Chesterfield, VirginiaEst. 2011Trips to the store: ongoing

The Weekend Fix

The house breaks. I fix it. I write down what it cost.

Marty Hobbs, arms crossed, holding a flathead screwdriver upright, reading glasses forgotten on his forehead

Marty Hobbs

Payroll guy. 1978 ranch. A spreadsheet going back to 2011 and a swear jar I keep funding.

More about me

July 17, 2026 · by Marty Hobbs

Why I track every home repair (the spreadsheet story)

In 1998, three weeks after we closed on this house, the hall bathroom toilet started running. I was 26 and I owned a screwdriver, so naturally I took the tank apart. By midnight the toilet was running worse and the screwdriver was somewhere behind the tank. The plumber came the next morning, fixed my repair and the original problem in 11 minutes, charged me $140, and whistled the whole time. I stood there and watched him do it.

I have been keeping score ever since.

For a while, keeping score just meant grumbling. Then in 2011 a contractor looked at a toilet that would not stop hissing, sucked his teeth, and quoted me $600. I asked what the part cost. He said the part was not really the point. It was a $9 fill valve. I replaced it myself that weekend, 40 minutes and two trips to the hardware store, and that same night I opened a spreadsheet and typed a header row. Date. Job. Minutes I figured. Minutes it took. Parts, to the cent. Trips to the store.

That spreadsheet is 15 years old now. Deb has a name for it that I will not repeat here, because the jar is right there on the counter.

Marty at the kitchen table at night, the spreadsheet glowing on the laptop, a pile of receipts beside the calculator, one moth at the screen

What you'll get here

Every job on this site gets written up the same way, because that is how the spreadsheet works and I am not changing for the internet.

  • The short version first. What broke, what fixed it, what it cost. If that is all you need, take it and go with my blessing.
  • The real numbers. Time I budgeted against time it actually took. I am over budget on almost everything and I print it anyway.
  • The Damage. Every part, every dollar, down to the cent, tax included.
  • What went wrong. Something always goes wrong. That part is usually where the useful advice lives.

For the record, my lifetime average is 2.1 trips to the hardware store per job. You will watch that number move at the side of the page. I am not proud of it. I am not ashamed of it either.

What I will not touch

Gas lines. The electrical panel. Garage door springs. Roofs. Anything structural. The sewer main past the cleanout. A guy has to know his limits, and mine are written down.

When a job lands on that list, I call somebody, I pay the man, and I write down what that cost too, because a $180 service call you actually needed is a bargain and I can prove it with 15 years of receipts.

Why now

Deb says nobody wants to read the spreadsheet. She has said it for years, and this spring she said it with enough conviction that I built a website about it.

Deb's verdict. "You made a website about the spreadsheet. Nobody is coming, Marty."

We'll see.

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