Teach Your Kids Home Repairs as Part of Your Homeschool Day

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If you are the DIY type, summer is an excellent time to roll up your sleeves and get to work on some projects. However, if you are homeschooling and want to teach your children, you don’t have to wait until summertime (or whenever you take a break). A great way to teach your kids life skills when it comes to home repairs and maintenance is to incorporate them into your daily life. Whether you have green fingers or you are a bit more technical, there are some excellent ideas to work on in the article below. Consider painting an accent wall, upcycling your furniture, decluttering your living space, changing light bulbs, or improving your lawn by upgrading your lawnmower, and more! These simple home maintenance and repairs are valuable life skills to teach older kids and even young children.

One day your kids will have their own homes, and most likely, they will want your assistance. However, teaching some basic skills and simple repairs now is an easy way to help them develop a great work ethic and problem-solving skills and get the whole family involved in keeping a clean house that is well maintained. Some of these tasks are more involved, and you want your children to learn these skills under adult supervision. After they have learned some basic home maintenance, you may want to pay them for some of these odd jobs.

Paying family members to help with DIY projects or home maintenance tasks will teach them a valuable lesson about financial literacy. It also can be an effective way for them to learn money management and the value of hard work.

Life Skills: Simple Home Maintenance and Repairs

Repaint the Home 

Painting the home is a simple and enjoyable DIY task to undertake at any time of the year, but it’s particularly relevant in the summer months when you need some new inspiration. Most people feel different during different seasons; in the winter, there is a tendency to experience a low mood, but the opposite is the case in the summer when we can soak up the lovely sunlight.    

Consider creating an accent wall in your home that you can change depending on the season. An accent wall is an excellent way to vary the atmosphere of your home depending on your mood or the weather outside. It’s also good to pay attention to your outdoor items around your patio during summer. Use some quality stain to touch up your wooden fences and deck area. 

Teaching your children how to paint inside and outside the home are skills that can lead to part-time or even full-time employment later. Additionally, they will thank you for these valuable lessons when they have houses of their own.

Upcycle Furniture 

Whether it is for inside the home or outside in the garden, upcycled furniture is an excellent way to update your home and contribute to the circular economy. The circular economy is a process of manufacturing without waste. Instead, items are kept in circulation for as long as possible and then broken down to be recycled. Furniture is one of the best home items to upcycle and reuse. 

Why not visit your local secondhand stores this spring and summer to see if you can grab a bargain? Secondhand furniture is excellent to work with as it tends to be high quality, inexpensive, and work updating to give it a new life in your home. If you have a patio, garden room, or decking area, you should be able to find some eye-catching units and chairs. 

If you allow your children to work with furniture, whether painting, simple upholstery, or stripping and staining, second-hand furniture is a great place to start. Furthermore, consider asking your online friends if they are getting rid of any furniture that your children can use. There’s a good chance that you know people who would be happy to donate to your cause.

Simple Home Maintenance and Repairs: Declutter the Home 

Stress is a common complaint for most people. In simple terms, it is a fight or flight response that evolved to keep us safe from life-threatening predators in the past, but it is experienced today in a number of ways. Usually, an external event like a threat or some clutter usually sends a signal to the amygdala – the emotion center – that changes the nervous system. 

Surprisingly, clutter in the home can have such an effect on the brain and cause feelings of anxiety and stress for adults and children. Summer is a great time to declutter the home and make it clean and fresh. Make radical choices when decluttering by selling things and sending things to thrift stores. 

While decluttering your home you may find items that you need to put on your home maintenance and repair list.

Get your children involved in the decluttering process by having them go through their own items and donate or give away things they are not using, such as old toys or clothing. Have your children help plan a yard sale. Yard sales or flea markets are good ways to get rid of a lot of items in a short period of time. When the yard sale is done, don’t bring the items back into the home. Immediately load them up in your vehicle and take them to your local donation center.

Power Washing the House/Deck

While painting the house or shutters can improve the look, power washing the house (especially if you have vinyl siding) is one of the simple things you can do to teach practical skills while making your home look fantastic. If you don’t have a power washer, you can always rent one at a local rental center. However, be advised older teens should do this task. Also, wear proper safety equipment such as safety glasses or goggles. The force of the water coming out of a power washer could cause severe damage to the skin.

Manage Your Lawn 

Children can begin to help in the yard at a young age. Even the littlest children can do two tasks: picking up sticks and raking leaves.

If you are the DIY type, you probably have a garden in which you spend lots of time. A garden is a lovely way to stay occupied in your home and create something beautiful for your family, but gardening can also be hard work. Gardening is one of the tasks in which the entire family can be involved.

Simple things, such as lawnmower maintenance and repairing the cord on your lawnmower, are items your older kids should learn.

Find out how to replace a lawn mower pull cord by yourself, and you can save time and get your grass cut sooner. A lawn mower pull cord should be replaced regularly, especially when it frays. The good news is that lawn mower pull cords are straightforward to change when you follow quality instructions. And most lawnmowers have the same processes. Even if your kids are ready to learn how to change the pull cord independently, they probably will love watching you do it. 

Changing Air Filters

Your children should learn about the maintenance of everyday household items. The furnace filter is easy to change, but if your children grow up and don’t know about furnace filters, they may be living in their house for a long time and never change it. It is essential to teach them how to find what type of filter they will need, navigate a hardware store and where to find the filters, and install the new filter.

Changing a Light Bulb

While talking about changing a light bulb seems silly, specific tasks associated with light bulbs are not silly. This simple home maintenance may turn into a costly repair if you don’t know what you are doing. What happens when the light bulb breaks off in the socket? Knowing how to cut the power to that socket, and then you can cut a potato in half and use the cut end to insert in the socket to remove the broken light bulb, is an essential skill. Sometime in their life, they will need to use that knowledge.

Repairing a Leaky Faucet

I once had a friend tell me about how she paid to have her one-year-old leaky faucet replaced. She never considered fixing the leaky faucet. There is a proper way to repair each faucet, and a simple YouTube video can show you how to do this repair. Allow your child to look up faucet repairs and undertake the repair independently. Show them how to turn off the water to ensure you don’t end up with water damage to your cabinets and kitchen counters.

More Home Maintenance and Repairs

Installing Smoke Detectors and Changing the Batteries

If you don’t have smoke detectors in your home, set a good example and go out and buy them and put them up today! Another basic life skill is changing the batteries in the smoke detector. Teach your children to test the smoke detector and change the batteries regularly. January 1 and June 1 are good days to select or when we turn the clocks forward and back.

TIP: At the same time you install or change the smoke detectors’ batteries, check the fire extinguishers. Also, go over the fire escape plan with your kids.

Install Solar Lights 

Solar power technology is constantly improving, so there has never been a better time to invest in solar power for your home and garden. Not only is solar power better for the environment, but it reduces your household bills at a time when power bills are rising across the board. If you can’t afford solar panels, install solar yard lights instead. 

Solar garden lights are an excellent idea; they soak up solar radiation throughout the day, giving you free illumination for your garden after the sun sets. Why not enjoy free lighting on your patio or pathway thanks to quality solar light in the style of classic London streetlights or motion-sensing solar lights that detect movement in your garden, alerting you to trespassers?  

These lights can be installed easily with the help of your children. Make sure to pick up some solar lights the next time they are on sale.  

Teaching your children simple home maintenance and repairs are life skills that ensure you won’t be getting a phone call every time something goes wrong after your children move out. Now, if you are a mama who loves to talk with your kids, you might not mind those phone calls, but it would be better to talk about how they fixed something because they learned it from you years ago. Or better yet, the grandkids can tell you all about how mom or dad taught them to fix a leaky faucet.

For age-appropriate chores, check out this free resource – Printable Chore Chart.

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