Most people who want to reduce what’s in their home get stuck in the same place: there’s too much advice, most of it contradicts itself, and none of it tells you what to do first.
So I made a checklist that does. It goes room by room through an ordinary house, and next to each item it tells you whether the fix is free, cheap, or a real purchase — so you can see at a glance what you could do this weekend for nothing.
What’s in it
- Every room, in order of what actually matters — kitchen and bedrooms first, because that’s where the evidence points, not because those pages sell best.
- Free actions marked separately. Roughly half the list costs nothing. Those are at the top of each section.
- The two tests worth doing before you buy anything — and what to do with each result.
- What to skip, with a line on why. Including several things this industry sells hard.
- Printable, so you can stick it on the fridge and tick things off over a few months rather than doing it all in a panicked weekend.
What this isn’t
It isn’t a shopping list. A good portion of it tells you to do nothing, or to wait until something wears out before replacing it.
If you’re looking for a document confirming that everything in your house is dangerous and you need to replace it all immediately, there is a great deal of that online and this isn’t it.
What you’re signing up for
Straight answer, because opt-in pages are usually vague about this on purpose.
You’ll get the checklist immediately. After that, I email occasionally — not on a schedule, and only when something is actually worth your attention. A regulation changing, a product that turned out to be worse than advertised, or a new guide going up.
No sequence of manufactured urgency, no daily emails, and one-click unsubscribe in every one. If I’ve nothing useful to say, you won’t hear from me.
Get the checklist
Enter your email and it’ll arrive in a minute or two. If it doesn’t, check your spam folder — and if it’s there, moving it to your inbox helps.
Not ready for email? That’s fine. The overview covers the same ground for free and asks nothing of you.
I’m Adrian. I built this site because I wanted this information myself and found most of it was either alarmist or selling something. My testing and funding policy explains exactly how the site makes money and how that’s kept separate from what gets recommended.