The only pressing item on our home maintenance To Do List is "fix gutter." I think it's been there 2 years. Doesn't help that I asked dh to take care of it and he just hasn't.

Knowing this, I have took back ownership of the task, but haven't gotten anywhere myself. It is really hard to find a good, reliable handyman. I am also pretty skeptical about other people's recommendations, which doesn't help. I find most people to be gullible and naive when it comes to most anything that cost money. I tend to better picking people out of the air than with recommendations. Have been recommended quite the scam artists over the years.

That said, I didn't really see any other choice. Was going to ask around with neighbors and on Facebook, and go from there.

Then, hallelujah...

A neighbor had asked for a handyman recommendation. A few days later I got an e-mail from a handyman replying. I read the e-mail and he sounded good on paper, but it wasn't until I got to the end of the e-mail that I saw it was our neighbor. Doh!

He's going to come look at the gutter tomorrow, but assured me it was probably a pretty simple fix, and that we shouldn't need to wash out the gutters. (We never had because there were no big trees around, and I had started to think maybe we should have done more maintenance).

Anyway, all of it is music to my ears.

I can't believe I potentially get to cross that off my list with little impact to the budget. Will see what he says when he actually looks at them!

Our strategy has paid off very well. Buy a new home with high quality materials, and don't do any work on it. We've been here about 10 years and the strategy has worked. We painted the exterior last year (original paint job did not last well - new stucco apparently does that). Dh replaced some toilet parts for $10-ish dollars this year. That's pretty much all that comes to mind besides slowly painting the interior over the years.

But, obviously all our appliances are aging, and we are going to need to find a reliable handyman type one of these days.

All that said, I've learned the hard way and made it a rule to not hire friends for things. So, I have slightly mixed feelings about the whole thing. But, I don't feel I have much other choice at this point. He's a contractor and business is slow. Why I never thought to ask him about this stuff before. But, guess he is hungry for more work.

Crossing my fingers!