Home Maintenance near you

The Scottish standard is the broadest in the United Kingdom because it applies to all tenures. Every home must have interlinked alarms: one smoke alarm in the living room or the most frequently used room, one in every hallway and landing, and a heat alarm in the kitchen, all mounted on the ceiling. Interlinking means that when one alarm goes off they all go off, which is the point of the requirement - a fire that starts in a downstairs kitchen has to wake somebody upstairs. A carbon monoxide detector is required where there is a carbon-fuelled appliance such as a boiler, fire, heater or wood burner in the room, though not for a gas cooker or hob. Where a space is open plan, one alarm can serve it if every point is within 7.5 metres, and it must be a heat alarm if the area includes a kitchen. The Scottish Government is explicit that meeting the standard is the property owner's responsibility.

England's regime is narrower in scope and sits on landlords. The Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015 require a smoke alarm to be equipped on each storey of the premises on which there is a room used wholly or partly as living accommodation, and a carbon monoxide alarm in any room used as living accommodation that contains a fixed combustion appliance other than a gas cooker. The 2022 amendments, which took effect on 1 October 2022, added the duty to check on the first day of a new tenancy that the prescribed alarms are in working order, and to repair or replace an alarm as soon as reasonably practicable once a tenant reports that it is not working.

For an owner-occupier in England, Wales or Northern Ireland that leaves alarms as a matter of good practice rather than statute, and the Scottish specification is a reasonable template to copy voluntarily: alarms on every level, interlinked if you are replacing them anyway, a heat alarm rather than a smoke alarm in the kitchen, and a carbon monoxide alarm wherever fuel is burned.

Late summer and early autumn are when the outside work has to happen. Gutters cleared before the leaves finish falling, downpipes and gullies run through, roof flashings looked at while the weather still allows it, external timber repaired and painted while there is enough warmth to cure the paint, and outside taps drained before the first hard frost. Leaving all of that until November means doing it in the rain, badly.

Midwinter is diagnosis season rather than work season. It is the only time of year when you can see where a house is genuinely cold, where condensation forms and where a draught actually comes from, so it is the right moment to walk round with a notebook. Government guidance on damp and mould distinguishes condensation from penetrating damp, rising damp and leaks, and the distinction is much easier to make when the heating is on and the weather is against the wall.

Spring is for catching up and for the checks that need daylight. Anything that failed over winter shows itself as staining, lifted paint or a damp corner, external decoration becomes possible again, and it is a sensible point to test alarms, service window and door hardware, and reinstate the outside tap. Splitting the year into an autumn preparation visit and a spring inspection visit covers most of what a house needs.

Blocked gutters are the outstanding example. Water overflowing at a joint runs down the wall for an entire winter, saturates the masonry and shows up inside as a damp patch that gets blamed on rising damp. The repair is a ladder and twenty minutes; the consequence of skipping it for three years is redecoration, and sometimes plaster.

Pipework in unheated spaces is the second. A loft, a garage, an outbuilding and the run to an outside tap all freeze, and a split copper pipe does not leak until it thaws, which is usually when nobody is watching. Lagging is cheap and is the single most cost-effective thing on an autumn list.

The third is a fault that gets reported and not diagnosed. A recurring stain, a fan that has stopped working, a door that is harder to close each year, a musty cupboard - each is a symptom that a maintenance visit is well placed to catch early, and each becomes much more expensive once it has been painted over twice. The value of a standing arrangement is mostly in noticing, not in the work itself.

Maintenance is priced on the round, so the things that move it are the size and height of the property, how much of the work is at height and what access equipment that needs, how many separate items are on the fixed list, how often the visits happen, whether materials and consumables are included, whether the property is occupied or empty between tenancies, and how far the tradesperson travels. A terraced house with a single gutter run is a very different round from a detached house with a conservatory, a garage and a flat roof.

LokalMatch is how you compare those rounds without ringing round yourself. Describe the property, the interval you want and the jobs you care about most, add your postcode, and maintenance and handyman businesses covering your area come to you. Homeowners pay nothing to use it and pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not do the maintenance, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend any of the businesses that respond, so insurance, competence at height and what each visit actually includes are the things to check yourself.