In these economic times, and having been a homeowner for many years, I’ve learned a few things that save a 50.00 fee here and there, which adds up mightily. I thought I’d invite other tricks and turns—

Sprinkler heads. So you hit it with the mower. You call repair and they charge you mightily. What did they do?

First of all, sprinkler systems use 1 of 2 sizes of line. Mostly it’s 1″ sprinkler hose, and 1″ fittings. You need: a shovel. Dig down to the place where the head T’s on to the line. The head should unscrew. Be careful not to get dirt down into it: surrounding the work area with paper towel is not a bad move. You take the broken head to Lowe’s or Home Depot, buy one that has the ‘pattern’ you want: they come as full-circle, 3/4 circle sweep, half, etc. Take it home, screw it on, fill in the hole.

Say you’ve got a head that’s buried behind bushes and wasting water. You can cut down the bush. You can also raise the head to a wand type: you dig down, remove the head, go to the store and get an extension that will screw onto the T and shower ABOVE the bush.

Say you’ve got a restricted water situation and want to water without throwing it for yards and yards. Lowes’. Get a little distributor head for a drip system. You cannot combine the spray sort and drip sort on the same section of sprinkler. You may want to cap wasteful heads (they sell that too), and run dedicated drip lines to the specific plantings you want to water. 

Fertilizing your lawn: get one of the Scott’s handheld distributors, instead of the rolling sort: better distribution, cheaper, stores in a cabinet, and does a pattern that won’t burn your lawn.

Winterizing your outdoor faucets/sprinkling system. Consult your plumber on his next visit and get him to install an unscrewable tap-screw AND a lever-valve on those lines. When winter comes, instead of paying somebody 50.00 to blow out your lines and shut down the faucets, you throw the lever that cuts them off, open them to drain, and remove that little tap-screw, which admits air to the line to totally dry it out. For a sprinkling system, run them once with no water: blows out the line and does no damage. To reverse it in spring, put in the tap-screw, throw the lever to ‘open’ and you have water, having saved yourself another 50.00 charge.

painting fences and houses: here’s where you can pay 5000.00 or…200.00 plus a hundred for paint. I got a tank-type paint sprayer (Wagner). Two of us painted the freestanding double garage-plus-work-area inside about 4 hours. Painting the fence would take you, oh, about 2 hours. It’s not skilled labor. You just need two sane people and a reliable ladder. Hint: re-paint BEFORE the paint peels: saves you tons of work.

replacing fence sections. Piece of cake. Take your measurement. Buy your sections pre-made if it’s stockade. Take a stout hammer, whack the bad sections loose: use a post hole digger and some ready-mix concrete to reset a post or two if needed. If it’s a built fence, like ours, just buy more planks, some 2×4 and the pre-made sockets they also sell, and measure nicely. We built onto our fence and it looks better than the rest of the fence. That’s about a 300-500.00 job, that ought to cost practically nothing but materials.

Garden path and steps. Get a level. A bigggg one. Excavate your path with a mattock, pour builders sand, level, wiggle stones into place: check level. Lift stone and remove sand or add sand as needed. A plan and a level are all you need, plus the stone and sand. U-do-it: cost of stone and sand. They do it: another 5000.00 bill.

Edging a flowerbed: get some stakes and a 2×12. Dig down. Way down. A sharpshooter shovel is a big help (12″ rectangular blade). So is a mattock. Screw the stakes onto that board. Get a mallet and hammer it down, then level. Even bermuda grass can’t find its way under that barrier, and you have a little lip that will hold your mulch in. Cost: a board and some pre-made stakes.

Electricity: call an electrician unless you’re VERY sure you know what you’re doing: it’s cheaper to be right.

Getting electricity to a new ceiling fan? Wire it to a swag-chain, like an oldfashioned swag lamp, run it to a wall plug. We also did this in apartments, where we couldn’t have messed with the wiring. We did a cloth cover for the wire in one instance, just decorative. Ceiling hook holes and attachment holes for a fan can be spackled and Kilz’ed into perfect, pristine whiteness. We never had a complaint. Saves a couple of hundred dollars.

Installing a new sink: be sure you have the Same Size sink as the previous hole in the counter top. You can make it larger, but you can’t make it smaller. Be sure. Then you turn off the water, disconnect the pipes, unscrew the clamps from the underside, remove sink, install new, reverse process. Piece of cake unless you’ve got a size difference. Plumbing bill averted. Don’t forget to teflon-tape the connections.