I completely agree. If you make thoughtful decisions and stay dedicated, you can reach a point in life where you can start to slow down and enjoy the fruits of your labor. My plan, for example, is to reduce to a four-day workweek once my house is paid off, so I can spend more quality time with the people I care about most. Life requires both hard work and a bit of luck to truly succeed, but with persistence and determination, it’s possible to shape the life you want.
And where’s the list? Like if I could just find a list of like, “Congratulations on being a homeowner, do all this shit because if you don’t the repairs will eat you alive” it would be handy.
Just follow Martha Stewart’s website, you’ll find there are several thousand hours worth of chores you should be doing weekly!
That’s a rough one. I know a good place to start is anything large you buy, make sure you read the maintenance portion of the manual and make a couple notes.
Then I start asking myself about important things like "how do I make sure the plumbing doesn’t get fucked? " or “how do I make sure the furnace doesn’t die?” and I start googling.
Not a great answer but it helps. I recently realized I didn’t give much of a thought to well pump maintenance and I’ve been down a massive rabbit hole on that one. I feel like you just pick one thing at a time and work on it and you learn as you go.
I just moved to a place with a well last year. I’m generally pretty handy but the whole well system is basically a black box to me at this point.
I’d ask you questions but frankly I’m not ready to absorb the information, but I know I’m gonna need to sooner or later. Probably sooner, it’s still the original pump from 1977.
Almost everything in your house has a manual. The furnace, the ac, the water heater, the water softener, the coffee maker, the fridge… they all have manuals. If the people before you weren’t responsible and you don’t have a packet of manuals somewhere, go through everything and download them. They all say exactly how to do maintenance for each thing, and how often.
Other than that it’s mostly looking around and making sure nothing is actively being eaten. Take a flashlight and look around in the attic and basement or crawl space or whatever your can’t normally see and make sure things aren’t moldy or rotting. If you catch things earlier it’s always cheaper and easier.
It took us years to compile the list and it’s paid for itself many times over.
But to jump start the list in a future place, especially a traditional house, I’ve considered hiring a housing inspector or general contractor to give us a walkthrough of key maintenance timelines. Many things could be decades away but easy to forget until it’s a much bigger job. Notes from that interaction would essentially be the bones of “the list.”
My house has bones!? I’m definitely out of my depth…
You don’t refill the bone marrow? You’re fucked pal
We can’t let them find my husband’s bones!
Honestly that sounds like an excellent post in a handyman type of community for compiling a list!
This might have made a good category of thing for me to post back when I made r/ArtisanVideos! Can’t believe I didn’t think of it in the 11 years before Reddit banned me.
Get a french press or clever dripper. Much better coffee, and with the clever, much less mess.
I use a French press. It really is super nice because all the coffee can mix with water then you press it down to filter it. No need for a funnel and wasteful filter paper.
No kettle. No dishwasher. No coffee machine.
Yeah. Adulting is hard :)
The real reason we have disposable products.
Technically quite a few months but the stupid button that is needed for descaling does not work anymore so…
Thank God my water supply is reasonably soft. Never had to descale my kettle.
Thank your lucky stars you’ve never had to descale a toilet…
Well to be fair, you shouldn’t have climbed up that toilet in the first place…
No way. Do you pour vinegar everywhere you can see?
Either that or a pumice stone on a stick and elbow grease!
You have to clean it regularly using a cleaner that descales.
The 20 dollar coffee machine that holds 12 cups doesn’t need descaling
it still does if you have hard enough water
My choice to go with instant coffee is paying dividends!
Instant coffee with a fancy creamer is underrated
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But my body is 60% water!
There are also some really good roasters making their own instant.
I don’t use the aeropress at work anymore. It’s still better than instant, but not having to worry about getting interrupted mid brew is worth the small loss in taste.
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Please explain, I wish to yield a better return on investment of my time and effort when dealing with coffee
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I need to descale my coffee machine. How do I do that?
I usually just run vinegar through it every once in a while and then run a few pots of just water to get rid of any residual vinegar. Beware, it’ll make the house smell like vinegar for the rest of the day.
Might want to try citric or lactic acid instead at a proper dilution.
White vinegar works, or you can pick up “sour salt” in the Kosher section, which is citric acid and since you don’t need much the rest is handy as a substitute for lemon juice. Dilute with plenty of water, run the machine, it removes calcium deposits.
what if i want some tasty calcium in my diet
Oh, that kind has microplastics mixed up in it, and it slows down the coffee maker. You want tasty calcium you’re going to absorb properly, try this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004KWGHCO
(Just the easiest link for a description, not pushing Amazon)
Good call. I was going to suggest citric acid. It’s what we use for our electric kettle.
Read the manual. It might have a descale mode that pushes some descaling chemical through the pipes without heating it.
Source: I did it like a month ago. The water that came out was quite pulpy.
I cannot describe the expression I made at the word “pulpy” but “horrified” is probably as close as I’ll ever get.
It’s best not to think about the non-water stuff that exists in the water pipes. I once had to open up our 200-litre water heater (which supplies the entire house) to replace the heater coil, and now have to live with the knowledge of what, and how much of it, was inside. “Ignorance is bliss” couldn’t be more accurate.
I can live with all the petty little details of day to day life. Even the medical ones as you age.
Pro Tip: when you hit 50, you really need to start looking for that doctor you intend to die on. That doctor will have all those little details documented saving you a whole bunch of time.
The one thing I absolutely hate as someone who has been faking the whole adult thing for decades now, is having to figure out what’s for supper every damn day…
The saddest I’ve seen is a 70 yr old “from a different era” who had to now learn how to make macaroni with cheese for the first time in his life because his partner passed away.
That’s where I think shit has gone really wrong for way too long when trying to adult. Like prepare that you may have to live alone for at least a portion of your life and be the type of person you can stand to be around alone.
As a person is less than a handful of years away from being 70 myself, that person’s problem wasn’t in “being from a different era.” But rather deciding, whether conscious or not, to be passive in life and refusing to learn new things. A a vast number of all of you out there suffer from the same problem. Like expecting someone else to make the macaroni and cheese for you rather than learning how to do it yourself. Many people expect someone else to solve all their problems for them. And then are shocked and surprised when that doesn’t happen as they get older. I learned from my elders on how to solve my own problems. Sometimes by teaching, sometimes by letting me fail and then learning from fixing the problem I had created for myself.
They taught me everything from how to forage the forest, hunt, fish, raise livestock and butcher it, grow a garden, make soap from scratch, repair large and complex machines and many other skills that few can do these days. Most important of all, they taught me that learning never ends. And the day it does, you are dead.
Being alone with myself is dangerous for me because I prefer being alone these days. After a lifetime of being the cavalry coming over the hill to save the day, I’m burnt out and tired of it. I just want to spend my remaining time alone to heal from all the stupid I had to try and fix.
I understand what you are saying and sorry if I made it seem ‘different era ‘ was the excuse I was giving it. It is a common excuse the passives give about their inability to come to their own rescue or take any initiative when it comes to themselves. It doesn’t help that others who are younger also promote the excuse that it’s ’the era they are from’
The one thing I absolutely hate as someone who has been faking the whole adult thing for decades now, is having to figure out what’s for supper every damn day…
Something that seems to work for us is to always have 2-3 oven-ready frozen meals (i.e. lasagna, shepherd’s pie, pizza) in the freezer for the days when we just can’t come up with something, 3-4 semi-planned meals (pick a protein, pick a veg, pick a starch and go), and maybe 1 or 2 specifically planned meals that require us to buy specific ingredients we wouldn’t normally have on hand, and usually those would be made either on the shopping day or the day after.
But the oven-ready meals are really the key part, it’s the emergency meal for when we just don’t have the mental energy to figure something out.
While I do have frozen meals ready to nuke at times, (soups and chili). It still requires malice aforethought to prepare and freeze such things. I really wish I didn’t need to be bothered.
I am still struggling with laundry, fr
Pro-tip - newer HE detergents are very concentrated. Use less than you think you need. A half cap is for highly stained items, we’re talking grass stains, blood, turmeric, etc. You only need a little for most loads. Maybe a quarter cap or less, or a quarter cup if using real measurements.
Also, if you’re using a newer HE washer, also be sure to enable the “extra rinse” on the cycle. They really, really suck at rinsing off detergent by default (especially if you use too much) and will bleach/fade your clothes in the dryer if not fully rinsed.
Wait til you hit 40-50.
You get a new responsibility: taking care of your fossilizing body.
Moisturizing after your shower to prevent dry itchy skin Gel in your mouth to prevent it from drying out during your sleep. Must go to bed at regular times or else you sleep like shitI think the gel thing is a portion of humanity (especially those who need a cpap) and if you don’t have one and you are getting dry mouth you should really look into a sleep test to make sure you’re not on the brink of death every hour as you sleep
Either that or get your nose checked as maybe there’s an issue there that is causing mouth breathing.
thoughts and prayers to the first world problem suffering ‘portion of humanity’ who must apply goo to their skin and mouth at their regular mandated bedtime
That sweet spot when your kids start getting independent and your parents start getting dependent.
This adult doesn’t do coffee. Caffeine capsules washed down with grape flavored carbonated water. My adult issues are the expectations others seem to have of me, like visiting or calling/texting. I usually don’t unless I have business to work out.
See all the maintenance and tracking of physical portions of my adult life are fine. I have plenty of space to remember what devices need what servicing or care, to pay attention to changes in performance or observe wear.
But the cultural and societal stuff is like voodoo magic to me. Surplus cash in escrow, down deposits, and HELOCs, heck even cultural gossip as a standard of conversation. Nah doesn’t do anything for me.
Ask me to manage my physical existence and I can do so indefinitely without complaints. It’s the imaginary adult stuff that is beyond me.
