Maintaining your home
This site is about your home and how to maintain it properly using the context of Stewardship. Learn, what is a home, how it’s made, and how you can take better care of it. This junk-free site is different because it is written by a real building professional strictly to help homeowners get more value and enjoyment from their homes.
Defining home and home maintenance
In its most basic definition, a home is an assembly of materials that enclose a weatherproof space for human living. Of course, your home is about much more than that. Home becomes the context of our humanity. It is the loom on which we weave our lives. The home itself may just be a structure or shelter, but the location, design and execution of that assembly and the atmosphere within it brings individual meaning and quality of life to those of us who live in them.
There are many things a home could be, but at core it should be a safe place for the self. A place where an individual or family can feel nurtured and come alive. This manual may not be able to help with your current feelings about, or attachment to, a particular home, but it will certainly help you have a better home. When your home is in good shape it is safer and more enjoyable. It becomes the refuge it was meant to be.
Homeownership
Homepreservationmanual.com is a guide to help you with maintaining your home so you can become a better homeowner. If you own a home already, you know that getting there was not easy. You likely had to work very hard, save diligently and make huge sacrifices and efforts to find and purchase just the right one. So, congratulations on your accomplishment. Bravo!!
Unfortunately, the work doesn’t end with the purchase of the home. Instead, that is when the role of homeownership really begins. If you wish to be a good one, and you should, then this Manual is for you.
Better homeownership equals maintaining your home
The goal of this Manual is to help everyone be better homeowners. The information found here should, if followed, help you and your family receive maximum enjoyment from living in the home, while also securing the highest possible financial returns from your investment in it. Now isn’t that what homeownership is all about?
Becoming a homeowner is often quoted as the American dream, but homeownership is also an enormous responsibility. Unfortunately many people are not very good at it. This is sad, costly and unnecessary. I blame these failures on the fact that almost no home comes with instructions. Can you believe that? Your home is likely the single biggest purchase you’ve ever made and yet you likely have not been provided with many useful clues about how to properly take care of it. Whether you’re a DIYer and your home is your favorite hobby, or if you just want to know how to talk to tradespeople, this website can help.
Bookmark this website and refer to it often
So again, if you own a home, this website is for you. It provides the information needed to help you with maintaining your home and in the process you can have more fun, spend less money and secure a nice return on your investment.
Gathering all this information together and keeping it current is a lot of work. But it is also a lot of fun. I have been using this information successfully in my Home Preservation business for years. Taking care of my client homes on a daily basis keeps me busy, so work on this site is a part-time endeavor. Still I try hard to update it regularly.
It has been a real joy for me to hear positive stories from happy homeowners who are either using the information found here, or directly experiencing the services provided by HPS Palo Alto Inc. I enjoy getting feedback so please drop me a line if you feel so inclined.
Disclaimers and warnings:
I do this website mostly myself. I have no proof readers or editors and you will likely find typos, misspellings and possibly even dreaded grammatical errors. Also since I am human and fallible you may also find factual errors. So if you find errors kindly let me know so I can make the corrections and possibly learn something in the process.
You should also know that in many ways this site is a work of fiction. Some of what you will find here is my opinion and not necessarily fact. I will try to stay clear of both politics and religion. My sincere hope is that this mix of accumulated experience and opinion will be fun and engaging enough that you will want to come back whenever you need help with being a better homeowner.
My background
Home Preservation Services
I founded my business HPS Palo Alto Inc. Home Preservation Services to help people take better care of their home. I developed a system to deliver the critical services for maintaining your home to homeowners who could not perform them on their own. To accomplish this as a business, HPS adopted the philosophy of prevention, and then created a systematic approach to performing the actual work. This system has proven successful now for hundreds of homes and their homeowners in our area. If followed it can do the same for you.
New ideas welcome here
HPS operates in the surrounding area of Los Altos and Palo Alto, California. This is the very heart of Silicon Valley. I believe our clients are some of the very brightest and most ambitious people on the planet. They know value and demand quality. They mostly come to us already knowing that their home is an enormous asset that should be taken care of properly. More importantly, HPS clients are also keenly aware that their time is valuable and limited. Our clients are experts and specialists in their own fields but most have neither tools or skills to home maintenance properly themselves. Outsourcing it to a qualified professional service provider like HPS makes sense.
Service strategy-maintaining your home
What always comes as a surprise, even to these most seasoned and astute homeowners is how much work there is to do. Most homeowners are only aware of about a dozen maintenance responsibilities when actually, there are over 250 individual items in the typical home that require service on a regular, recurring basis.
This website explores ways of preventively caring for your home in order to achieve blissful homeownership. This is not intended to be a “how to” site for fixing specific items (although we may touch on some of the more important tasks) but instead focusses on the larger context of why taking care of your home is so important. And what long-term returns you can expect from your efforts in both money, avoided disasters and enjoyment.
Following your bliss
My life, and this site are essentially both products of a lifetime doing what Joseph Campbell called “following one’s bliss.” If you are not familiar with Joseph Campbell, I highly recommend you get a copy of his book “The Power of Myth” and listen to it about 500 times. Professor Campbell believed that committing to, and pursuing the things in life that make you happy would propel you in directions you would not perhaps have expected, but that in the end would lead to…bliss. Except for a few wrong turns along the way, this philosophy pretty much describes my life. FYI, this is as close to religion as I get in this website.
My “bliss”
It turns out I like to build things. Not just anything. I like to build stuff that lasts. Good stuff. Stuff worth keeping and taking care of. Ironically, I don’t really like taking care of stuff because I’m a bit lazy, but I know that doing so is good and helps me keep the good stuff I like… so I developed a discipline to do it.
I figured a lot of other people were lazy like me, so I started a business in 1984 to help them take care of one their most valuable things, their home. I was right. A lot of people did want help taking care of their home and the business grew. In fact the business grew enough that I now have many other great people doing what I do… only better. So I have some time to do this website. Here’s how that happened…
Growing up
In 1966 my Mom and Dad bought a modest new house with an unfinished yard in northern California. Dad knew nothing about home maintenance, but he was a proud new homeowner and an eager do-it-yourselfer. He set out to install his own Sunset Magazine inspired landscaping. Lofty visions of green lawns, crisp concrete curbs and patios, state of the art automated sprinklers and a flashy new redwood deck must have filled his imagination. This landscape would be dad’s creative masterpiece. The vision of course required more hard work than could be expected from any one person. Which is where my brother and I entered the picture.
My younger brother age 10 and myself age 13 were recruited for trench digging, cement mixing, pipe laying and grass planting. It was hard work but it was our first taste of construction and I loved it. Doing stuff with dad was cool!
Work-early impressions
As I entered high school I quickly learned that having some kind of job meant I could buy nice stuff… basically cars and things for cars. Summer jobs included farming with the family, work with a logging company (owned by my friend’s dad), and lots of heavy equipment use. As a senior, one job was helping a friend prepare the foundation for a spec house. I enjoyed that a lot. The contractor offered me a permanent job. Dad thankfully said no! College first. Grudgingly, I agreed and after a near-miss with the draft, off to school I went. This turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.
College
College was new and serious and fun, but I had to work hard to get decent grades. I found I was good with numbers and earned a degree in accounting. As a profession, accounting did not appeal to me. Casting around I ended up with a job working for a builder in the San Francisco area. I did estimates and prepared bids but what I really loved was going out to the jobs and experiencing the actual creation of a project.
Out on my own-first job
After a couple of years, I managed to get my Contractors license and struck out on my own. This is where things began to come together. My first contract was remodeling a commercial building where the owner was a complete nut about durability and maintenance. This customer owned a high-volume public space and it took a beating. The owner absolutely would not tolerate anything breaking. Parts were expected to work as they should under the most stressful conditions and he demanded that everything be designed to last forever.
I was asked once to set up six different types of sample toilet partitions and can remember watching in disbelief when my customer set upon them with hammers, screwdrivers, marking pens and pocket knives to tear them up. My client was of course a total eccentric. He also could afford all the seemingly crazy demands he made and guess what? His work did last a long time. The experience got me to thinking about ways I could improve everyday building practices to make my buildings last longer.
Durability and 100 year specs
After working several years for Mr. Indestructible, I was totally indoctrinated into the durability context. I wrote a set of building specifications that could be used to “build” longevity into virtually any project and even built several homes this way. Many of these early specifications, such as the application of metal flashings to protect the tops of outdoor beams, later became best practices in the industry which I am very proud of.
I liked building “hardened” homes but they were expensive to build and I soon recognized that even indestructible homes were not “maintenance free”. They would still have moving parts that would need adjustment and lubrication, filters that would need changing and accumulations of debris that would need cleaning. this meant maintaining your home could not be avoided. Sadly too, building one hardened home at a time was not going to have a very big effect on the world. So I gave up the quest to build the maintenance-free home but kept all the accumulated knowledge I had gained.
Thinking bigger
Somehow I wanted to affect a bigger market. A way had to be found to help more homes and more homeowners. I didn’t have a clue how to make that happen.
Maintenance seemed to be the key.
I began to make the connection that whether a home was well constructed or not, it required a certain amount of attention (maintenance) to keep it working properly. Poorly constructed or neglected homes would of course need more. But the reality was that in most cases, the home got none. It occurred to me that if I could identify the critical key elements of the structure that needed regular attention, then I could focus on servicing those things and possibly extend the life of the home. Theoretically, EVERY home could benefit from that. Now that really turned me on!
I began to shift my attention away from durable construction and towards strategic maintenance and maintaining your home properly.
Getting a clue
During my early contracting years when I was building and remodeling single family houses, I experienced quite clearly that although most people loved their homes and had huge financial investments in them, they paradoxically didn’t take care of them properly. It occurred to me that if they took better care of their home they might love it even more. Not only that, the home would last longer, be more efficient to operate, be safer and in the process might also become more valuable.
The problem seemed to be time and expertise. Most of the homeowners in my area (Palo Alto) were quite busy and successful in their own specialty. These folks really didn’t have the time to take care of their home properly, and even if they did, they did not have the know how to do so.
The answer was obviously to go out to the home and do the work for the homeowner.
Due diligence
For the next year I studied up on preventive maintenance systems. The service programs used by airline industry and food industry were studied. Critical strategies used to avoid catastrophic failures at NASA (post Challenger) were reviewed. Insurance claims data was intensely studied and I identified the primary causes of failure in the residential structural environment (water and neglect.)
I also learned about the expected duty lives of appliances, heating systems, various roofing, plumbing, water heaters, paint and every other part of the building. At that point in time, without the internet, very little formal information was available. All the data came from long hours of research, library time and letter writing.
Stewart Brand
I drew inspiration from many places, including an interesting book by Stewart Brand called How Buildings Learn. A treatise on how buildings start out in one configuration when newly constructed then slowly morph into different and many times unrecognizable variations as time and successive owners have their way with them.
I used this information and my experiences as a builder to produce a master list of items in the typical home where regular attention was needed in order to keep everything working as it should. It was our first, very rough list for maintaining your home. From there I started working on each actual task that needed to be done, including how and when it should happen.
Going pro
About this time, one of my remodel customers asked if I would come out on a regular basis and maintain their home for them. Finally the light went on. If one client wanted this kind of help, surely others would too. A business idea was born and shortly after Home Preservation Services was launched.
Home Preservation (now HPS Palo Alto Inc.) was formed in 1993 to provide homeowners with the first version of home services needed for properly maintaining your home. HPS steadily added clients and in 1997 one of them, Jonathon Axelrod, and his friend Brad Husick proposed formalizing a business plan for a major expansion. The resulting plan, called for mass marketing the service. It did not prove feasible, but their big-picture vision was extremely helpful in refining the local service. Brad Husick’s friendship, mentorship and always-positive attitude was especially helpful and motivating when things got difficult.
Stewardship means maintaining your home
HPS’s primary service has evolved into “Stewardship.” What is Stewardship? Stewardship in the context of homeownership would be to plan and execute the post construction care needed for any construction worthy of proper care. Stewardship provides the tasks and actions that are needed to preserve your home in an impeccable condition at all times. Examples of stewardship tasks include regular general inspections, preventive maintenance (monitoring, testing, adjustments, lubrication, debris removal, filter changes), timely repairs, proactive replacements, groundskeeping, housekeeping, pest controls and 24×7 support.
Timeless Projects
The concept of a timeless project is ancient, but it runs counter most thinking in today’s disposable world. Cathedral builders embraced the idea centuries ago, mainly for self preservation. Medieval times were brutal and it was not uncommon for builders to be subject to imprisonment or even execution as a consequence for mistakes and shoddy work. As a result, the builders became very astute at building-in durability and providing for proper stewardship of the structure after construction.
Timeless projects are legacy constructions meant to span generations. They include only good design elements, the most durable materials and the best workmanship to construct and assemble them. Design elements are incorporated that not only look and feel good but support longevity and serviceability. Materials are selected to properly endure their particular use and environment. And if a delicate material is contemplated, then allowances for its protection and maintenance are included. Workmanship would consist of following best practices and use of quality control and documentation.
To achieve timeless projects requires Stewardship. The providing for the care of the structure far off into the future. I would like to see wide adoption of the concept of Timeless Projects. The approach would extend the expected life of the home, improve the efficiency of operation, reduce the costs to operate and carbon footprint, eliminate disasters and provide a safer and more enjoyable experience for the homeowner. Exactly what I hoped to do with HPS, and to inspire with this website.
HPS Palo Alto, Inc. is located on the SF Peninsula not far from Stanford University and provides Stewardship services to several hundred homes. If you live in the Silicon Valley and want proper care for your fine home, but can’t or don’t want to do it yourself, HPS is the company to rely on.
Help me to help you
Thank you for taking time to use this free website. I hope you find the junk-free information here fun and useful? Please send me your comments and feedback.
Writing and maintaining the information in this manual is a lot of hard work. By sharing these pages with your friends, you help me to continue the effort. You can easily share these pages to all your favorite social media sites via the shortcut buttons on the sidebar. You can also simply email the page link to your friends. Please share often.
The very best way to help me happens when you use the embedded links to buy things. Using a link is easy and free, yet it provides a great source of support for this site. The vendors I’ve chosen to link to have proven to be trustworthy and are the very best resources available. That is why I recommend them personally.
HomePreservationManual.com is the place to visit if you want information on
- maintaining your home
- how to improve air quality
- ways to improve the real value of your home
- what are the best housekeeping services
- the problems with handymen services
- how to plan and execute home maintenance, renovation and home improvement projects
- tips for spring cleaning; tidying up a messy house
- and generally how to be a better homeowner.
Make sure you download your monthly maintenance checklist for this month.
Linking to this site
Do you want to link to anything on this site? Please do! Go right ahead. It would be an honor to be a resource on your site. Always feel free to link to anything you find helpful. Please link away and thanks!
Thank you!
Copyright and permission to use information.
If you have questions or just want to say hi, please send me a note. Want help performing the home maintenance work described? Go to HPS Palo Alto Inc. and request a free evaluation.
Remember it is unlawful to make copies including cut and paste or especially making printouts for reuse. If you wish to make a print for personal use, I will happily grant you one-time permission. Kindly send me a request in writing.
Thanks again!
