The Home Repairs Worth Learning

Search for home repair advice and you will find the same article forty times: a list of tools, ranked by how much the site earns per click on each one. It tells you to own a stud finder. It does not tell you what is actually going to break.

This one is organised the other way round. These are the things most likely to stop working in a place you live in, in roughly the order you will meet them, with the honest answer for each: fix it, or pay somebody.

The short answer

Three categories, and the line between them is not difficulty.

The third row is not about how hard the job is. Plenty of electrical work is easy. It is about what happens when the person doing it is wrong about something, which is the only question that matters when the wrong answer burns the building down.

The eight tools that cover most of it

You do not need a toolbox. You need eight things, and you can buy them one at a time as jobs come up.

Tima Miroshnichenko / Pexels

• A claw hammer. For the obvious, and for the far more common job of pulling things out.
• A screwdriver with interchangeable bits. One handle, a set of bits. Cheaper and more useful than six separate screwdrivers.
• An adjustable wrench. Covers every nut you will meet in a domestic setting.
• A tape measure. Five metres is plenty.
• A utility knife. Retractable, with spare blades. A blunt blade causes more injuries than a sharp one.
• Pliers. Combination pliers first; add long-nose when something needs reaching.
• A cordless drill. The one genuinely transformative purchase. It drills and it drives screws, which is most of what a repair is.
• A torch. Not your phone. The things that break are behind, under and inside.

Everything else is bought for a specific job. A set bought in advance is mostly a box of things you will never take out.

The ten things that break, and what to do

1. A dripping tap

The most common household failure and the most underestimated. It is usually a worn washer or cartridge, both cheap, both replaceable in half an hour with the water isolated.

People leave it because a drip sounds trivial. It is not.

Zulfugar Karimov / Pexels

2. A running toilet

The silent version of the same problem, and usually a bigger one because nobody hears it. The flapper or the fill valve has failed. Both are inexpensive parts, both come out by hand, and the whole job is a few minutes once the supply is off.

The test: put a few drops of food colouring in the cistern and wait twenty minutes without flushing. Colour in the bowl means the seal is leaking.

3. A slow drain

Almost always hair and soap in the trap, not a blockage deep in the system. Remove the trap under the sink with a bucket underneath, clear it, put it back.

Chemical drain cleaner is the thing to avoid, not because it never works but because it sits in the pipe when it fails, and then somebody has to open that pipe.

4. A dryer that needs two cycles

The lint screen is the part everyone knows about. The vent hose behind the machine is the part that actually blocks, and a blocked one is why nothing dries.

Pull the machine out twice a year, disconnect the hose, clear it. It is a ten-minute job on the list of things that prevent a fire.

5. A blown fuse or tripped breaker

Resetting a breaker is fine and is not the same as working inside the panel. Switch it fully off, then on.

What matters is what happens next. If it holds, you overloaded a circuit. If it trips again immediately, something is faulty and the breaker is doing its job, which means the answer is an electrician rather than a second attempt.

AV / Pexels

6. Silicone that has gone black

Around a bath or a shower tray, mould in the sealant is not a cleaning problem, it is a replacement problem: the mould is inside the silicone. Cut it out with a knife, clean and dry the gap completely, run a new bead.

Doing it badly is the normal outcome the first time. It is also the cheapest possible thing to redo.

7. A door that will not close

Almost always hinges rather than the door. Tighten every screw first. If a screw spins without biting, the hole is worn: push wood glue and a matchstick or two into it, let it set, screw back into that.

8. A radiator cold at the top

Air in the system. Bleed it with the key, with a cloth underneath, then check the system pressure afterwards because bleeding drops it.

9. A shower with no pressure

Usually limescale in the head, not a problem with the plumbing. Unscrew it, soak it overnight in descaler or vinegar, refit.

10. A hole in plaster

Small holes take filler, a scraper and sandpaper, and the whole skill is applying less than you think and building up. The common failure is one thick application that shrinks, cracks and has to be redone.

The maintenance that is not a repair

Three jobs on this list are not fixing anything. They are the ones that decide whether you ever meet the emergency version, and they take minutes.

Two minutes is the whole argument. Every other repair on this page can wait a week. The alarm is the one where the maintenance interval is short because the failure is not recoverable.

The other two, on the same logic:

Clear the dryer vent twice a year. Covered above, and it belongs here as well, because it is scheduled maintenance rather than a repair.

Turn the water shut-off once a year. Valves seize when they are never moved. A shut-off you have turned recently is a shut-off that will turn during a flood.

The three jobs to pay for, every time

This is the part most repair lists soften. It should not be softened.

Anything inside the breaker panel. Not resetting a breaker, which is a household task. Opening the panel, changing a breaker, running a new circuit. The consequence of being wrong is a fire in a wall or a person dead, and neither shows up as a mistake you can learn from.

Anything involving gas. In most countries this is not a judgement call, it is illegal to do without certification, and the reason is that a gas fault does not announce itself before it kills somebody.

Anything structural. Removing a wall, cutting a joist, anything holding the building up. The failure mode arrives months later and takes the ceiling with it.

The honest framing is this: these are not the hardest jobs on the list. Bleeding a radiator correctly takes more care than resetting a breaker. They are on this list because of what happens when the person doing them turns out to have been wrong, and no amount of confidence changes that arithmetic.

How to work out whether a repair is yours

Every list like this eventually meets a problem it does not cover, and then you need a rule rather than an entry.

Four questions, in order. The first “no” is your answer.

1. Can I isolate it completely? Water off at the valve, power off at the breaker, appliance unplugged. If there is no way to make the thing safe before you touch it, stop.
2. Can I describe what is wrong? Not what the symptom is, what the fault is. “The tap drips” is a symptom. “The washer has perished” is a fault. Working on a symptom is guessing with tools.
3. Do I know what it looks like when it is right? If you cannot picture the correct state, you cannot tell whether you have reached it, and you will stop when it looks finished rather than when it is.
4. What happens if I am wrong? Water on a floor is an afternoon. A gas leak is not. This is the question that decides the three jobs in the section above, and it outranks the other three.

That last question is worth sitting with, because it inverts the instinct. The jobs people are most nervous about are usually the ones with the mildest failure modes: a badly sealed bath leaks and you redo it. The jobs people are casual about, because the individual actions are simple, are sometimes the ones where being wrong is not recoverable.

Repair or replace

The other decision that comes up constantly, usually with an appliance making a noise it did not use to make.

Two things push the answer toward repair more than people expect. Labour is a large share of any quote, so a job you can do yourself changes the arithmetic entirely. And the parts for most domestic appliances are available, catalogued by model number, at a fraction of what the whole machine costs.

One thing pushes it the other way, and it is worth being honest about: an appliance that has already been repaired once for the same fault is telling you something about the rest of it.

Before anything breaks

Two things to do this week, both of which take ten minutes and both of which are worth more than any tool you could buy.

Find the water shut-off and turn it. Not just locate it. Turn it, so you know it moves and you know which way. A seized shut-off found during a flood is the same as no shut-off at all.

Find the breaker panel and label it. Switch each breaker off in turn and write down what stopped working. Twenty minutes now, and every future electrical problem starts from knowledge instead of guessing.

Renting changes the answer, not the knowledge

Much of the advice above assumes the place is yours. Most people in their twenties are renting, and the rules are different in a way worth being explicit about.

What is the landlord’s job. Almost everywhere, the structure, the heating, the plumbing and the electrics are the landlord’s responsibility, not yours. Fixing them yourself is not a favour, it is taking on liability for work you were not obliged to do and often are not permitted to do.

What is reasonably yours. A blocked trap you filled with hair, a lint path you did not clear, a light bulb. The line is roughly between what wears out and what you caused.

Report in writing. Not because your landlord is untrustworthy, but because a written record with a date is the only version that exists later. A text message counts.

Do not attempt anything that leaves a mark. Drilling, sealing, replacing fittings. Even competent work can cost you a deposit if it was not agreed.

The knowledge on this page is still worth having as a renter, for a different reason: it lets you describe the fault accurately, which is the difference between a landlord sending somebody and a landlord waiting to see whether you mention it again.

The mistakes worth avoiding

• Buying tools before jobs. The set in the box is chosen by what fits the box.
• Skipping the isolation step. Water off, power off, checked. Every job on this page starts there and it is the step people skip when they are in a hurry.
• Chemical drain cleaner as a first move. It sometimes works and it makes the manual fix considerably worse when it does not.
• Overtightening. Most domestic plumbing seals with a rubber washer, not with force. Tightening past snug cracks fittings and strips threads.
• Fixing a thing you cannot describe. If you cannot say what is broken, you are not repairing, you are experimenting on something you live in.
• Not taking a photograph first. Before you take anything apart, photograph it. Reassembly is where the confidence goes.
• Working without the part. Taking something apart to see what is broken, discovering the shop is shut, and living without a toilet for a weekend. Diagnose first, buy the part, then open it.
• Ignoring the smell of burning. A faint electrical smell is a fault that has already started. It is not a thing to watch, it is a thing to isolate.

Learning the job before you do it

Every repair here has been filmed by somebody, and video is genuinely the right medium for this: watching a pair of hands do a thing beats reading about it.

What to look for in a video, because the quality varies enormously:

• The whole job, unedited through the difficult part. A video that cuts away at the moment the awkward bit happens is not showing you the job, it is showing you the result.
• The specific part or model. Domestic fittings vary by country and by manufacturer. A video for a different standard will be confidently wrong about the thread on your fitting.
• What can go wrong. Anyone who has done the job many times will mention the failure mode. Anyone who has done it once will not know it exists.
• A publication date that makes sense. Regulations change, particularly on anything electrical or gas-adjacent.

The other habit worth building is reading the model number off the appliance before you start searching. Almost every domestic machine has a plate with a model and serial number, and it turns a general search into a specific one, including for the exact replacement part.

Keeping the tools somewhere

A small point that decides whether any of this happens: tools you cannot find are tools you do not own.

One box, one place, everything back in it after every job. It sounds like an aside and it is the difference between fixing the tap on Saturday and adding it to a list where it stays for four months. The friction that stops small repairs is almost never the difficulty of the repair.

Two additions worth making early: a small tub of assorted screws and wall plugs, and a roll of PTFE tape. Between them they cover an unreasonable proportion of the jobs where you would otherwise stop and go to a shop.

The bottom line

Learn the repairs that fail often, cost little and punish you slowly: the tap, the toilet, the drain, the lint, the seal. Buy the eight tools as the jobs arrive.

Then pay somebody for the three that punish you all at once. The line between doing it yourself and calling somebody is not how difficult it looks. It is what happens if you are wrong.