rattles forever.

Step 3: Hose Down the Front Grill

A dirty, white plastic fan cover with a circular metal grille sits on a concrete floor in sunlight—perfect for anyone learning how to clean a box fan.

Look at that gunk.

A white, round fan cover with visible dirt sits on a concrete surface next to a white cord and a textured glass or plastic panel, ready for box fan cleaning.

Hose it on down.

Step 4: Vacuum the Back Grill

A handheld vacuum cleaner nozzle is shown demonstrating how to clean a box fan by removing dust from the grill of a large circular fan.

With the back grill and blades exposed, start with a dry clean, using a vacuum with a brush attachment to suck up the loose dust and cobwebs from the front and back of the back grill.

You can also hit it with a can of compressed air if you’re feeling fancy.

This dry stage helps avoid making a muddy mess once water gets involved.

Step 5: Wipe the Back Grill and Base

A person demonstrates how to clean a box fan by wiping the back grill of a white electric fan with a yellow cloth.

Vacuuming won’t get all the grime off the back grill; now it’s time to wipe it down.

Wipe the front and back of the back grill with a rag dipped in soapy water. It’s easy to clean the surface of the grill — the slots in it, not so much. How much time you want to spend on wiping out those tedious gaps is up to you. I just hit the vents that were most grimy.

Wipe all around the fan’s base as well.

Step 6: Clean the Blades

A person uses a yellow cloth to clean the dusty blades of a disassembled fan, showing an easy way to tackle Box Fan Cleaning.

If your fan blades are detachable, unscrew or unclip them from the motor shaft, let them soak in a bucket of soapy water for a few minutes, and then use a cloth to wipe off any leftover grime. Rinse with clean water and dry thoroughly with a towel or let air dry.

If your blades are non-detachable like mine, you can still wipe them down in place — just be careful with water near the motor housing.

Do not submerge the motor housing. If needed, vacuum around it and wipe it down with a barely damp cloth.

A close-up view of a large, white floor fan with five blades, positioned on a metal-patterned surface in an indoor setting—ideal for illustrating how to clean a box fan.

Much better.

Step 7: Reassemble 

A white Cyclone brand box fan sits on a rubber mat in a room with gym equipment and plants in the background—a great spot to remember regular box fan cleaning for fresh, cool air during your workouts.

Once everything is dry, reassemble the fan. Make sure the blades are secured and spin freely. Reattach the grill and tighten all screws.

Plug it in, fire it up, and admire your handiwork (seeing the before and after is surprisingly satisfying). You may hear a noticeable difference in performance with a quieter, smoother airflow (I did). And you just might breathe easier during your next workout, too.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Skill of the Week: Get a Bird Out of Your House https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/how-to-get-a-bird-out-of-your-house/ Sun, 04 May 2025 12:11:00 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=102818 An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Illustration of getting birds out of the house.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

A return to warmer temperatures means a lot of us are cracking open our windows and letting fresh air into our homes. But, that refreshing breeze is also an easy way for unwanted critters to come inside. If you don’t have screens on your windows or doors, you should expect a few flies and mosquitoes to share your living space. What you might not expect is for a bird to get disoriented and turn your kitchen into an aviary.

It’s not uncommon for a bird to end up inside a house (or even workplace), which usually propels us to think of a variety of creative ways to get it out. The problem is that birds are exceedingly delicate. Shooing them with a broom or trying to catch them with your old fishing net can quickly cause significant harm to our feathered friends. Luckily, there’s an easy to way to encourage them back outside that’s safe for them, and easy for you.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Beware the Phantom Costs of Homeownership https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/phantom-homeownership-costs/ Mon, 17 Feb 2025 21:18:37 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=189092 We’ve lived in our house for 14 years now. We love it. We’ve made many memories in it, and it’s served as the headquarters for the Art of Manliness. Our house is home for us. With that said, something I’ve learned as a homeowner during the past 14 years is that owning a home is […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Cartoon of a couple gazing at their dream home with a "Sold" sign. Text reads "Beware the Phantom Costs of Homeownership" as ghostly figures loom around, hinting at hidden expenses.

We’ve lived in our house for 14 years now. We love it. We’ve made many memories in it, and it’s served as the headquarters for the Art of Manliness. Our house is home for us.

With that said, something I’ve learned as a homeowner during the past 14 years is that owning a home is pretty freaking expensive. And many of the expenses I’ve had to lay down cash for have been for things that weren’t even on my radar when Kate and I signed the mortgage.

These extra, overlooked costs of owning a home are often called “phantom costs.” Phantom costs include things like maintenance and repair costs, rising property taxes, and insurance premiums. If you want to know the true cost of homeownership, you’ve got to take into account these hidden costs in addition to the more obvious ones.

If you’re thinking about buying a home, phantom costs definitely need to be on your radar as you decide whether to buy a home or continue renting. If you own a home, you need to know about them so you can budget for them.

In today’s post, we’ll break down everything you need to know about phantom homeownership costs.

What You’ll Pay in Phantom Homeownership Costs

There have always been phantom costs with homeownership. But in the past five years, they’ve gotten significantly steeper. According to Bankrate.com, the average homeowner now shells out $18,118 annually ($1,510 monthly) on property taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance. That’s a 26% jump from 2020, when these expenses averaged $14,428 annually.

To put that in perspective, if you’re paying the national median mortgage payment of $2,256, these additional costs add another 67% to your homeownership-related expenses. Basically, to own a home in America today, you’ll likely have to pay expenses that are equivalent to buying a used car every year.

While $18,118 is the average in annual phantom homeownership costs, they’ll vary due to where you live. According to that Bankrate study, here are the states with the highest yearly phantom homeownership costs:

  1. Hawaii: $29,015
  2. California: $28,790
  3. Massachusetts: $26,313
  4. New Jersey: $25,573
  5. Connecticut: $23,515

And here are the states with the lowest:

  1. Kentucky: $11,559
  2. Arkansas: $11,692
  3. Mississippi: $11,881
  4. Alabama: $12,258
  5. Indiana: $12,259

Older Homes Mean More Phantom Ownership Costs

One factor making phantom costs even steeper is the increasing age of America’s housing stock. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age of owner-occupied homes is about 40 years old. That’s a lot of aging roofs, worn-out HVAC systems, and creaky appliances waiting to fail.

Our home is nearly 40 years old, and while it’s in pretty good condition, it’s at the point in its lifecycle where things are wearing out and need to be replaced. Most of our phantom costs have come from replacing and repairing things. Here’s a rundown of some of the repairs I’ve had to fork over money for during the past 14 years:

  • Fixed several leaks in roof.
  • Replaced almost all the windows due to rotting wooden frames.
  • Replaced the back deck that was about to collapse due to decades of weathering.
  • Replaced the old furnace that died on us one winter.
  • Replaced the icemaker that died.
  • Replaced the swimming pool’s filter, pump, and vinyl lining.

Inflation and rising labor costs have only caused home maintenance costs to go up. I’ve seen this firsthand. We had to replace some windows in our home shortly before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we had to replace another set of windows that were just like the first, but the cost had increased significantly due to inflation and higher labor costs.

Don’t Forget Property Taxes, Insurance Premiums, and HOA Dues

Besides repair and maintenance expenses, other phantom homeownership costs include property taxes, insurance premiums, and HOA dues.

Reports show that property taxes have been rising throughout the United States during the past five years, primarily driven by the pandemic-era home price boom. According to ATTOM, a real estate analytics company, property taxes in America have increased 25% since 2019.

Home insurance costs have increased by 74% in the past five years. Several factors have contributed to rising home insurance costs, including increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, rising construction and labor costs, and inflation. (One thing you can do to manage home insurance costs is to shop around. I was able to save thousands of dollars a year last year by switching home insurance companies.)

If you live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association, you’ll likely have to pay dues. I didn’t think about that when I bought our house. And those dues have increased in the past five years due to rising maintenance costs.

Budgeting for Phantom Homeownership Costs

When you add up all the additional expenses I’ve put into my home, the actual cost of homeownership has been much more than the original buying price of our house alone.

Knowing what I know now about the actual cost of homeownership, do I regret buying my house?

Not at all. Like I said, it’s our home. We love it. It’s awesome to have a place to call our own.

In our calculus, the costs of homeownership have been worth it. We don’t like to travel all that much. We’re not clothes horses or foodies. We’re homebodies who not only live at home, but work from home, so having a place we really enjoy inhabiting is important to us.

But I do wish someone had warned me about these hidden costs before I bought the house. It would have helped me budget better and set aside money for repairs and maintenance so I wasn’t blindsided when I had to fork over a bunch of money for this, that, and the other unforeseen thing.

How much should you set aside monthly for home maintenance and repair costs?

According to the experts, a good rule of thumb is to budget 1–3% of your home’s value per year for phantom costs. This will vary based on location, the age of the home, and whether you’re in an HOA. Here’s a breakdown of how that translates into a monthly savings target:

  • 1% of home value per year: Minimum, for newer homes in good condition.
  • 2% of home value per year: Moderate, for older homes or higher-tax areas.
  • 3% of home value per year: Aggressive, for high-maintenance homes or as insurance against unexpected issues.

Besides setting aside money for home maintenance costs, another thing you can do to mitigate phantom costs is to do regular home maintenance on your home. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and all that.

If you’re considering buying a new home, make sure you include phantom costs in your decision calculus. It will help you make a more clear-eyed decision.

If you own a home, start that maintenance fund now, not later. Build that 1-3% savings cushion into your budget, and treat it as non-negotiable as your mortgage payment. Your future self will thank you for it.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> 4 Todoist Templates to Streamline and Organize Your Life https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/todoist-templates/ Fri, 22 Nov 2024 03:14:50 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=184889 I’m a big Todoist fan. If you’ve never heard of this task management app, check out my full write-up about Todoist. It’s amazing! (I’m not affiliated with the company in any way, just an enthusiastic user.) Over the years, Kate and I have developed some dedicated checklists that we use to keep on top of […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Effortlessly organize and streamline your life with Todoist templates, set against a bold red background with a sleek checklist icon.I’m a big Todoist fan.

If you’ve never heard of this task management app, check out my full write-up about Todoist. It’s amazing! (I’m not affiliated with the company in any way, just an enthusiastic user.)

Over the years, Kate and I have developed some dedicated checklists that we use to keep on top of tasks in both our professional and personal lives. We’ve got Todoist checklists of article ideas we want to hit and Todoist checklists of family- and household-related tasks that need to get done that we often discuss during our weekly marriage meetings.

On that latter front, I’ve developed some checklist categories for everything from life admin to home maintenance. The aim of these lists is to help me be better at home economics in the Aristotelian sense. I figured people might find them useful. So I’ve created free templates that you can download into your Todoist app.

4 Todoist Templates to Streamline Your Life

On Todoist, you can create a “Project” folder within which to create a checklist of tasks.

I use three basic categories of Projects:

  1. Projects with mostly one-off tasks. An example would be my Household Project. On this checklist, there are one-off tasks like “Call the plumber to fix the sink.” When you check off a one-off task, the task disappears from the list.
  2. Projects with recurring tasks. An example of this, as you’ll see below, is “Life Admin.” These are tasks I have to do every week/month/quarter. When you add a recurring task to a Project checklist, you give it a recurring due date like “every Sunday.” Then, when you check the task off, it automatically repopulates itself on the list with the due date for next Sunday.
  3. Projects for recurring (but occasional) situations. These are Projects for situations that don’t occur regularly, but when they do occur, the tasks are the same each time, e.g., preparing to leave for vacation.

Since Projects of strictly one-off tasks will be very variable, I here concentrate on the templates I use for Projects with regularly recurring tasks and Projects for recurring, occasional situations.

Below, I’ll walk you through how to use each type; the first step for both, obviously, is to download and install Todoist, if you don’t already have the app.

Templates for Recurring Tasks

The following two Project templates provide checklists of recurring tasks. Again, when you check off a recurring task in these Projects, the task will automatically repopulate itself on the list with the due date for the following week/month/quarter. I have created recurring due dates for the tasks (like “every 4th Saturday”), but you can alter them according to your desires.

Life Admin Checklist

Life Admin is the office work of life. It’s the stuff you have to do to keep your household going. Paying bills. Filling out paperwork. Buying groceries.

Some life admin consists of one-off tasks that come up every now and then. Think signing kids up for sports or managing a recently passed parent’s estate.

But a lot of life admin is recurring on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Over the years, I’ve developed a life admin checklist that I use to keep on top of this piddly recurring life admin. Most of it is designed so that things don’t pile up, and I’m not left with a big life admin bomb to resolve. So you’ll notice that my life admin checklist consists of a lot of maintenance things like backing up my computer, cleaning up old text messages, and getting rid of old paperwork. Maybe some stuff on my list will be useful for you. Add to or take away from it based on your needs.

Need some more strategies for better tackling your life admin? Listen to this episode of the AoM podcast for some handy and practical suggestions:

Home Maintenance Checklist

One of our most popular articles of all time is our home maintenance checklist that we published back in 2013. I’ve taken that home maintenance checklist and turned it into a Todoist Project. The list is broken into the following sections: Monthly, Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer.

**How to Download Templates for Recurring Tasks **

All the templates below are saved as CSV files. You’re going to import them as a Todoist Project.

Here’s how you do that. We’ll use the Life Admin checklist as our example.

Download the Life Admin CSV file to your computer (click the link).

Image8

A tab will open up with the file in Google Drive. Click the download button to download it to your computer.

Image6

Click on the “+” next to “My Projects,” and then click “Add Project.”

Image11

Name the project “Life Admin,” and then click the red “Add” button in the bottom right-hand corner.

Image4

Now click the three dots next to Life Admin in your project list.

Image5

Click “Import from CSV.”

Select the Life Admin CSV file that you downloaded.

Image9

Bada bing! You’ve got the Life Admin Checklist that I use to keep track of my life admin. You can do the same thing with the Home Maintenance Checklist.

Templates for Occasional Situations

I’ve also created some checklists that I only use for certain situations, like leaving on vacation or leaving for a backpacking trip, that are not recurring on a daily or weekly basis. I don’t need these checklists sitting in my Project menu all the time. I just need to pull them in on special occasions. Todoist has a handy feature that lets you do this.

Vacation Checklist

Another one of our popular past articles was about what to do before you leave on vacation. I’ve turned the checklist we provided there into a Todoist template.

This is a list that you don’t need to keep in your project menu all the time. Just save it as a template as I showed above. Copy the Vacation Checklist template into your Project menu the week before you leave for vacation. (I’ll show you how to do that below.)

Backpacking Checklist

The McKays love backpacking, and over the years, we’ve developed a list of things to pack and do before we leave for a backpacking trip. It really helps streamline things and ensures we don’t forget any vital equipment.

Like the Vacation Checklist, you don’t need to keep this in your Project menu all the time. Just save it as a template and copy the template into your Project menu the day before you leave for your backpacking trip.

**How to Download Templates for One-Off Situations**

Let’s use the Vacation Checklist for our example.

Download the Vacation Checklist (click the link).

When the tab opens up, click the download button like you did with the Life Admin file.

Click on the “+” next to “My Projects,” and then click “Add Project.” Name the project “Vacation Checklist,” and then click the red “Add” button in the bottom right-hand corner.

Now click the three dots next to Vacation Checklist in your project list.

Click “Import from CSV.”

Select the Vacation Checklist CSV file that you downloaded.

Click on the three dots next to the Vacation Checklist in your project menu.

Image13

Click “Save as Template.”

Image12

Todoist will ask that you describe what this template is for. I just typed “Template to use before I leave for vacation.” Click the red “Save” button.

Image10

Your Vacation Checklist is now saved as a template that you can pull into your projects as needed.

Image3

If you’re not going on vacation anytime soon, delete the Vacation Checklist project from your Project list by clicking the three dots next to “Vacation Checklist” and clicking “Delete.”

Image7

The week before you leave for vacation, pull your Vacation Checklist into your Project folder by clicking “Browse Templates” at the bottom of your Project menu.

Image2

Then click “Vacation Checklist”

Then click the red “Copy to My Projects” button.

Bam! You’ve got a handy-dandy Vacation Checklist to make sure you don’t forget anything before you leave on your next trip.

Even if you don’t find these specific templates useful for your particular circumstances, hopefully, this article has given you some ideas on how to use Todoist to organize and streamline your life. It’s very handy for keeping track of the 8 checklists you should be keeping besides the standard to-do list. And, of course, for keeping track of your Christmas shopping too!

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Secure Your Garage: 11 Ways to Protect Yourself From Break-Ins and Theft https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/secure-garage-door/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 13:55:16 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=184704 With the holidays coming up, I’ve been thinking about hot cocoa, how to get into the spirit of the season, and . . . home security. A 2022 study found that burglaries increase during the holidays due to more people being away from home because of travel and the presence of more high-value items in […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A man pulls the cord of a garage door, opening it partially in a bright garage with shelves and a window, mindful of garage security to prevent potential break-ins.

With the holidays coming up, I’ve been thinking about hot cocoa, how to get into the spirit of the season, and . . . home security.

A 2022 study found that burglaries increase during the holidays due to more people being away from home because of travel and the presence of more high-value items in the home in the form of gifts to be given and gifts received.

One area in which I’m focusing on beefing up security is my garage. I tend to forget about it as a home access point, but criminals don’t. Every few years, our neighborhood gets hit with a string of garage burglaries. People get stuff stolen from their garages or thieves enter the home through the garage and burglarize the house.

Below, I outline some easy measures to take to make your garage more secure.

1. Don’t Leave Your Garage Door Opener in the Car (Duh!)

If you park your car in the driveway, don’t leave the garage door opener in it. This may seem like a no-brainer, but people sometimes forget. Burglars often break into a parked car in the driveway, grab the opener, use it, and clean out the garage.

2. Keep Your Garage Door Closed (Double Duh!)

Sure, this seems like a no-brainer as well, but people neglect to close their garage doors all the time. An open garage door with bikes, tools, and toys screams “Rob me!” A burglar can run into the garage, take what he wants, and get away, all while you’re unawares, sitting in the house watching Elf.

3. Upgrade Your Garage Door Opener to One With Rolling-Code Technology

Criminals can access garages by buying a universal garage door opener that works across different older units. They just pull up to houses and click the remote to see if the garage door opens.

Another way thieves can get into your house is by using a “code grabbing” device. Think of your garage door opener like a TV remote. When you press the button, it sends a signal to your garage door receiver saying, “Hey, it’s me! Open up!”

The problem? Bad guys can grab that signal from the air.

Here’s the criminal play-by-play:

  • When you get home from work, you press your opener.
  • A nearby thief uses a code grabber to catch your signal.
  • Later that night, they replay your signal from their grabber.
  • Your garage door opens, thinking it’s you.
  • The thief cleans out your garage.

A garage door opener with rolling-code technology prevents both issues. It generates a new code every time you use it. It’s like a new password for every Gmail login, making it harder for intruders to crack.

4. Use Your Garage Door’s Deadbolt

When you’re gone for long periods, use your garage door’s deadbolt. It’s installed on the inside and slides a metal bar into the track, preventing the door from opening. Most deadbolts need to be engaged and disengaged manually. Some openers allow you to set up a system for automatic deadbolting when you close the door.

5. Secure Your Garage Door’s Emergency Release Cord

See that emergency release cord dangling from your opener? A bad guy can gain access to your garage by breaking a window or sticking a wire hanger through the top of your garage door and pulling it.

To prevent this break-in method, thread a zip tie through the release lever and secure it. This makes it much harder for a bad guy to release the latch because he doesn’t have adequate leverage from the position in which he’s reaching into the garage. If you need to release the latch in an emergency, pulling down hard on the cord will break the zip tie.

6. Secure Garage’s Side Door

If your garage has a side door, remember to keep it secured. Install and use deadbolt locks.

7. Secure the Garage-to-Home Door

If a criminal breaches your garage, ensure they can’t enter further into your home. Install a sturdy door from your garage into your home and deadbolt it at night. Make it part of your 9 PM Security Routine.

8. Tint Windows

If your garage door has windows, tint them so burglars can’t see inside.

9. Install Exterior Lights and Cameras

Most burglars are criminals of opportunity. They’re typically only going to hit homes they can access easily without being detected. The presence of lights and cameras is one of the factors that make your home a less enticing target.

Install motion-activated floodlights next to your garage door and other access points, and combine them with a wireless security camera. I’ve used these Ring floodlights/cameras for years. They work great.

10. Utilize Smart Tech Solutions

Garage door openers have evolved since the 1980s. Most integrate with your smartphone and offer features for home security, like issuing alerts when the door opens or allowing you to check if you left the door open after, say, leaving on a family road trip to Santa Fe (guilty, guilty).

11. Maintain Your Garage Door

Regularly inspect your garage door and its components for wear or damage. Keeping everything in good working order can prevent vulnerabilities that burglars could exploit. Make checking your garage door part of your yearly home maintenance list.

Follow these measures, and your garage will be a more secure and less attractive target for would-be burglars.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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