The five things your house is charging you

Before you spend a dollar on a renovation, your house is already charging you. Not in money. In effort, every day, in five ways. Most people feel the charge without ever naming it, which is why they end up paying for changes that never touch the hard part of the day.

Here are the five. Once you can name them, you can find where your house charges most, and that's what you renovate.

1. Steps

How far you walk to do a thing. From the bed to the bathroom. From the front door to somewhere you can sit down. From the fridge to the stove and back, six times, to make one meal. Stairs are steps with a cost multiplier.

Steps add up quietly because each one is small. Count them for one ordinary task and the number is usually a surprise.

2. Reaches

Where you bend, stretch or twist to get at something. The plate on the top shelf. The pan in the bottom cupboard. The outlet behind the couch. The light switch that's around the corner from where you actually need light.

Reaches cost most when they happen above your shoulder or below your knee, or when you're holding something. Those are also the easiest to move.

3. Transfers

Where your body has to change position. Sitting to standing. Standing to sitting. Getting into bed and out of it. Onto the toilet, off it. Into the shower, into the car. A transfer is the moment most likely to go wrong on a bad day, and the one most houses give you nothing to hold onto for.

4. Minutes

How long a task keeps you going. Standing at the sink through the dishes. Standing in the shower. Standing at the counter chopping. Minutes aren't a problem on a good day. On a bad day they're the reason a task gets skipped, and a house with nowhere to sit while you do things charges minutes for everything.

5. Hands

Where the house needs a hand you don't have free. A round door knob when you're carrying a laundry basket. A shower door you hold open while stepping over the tub edge. A drawer you need two hands to open. A key, a bag and a step at the front door, all at once.

Hands are the cost people notice least and the one that most often decides whether a task is possible one-handed on a bad day.

Write it down, room by room

Walk the house on an ordinary day. In each room, notice which of the five it charges you and where. Three sentences per room is enough:

Bathroom. Transfer onto the toilet with nothing to hold. Minutes standing in the shower. Reach for the towel with wet hands.

Kitchen. Reaches above the shoulder for every plate. Minutes at the counter with nowhere to sit. Steps to the pantry across the room.

Do the whole house. Then mark which of these only bother you on a bad day. Those are the ones nobody else in the house notices, and they're the ones that matter.

Pick the five that matter most

You'll have a page of lines. You don't renovate a page. Pick the five that cost you most right now, and put them in order.

That list is what you renovate from. Every decision in the project gets checked against it: does this change touch one of the five? If not, it's a change you're paying for that doesn't change your day.

It's also the list that turns a product into a requirement. "I need a walk-in shower" is a product. "The shower charges me a transfer over the tub edge and ten minutes standing" is a cost, and the requirement follows from it: no step, somewhere to sit. Start from the cost and you often find a better answer than the product you had in mind, and sometimes a cheaper one.

What this list is for

It's the first thing the course has you write, because the whole rest of the method checks itself against it. It's also the first thing I ask about on a consultation call. And it's what the free guide, The Decisions Your Renovation Makes Without You, assumes you've done before it tells you which decisions close when. Short, large print. Sign up and the download is yours.