Five small repairs that get expensive if you wait

One: a toilet that rocks

Costs now: a toilet lifted, a new wax ring, new bolts, perhaps a flange repair.

Costs later: subfloor replacement, and in an upstairs bathroom the ceiling below it.

Every time the toilet moves it breaks the seal to the drain, and what escapes goes sideways under the flooring where nobody sees it. By the time there is a soft spot in the floor or a stain on a downstairs ceiling, the repair has moved from plumbing to carpentry. Shimming it stops the wobble and does nothing about the seal.

Two: caulk that has let go in a shower

Costs now: a couple of hours to cut out, clean, dry and reseal.

Costs later: tile off, board out, framing checked, tile back. A different order of magnitude, and a different trade.

The joint where the tub or pan meets the tile is the one place in a bathroom where water is directed at a seam every single day. Open caulk lets it behind the tile, into the board, and eventually into the framing. The warning sign is not the look of the caulk — it is the tile feeling slightly springy when you press above the joint.

Three: a shutoff valve that weeps

Costs now: one valve, in the same visit as something else.

Costs later: whatever a failed valve empties onto your floor while nobody is home.

A valve that drips a little from the stem when you turn it has told you it is finished. The failure mode is not a gradual increase; old valves tend to let go properly, often while being turned in a hurry during some other emergency. This is the cheapest item on the list and the one most worth doing while nothing is wrong.

Four: a cabinet door or drawer that has started to sag

Costs now: twenty minutes, a plugged screw hole, perhaps a new hinge.

Costs later: a new door, or a new drawer box, because the hinge has torn out of the panel.

A hinge screw that has lost its grip puts all the load on a smaller and smaller patch of particleboard. Once it tears through the face of a cabinet door there is nothing to screw into, and doors are not sold singly in a kitchen. The warning is the door hanging a few millimetres low, which everyone lives with for a year.

Five: a bathroom fan that has stopped moving air

Costs now: a like-for-like replacement on the same duct and the same circuit.

Costs later: mould remediation, repainting, and sometimes drywall.

A fan that spins but no longer pulls is doing nothing, and what it is failing to remove is a few litres of water a week in the air. That goes into paint, grout, window frames and the ceiling. You can test it with a square of toilet paper held to the grille: if the fan will not hold it up, it is not working regardless of the noise it makes.

What is not on this list

Plenty of things genuinely can wait, and it is worth saying so. A cracked outlet cover, a sticking door that still latches, a hairline crack above a doorway, a slow drip from a faucet spout that lands in the sink rather than the cupboard, a scuffed baseboard. None of those are damaging anything. They can go on the list for whenever there is a reason to have somebody out.

That is the whole distinction worth learning: is it breaking something more expensive than itself? If no, it can wait until there are four others to do with it.