Maintaining your home and surroundings in the times of Covid19 lockdown

In these unfortunate times of home quarantine and prolonged lockdowns due to the unfortunate ongoing corona virus pandemic worldwide—technically termed as #Covid2019 or simply as #Covid19—the practical problem of maintaining one's home and surrounding areas become a big challenge apart from saving oneself from getting infected from the dangerous virus.

Image source: Open web (Unknown original creator)

Apart from restricted personnel movement, the basic services and amenities have also got affected in many ways.

Although professional and domestic maintenance services have varied a lot in terms of availability, cost, liability, etc. depending on which part of the world you are putting up, yet the common denominator worldwide has been the factor that everybody do need a helping hand once a while towards home maintenance and home improvement jobs.

And, we are not talking about the new constructions here. The common households require assistance from the gentry of the likes of plumbers, electricians, gardeners, painters, upholsters, home cleaners, audio-visual equipment up keepers, electronic gadget technicians, etc. etc. etc. The list would simply go on and on and on.

So, in the current lockdown conditions, what can homeowners and residents do if they require something to get mend which has gone wrong or berserk at their respective homes? In such situations, organized society type colonies and gated communities are still better as most of such establishments have had their own service and maintenance staffs, who are still available at the beck and call. The only problem to them is that replacement and add-on material is not easily available from the stores due to shutdowns and non-supply issues.

But, there is large proportion of common residents who used to rely upon their local support system of technicians for sundry works. And, now when things have come to almost a standstill, with people instructed/ asked to remain indoors to negate community infection of the virus, getting broken or gone-bad utilities back to work has become a herculean task in its own.

A few of common suggestion and best practices to tide over these testing times of Covid19 are listed hereunder as general guidelines and for safer implementation:

• It would be wise for households to keep a few checks that their utilities and fixtures DO NOT GO BAD as far as possible during these difficult times.
• As far as possible, maintain your households with utmost care that things remain functional on their own.
• Look out for your inventory of replacements and repair stuff, and keep them in ready-to-utilize locations. Things like spare light fixtures, sanitary fixtures, tools and tackles, stepping ladders, safety kit (PPE stuff), etc. must be located well in time, and kept at a location which is easy to fathom at time of need.
• Try putting on just one or max two lighting fixtures in any one area or room so that chances of things going bad are less; and that even if one circuit goes bad, another is still functional.
• Do not allow members of the house, especially the kids, to mishandle utilities (sanitary fixtures, electrical switches and sockets, gadgetry, tools, etc., which may help negating chances of their going bad, as far as possible.
• Search for a list of service providers that the local government or authority might have put up in place in times of emergency. Some of these services may be tagged under essential services as well.

In case you come up with more of such important dos and don'ts for locked down times, share them by way of email or comments.

Lets all try to stay indoors, and stay safe for everyone. 

As the age old adage goes: 

This (difficult time) too shall pass! Take care. Stay well. Stay prepared.

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