The small-job list: twelve things worth booking in one visit

Every house has one. It starts as a couple of jobs and grows quietly until it is a page of small annoyances that you have stopped seeing. The reason it never gets done is almost never the money. It is that no single item on the list feels worth booking someone for.

Which is exactly the argument for booking them all at once. Here is what actually fits in a visit, and roughly how long each one takes.

The quick wins, ten to thirty minutes each

• A picture or mirror hung on a proper fixing, rather than the hook that came with it. Twenty minutes and the single most common cause of a hole in a wall.
• Loose handles and knobs on cupboards, doors and windows, tightened or replaced. Ten to twenty minutes each and they change how a kitchen feels.
• A ceiling fitting or rose swapped for something better looking. About forty five minutes each.
• A toilet seat replaced. Forty five minutes and one of the easiest quality of life improvements in the house.
• A shower head or handset replaced. Forty five minutes, and worth doing at the same time as anything else in that bathroom.

The ones that take an hour

• A sticking door adjusted at the hinges. Forty five minutes to an hour. Adjusting the hinges rather than sanding the door keeps the gap right when the door dries out again.
• A cupboard door rehung on new hinges, or a hinge plate that has pulled out of the chipboard properly repaired. About an hour per door.
• A curtain rail fitted on a standard window. An hour to ninety minutes, and worth doing all the windows in a room in the same visit.
• A flat pack bed base and headboard assembled. An hour to ninety minutes.
• A dripping tap sorted with a new washer or cartridge. About an hour, and worth grouping with the toilet seat while the tools are out.

The ones that earn their own slot

• A TV bracket on a brick wall, one to ninety minutes depending on the bracket. Check which wall before you buy the bracket, because a hollow partition changes the plan.
• Silicone stripped and redone around a bath or basin. Ninety minutes to two hours, because the old seal has to come out completely and the joint has to be dry before the new one goes in.

How to sort the list

The practical rule is by room, not by type. A handyman moving between a bathroom and a kitchen all morning spends more time walking than working. Group everything that lives in the same room together and the visit gets shorter, which means a shorter visit and a better price.

Second rule: put anything that needs a specific fitting at the end of the list, not the start. If a part is wrong or missing, it should not be holding up ten other jobs.

Write the list down before you send it. A mental list loses about a third of its items the moment someone arrives and starts working.

What to have ready

• Any fittings you have already bought, out of the packaging and on site.
• Photos of walls where anything needs mounting, especially if the wall type is unclear.
• A rough idea of what is stored in anything being strengthened, because a shelf holding tinned food needs different support to one holding cereal boxes.
• A note of which jobs you have already tried to fix, and what happened. It narrows the cause faster than anything else.

The short version

Five or six small jobs is roughly two hours, which is the minimum booking on most handyman rates anyway. If your list is longer than that, leave it as one list and ask for both a half day and full day price. The per-job cost drops sharply the more of the list goes into one visit.