One thing I’ve learned from my dad over the years is that it’s better to work at maintaining something than to wait until it’s broken to fix it.

Regular maintenance if often much easier and less expensive than repairing or replacing an item.

The problem is that it takes some time and effort along the way.

This “maintenance mindset”, as I’ve decided to call it, is not much fun for me. But I’ve learned my lesson in the last few years (as you’ll read below) that my dad’s way of taking care of things is probably best.

Make Life Easier With a “Maintenance Mindset”

Vehicle

Regular vehicle maintenance can help keep larger problems at bay.

The most obvious tasks are (1) getting the oil changed and (2) getting new tires when needed. Not keeping up with those basic maintenance tasks might leave you stranded on the side of the road and/or with a very expensive repair bill.

Sometimes with vehicles, there are warning signs before something goes really wrong, like a strange noise that wasn’t there before. It’s easy to ignore warning signs because the car is probably still driving just fine. https://bellevuehealthcare.com Until it’s not.

Example #1: We had a problem with a car a while back where it occasionally wouldn’t start unless you kept trying and wiggled things just right. That was probably a warning sign.

Did we take the car in? Nope!

One day, it wouldn’t start at all. Of course, this was on Austin’s first week of a new job. We had to push the car from our house to a repair shop (luckily, it wasn’t too far) and Austin was super late for work after he was able to borrow a car from his parents.

We would have saved a lot of time and frustration if we had just taken care of the vehicle.

Example #2: In case you think I learn my lessons quickly, here’s another one, haha!

By the very end of summer one year, the A/C in our car wasn’t getting very cold. It probably just needed to be recharged but since we were going into winter, I didn’t worry about it.

By the next summer, when I had it looked at we were told that the whole system had gone bad and would cost over $1,000 to fix! This was most likely because I didn’t get it fixed right away.

Taking care of it immediately would have been less expensive and much less hassle. We were without air conditioning for the summer and it was very unpleasant.

I’m trying to have more of a maintenance mindset with our car. I want to get things fixed as soon as I notice a problem in hopes of saving time, money, and my sanity.

House

Owning a home requires a lot of maintenance. If we can catch something before it gets bad, we can often fix it ourselves. If not, we might have to call in a professional and pay a lot more to fix a much bigger problem.

Example #3: At our first house, I didn’t do a good job at keeping up with the weeds in our yard.

Within a few years, it was a major battle to try to have nice grass. The yard became completely overrun with weeds.

After two summers of trying to do it myself, I looked into having a company come out and help. Their prices were crazy-high! We ended up moving that summer, so we didn’t end up paying for professional help. If we had stayed in that house, we would have had to, though.

I’m trying much harder to keep up with the weeds in the yard at our new house!

We’re also trying to work at other regular maintenance tasks before they become a big problem.

My dad has always been good at taking care of regular vehicle and home maintenance. I’d rather not think about these things simply because it takes some time, effort, and money.

However, once something is broken and needs to be repaired or replaced, it has ended up costing me even more money than maintenance would have cost. Plus, it’s super frustrating. I’m getting better at having a maintenance mindset and it’s definitely worth it.

Happy Father’s Day to my dad and any other fathers out there reading this! To everyone else, this is your official reminder to get your oil changed 🙂

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