Introduction
Here’s how to use Propsee to build a customized home maintenance task checklist, scheduled for every month of the year, in 3 steps and 10 minutes.
Step by step
Whether you are a first-time homeowner, just bought a new house, or have owned for many years, having a plan for home maintenance and completing it on a regular basis is very important. Deferred maintenance eventually catches up to your home and can cause costly damage or impact your home’s selling price when it’s time to move.
Experts estimate that homeowners should put aside 1-3% of their home’s total value in a home maintenance budget every year. This means that a $200k house would have $2-6k/yr set aside for maintenance, or around $150-500/mo. Of course, this won’t always be an even cost from month to month. Usually these costs come in seasonal waves or larger repair bills. Regardless, it is an expense that should be planned for when considering how much home you can afford.
So how can you better plan and budget for these tasks?
You could use a spreadsheet or Google Calendar. This is more of a DIY approach but has the advantage of being flexible and free. The disadvantage is you’ll need to start from scratch and compile information from all over the internet on various tutorials in order to be sure you don’t miss anything. You’ll also have to decide if you want a checklist that is monthly, annual, or seasonal and try to capture the tasks that aren’t completed every year. If you’re good with Excel and want to try this, start by browsing our Tutorials to get an idea of what you need to plan for!
Another option is downloading a free printable checklist. We offer this as a download via the link at the bottom of this tutorial as a PDF download. The advantage of this approach is that it is free and easy to print. In the case of our pdf checklist, it also has links to each of the tasks with full tutorials on how to complete every item. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is generic and may have tasks that don’t apply to your home or miss important tasks that do. It also is static, so it won’t give you reminders or a monthly schedule. If you print it, we’re pretty sure the links won’t work either…
The ultimate home maintenance plan would combine the best features of a spreadsheet and PDF. It would be highly customized to your home, give monthly reminders of tasks, allow you to track tasks as they are completed, and have detailed tutorials for each task on the list. This service would have rich content and only include the information that is relevant and important to your home.
Well, lucky for you, we thought this was a great idea and built Propsee to do just that!
Our subscription maintenance app is designed to be customized to your home so you only have the tasks that are relevant to you. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on how you can create your own checklist in 5 minutes. At the end, we encourage you to sign up and give this service a try for yourself. We offer a free 30-day trial with no payment information required up front, so you can set one up for yourself and if you like it you can continue with our annual subscription.
Let’s get started!
Here's a video version of this tutorial:
- Set Up Your Propsee Account
Go to our Plans page and select either the 30-day trial or the full 1-yr subscription. You’ll get the same features with both.
Once you select your plan, you’ll be given an option to insert a Coupon Code if you have one. You’ll then hit Proceed.
After you hit Proceed, you’ll be brought to a page to create your account information. This is pretty self-explanatory.
After your account info, you’ll be asked to select your email preferences. This helps us tailor content you are most interested in.
Be sure to select the checkbox for your automatic task reminders! By clicking this we’ll send you a reminder of your uncompleted task for each month on the 1st and 15th.
After setting up your account, you can always change your email preferences. We’ll show you where that is later.
Click “Register”.
If you chose the 30-day free trial, no payment information is required and you’ll be taken directly to Step 2.
If you signed up for the full paid 1-yr subscription, you’ll be brought to a PayPal module to submit your payment. After you submit, we’ll automatically bring you back to Step 2.
All payments are processed outside of our website through PayPal. We don’t receive or store any credit card or payment information directly. The only interface is a computer API that interacts with PayPal to let us know you paid and then brings you to Step 2.
- Select Your Home’s Features
This is the fun part! You’ll have been brought to a page that looks like this and will walk you through this Step. If you don’t to complete it all now, you can always come back to this tutorial by selecting the “Home” link.
Now you’ll walk through each section and input your home’s information. Fill out as much information as possible. Our proprietary algorithm uses this to match up the tasks specific to you. For example, if you have a tankless water heater but don’t tell us, we won’t be able to give you the annual tutorial on “How to Flush Your Tankless Water Heater”. Some generic items we have defaulted to populate to all homes, just to get you started, but the more information you give us the more we can customize your home maintenance plan.
However, if you don’t know something, just leave it blank or select “I Don’t Know”. We’ll be adding features later to help explain some of the more technical questions that the typical homeowner may not know.
At the end of the section, you’ll see a button to bring you to the next section. Just walk through the checkboxes for each section.
- Complete “General Information” Section
- Complete “Mechanical & Appliance” Section
- Complete “Exterior” Section
- Complete “Lawn & Garden” Section
You’ll notice that as you complete each section, we’ll show you how much information you’ve completed in that section on the right side of the page. Once you get a decent amount, it will turn green. You can always go back and update/add information to that section by selecting it.
Great! Once you finish the last step you’ll be taken to your “My Dashboard” section to see your monthly home maintenance schedule.
- Review Your Annual Maintenance Plan
Your “My Dashboard” section is where your annual maintenance plan lives. Here’s a quick tour of the features.
That’s it! We did our best to make it super easy to make a full monthly home maintenance schedule with our app. Hopefully you’ll find it easy to use and beneficial. If you have questions, comments, or feedback please let us know by emailing us or submitting through our Contact page.
Bonus Info: Navigating Propsee
Here’s some information on how to Navigate other parts of Propsee from your home page.
On each Tutorial, you’ll also find a hyperlinked list of all the tools and materials you need to complete each task. Note these are affiliate links, so if you use them it helps support Propsee!
