Orla

Write the date on the inside of a cupboard door or take a photo of the invoice. In four years you will not remember, and that is how people end up in your position wondering when it was last done.

Before the inspection, go find your toilets and check for a silent runner. Put a few drops of food colouring in the cistern, wait 20 minutes without flushing, and look in the bowl. One leaking flapper can push hundreds of gallons a day into a system that would otherwise be fine, and it's invisible until someone tells you to look.

Old buildings make it worse in a second way: long runs of narrow pipe shared between many rooms. One flush on a 15mm branch feeding six bathrooms is a much bigger event than one flush on your house's supply.

Water came out of the schrader. So it's a new tank. Is nine years about right for one to go?

It does it on the outside hose bib too, wide open, so I don't think it's the shower valve.

Add leaving the door and the detergent drawer open between washes. It's the single change that stopped ours coming back.

Put a tray on the shelf underneath. Sticky patches are often oil that ran down the side and pooled at the bottom edge, and a tray also saves you scrubbing the oven floor.

It's the trick that makes you feel like a wizard for about a fiver. Keep a spare T20 and T25 in the drawer purely for sacrificing to stripped screws.

Order of things to try, cheapest first.

1. Get the paint out of the recess. A sharp awl or a small nail and a tap of a hammer, then blow it out. Half of all stripped screws are actually paint filled screws and this alone sometimes fixes it.

2. Tap a Torx bit one size larger than looks right into the head with a hammer. T20 or T25 for a typical number 8 screw. The points bite into what's left of the recess and it grips shockingly well.

3. Screw extractor set, about £12. Reverse taper bit, run the drill in reverse, it digs in and backs the screw out. This is what they're for and it works.

Also, whatever you use, push hard. Most stripping is from not enough downward force, not from the wrong bit.

This is the calculation that everybody skips and then wonders why the softener regenerates constantly and never quite keeps up.

Small nuance on chargers: an old, cheap, unbranded one from ten years ago can genuinely draw a watt or two idle, and a few of those get warm, which is the real reason I don't leave the very old ones plugged in. Modern ones are essentially asleep.

Middle path since you've got fourteen: buy two decent enclosed-rated bulbs, put them in the two fixtures that are on the most, and leave the cheap ones in the hallway that gets four minutes a day. Failure follows run hours, so you don't need to spend the same everywhere.