A woman at Berry read me a list off her fridge over the phone. Eleven items, the oldest going back about two years, all of it the sort of thing you walk past every day and stop seeing. A bedroom door that had not shut properly since they moved in. A gate dragging on the path. Shelves still in the flat pack in the garage. A towel rail that had pulled out of the wall.
Four of those she could have done herself in an evening. I told her which four. The rest were worth me driving down for, and doing them all in one visit is what made the trip worth anybody's money.
That is the whole skill in this trade, and nobody writes it down: sorting the list.
The list is the unit, not the job
There is a call-out in every handyman visit, and it does not care whether you booked one item or nine. So a single small job is the most expensive way to buy this work, and a list of eight is the cheapest.
Which means the right move is to stop ringing when something breaks. Write it on the fridge instead and call when the list has grown a spine. Most people already do this by accident and then feel embarrassed about the length of it, which is backwards. A long list is good news for both of us.
The handyman page has the general run of what goes on those lists. What it does not say, because service pages never do, is which items you should cross off yourself before you call.
Things you should just do yourself
I would rather tell you this than charge you for it.
A door that will not latch is usually a strike plate, not a door. Look at where the latch is hitting the plate — you can normally see a shiny mark on the metal. Loosen the two screws, shift the plate a couple of millimetres, done. If the door has dropped instead, the top hinge screws have generally pulled loose in the jamb; back them out and drive longer screws in so they bite into the framing behind rather than the thin jamb timber. Ten minutes and a screwdriver.
Flat-pack is a patience job, not a skill job. If you have an afternoon and you can read a diagram, keep the money. If it is a wardrobe over about a metre and a half wide, or anything that has to be squared up and fixed to a wall so it does not tip, that one is worth handing over.
Sticky sliding doors and windows are usually dirt in the track and a wheel out of adjustment, both of which are underneath and reachable. Squealing hinges want a drop of oil, not a new hinge. A smoke alarm battery is a battery. The hardwired unit it sits in is an electrician's, and that distinction matters more than it sounds like it does.
The ones that look small and are not
A door that has always been slightly wrong is an adjustment. A door that started sticking this year, in one specific corner, is telling you the house has moved, and planing it to fit hides that rather than solving it. Same with a crack that keeps reopening in the same spot after two rounds of filler. Filling it a third time is not the answer, and I will say so rather than take the work.
Towel rails and shelves that have pulled out of the wall are the other one. The rail is not the problem. The problem is that it was screwed into plasterboard with the wrong anchor, or into nothing at all, and the fix is finding the framing or putting in an anchor rated for the load and the pull direction. Refixing into the same blown-out hole gets you about three months.
Not ours, at any size
This is the shortest section and the one that saves the most grief. Electrical, plumbing, drainage, gasfitting and air conditioning always need a licensed contractor in NSW. There is no small version. Swapping a light fitting, moving a tap, adding a power point, replacing an extraction fan — the dollar value never enters into it, because it is the trade that decides, not the invoice.
Everything else we do sits under the general building work threshold, which NSW sets at more than $5,000 in labour and materials including GST. The licensing post goes through how that is worked out and which trades sit outside it altogether.
Anyone offering to do the licensed stuff cheap as a favour is offering you an uninsured job and a conversation at sale time.
Fibro, and why I will stop mid-job
Worth knowing before you hand anyone a drill. Plenty of houses through the Illawarra and down the coast have asbestos cement sheeting in the eaves, bathroom walls, laundry linings and old sheds. Left alone and in good condition it is not doing anything. SafeWork NSW is clear that the risk comes when the material is disturbed by cutting, drilling, water blasting or similar activities, which is an accurate description of mounting a shelf.
So if a job means putting a fixing into a sheet I am not sure about, I stop and we talk about it rather than pushing on. Removal is its own licensed world — SafeWork NSW requires a licensed removalist for any friable asbestos and for more than ten square metres of the bonded kind, and recommends one for any amount of it.
That comes up more on the small jobs than the big ones, which is the part people find surprising. Nobody renovates an eaves lining. They just want a sensor light on it.
Landlords, agents and the make-good list
A decent share of this work is rental. Condition-report items, the odd repair between inspections, and the run of small things that have to be right before a new tenant walks in.
That runs differently to a homeowner's list because the timing is fixed and the scope comes off a report rather than a fridge. Property maintenance covers how we handle it, and the rental turnover post has the list of what actually gets picked up between tenants.
If you have got a list and you are not sure which half of it is worth a visit, send it through as it is written. I will tell you what to cross off first.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0450 959 936.