Home Maintenance Schedule

Six columns

Task. Area or room, frequency, last done, next due, notes. Eighteen rows by default, twelve to twenty-four available.

Turn on seasonal grouping and the rows split into four banded sections — spring, summer, autumn, winter — which is how most household maintenance actually falls.

Last done is the column that matters

Frequency without a date is an aspiration. "Annually" says nothing at all about whether the thing is due this month or was done a fortnight ago.

Write the date you did it and the date it is next due, and the sheet answers the question by itself. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why a maintenance list without those two columns gets read once and then ignored.

What belongs on it

The annual ones first, because they are the ones that get missed. Boiler service, gutter clearing, chimney sweep if you have one, smoke and carbon monoxide alarm tests, bleeding radiators before the heating goes on.

Then the seasonal: outside taps off before the first frost, garden furniture in, filters and vents, drains. Then the occasional but consequential — roof and flashing checked from the ground with binoculars, sealant round the bath, the loft looked at after a storm.

Include the boring ones. Descaling a kettle is not interesting, and neither is checking the mastic round a bath, and both are a great deal cheaper than what eventually happens if nobody does either.

Cheaper than the alternative

This is an economic argument, not a tidiness one.

A gutter cleared for the price of an afternoon prevents a damp wall that costs a great deal more; a boiler serviced annually is a boiler that keeps its warranty and does not fail in February. Almost every large domestic repair bill started as a small maintenance job that nobody had written down anywhere.

Seasonal grouping

Turn it on if you want the sheet to work as a calendar rather than a register. Each band becomes a weekend's worth of jobs.

Leave it off if your list is mostly monthly and quarterly items, where the seasons are not the organising idea.

Renting, and selling

Tenants benefit too. A dated record of when a problem was reported is exactly what you want if a repair drags on, and the notes column is where that goes.

Sellers: keep the completed sheets. Documented maintenance reassures a buyer in the same way a service history reassures someone buying a car, and it costs nothing to have kept.

Related: the car maintenance log works the same way for a vehicle.