Last week our toilet stopped flushing well. It needed new innards – the stuff inside the tank that help it flush. I’ve done this in a rental property, and it was no big deal. My wife has done it several times as well. Well, this was not as simple. Maybe I bought an incompatible unit, but this took us both hours of mixing various parts of the old unit and the new one.

It was… not fun.

Yesterday, we spent an hour trying to get the motion-sensor lights on a Chamberlain garage door opener to work. Changing the light bulb didn’t work. Changing out the sockets with new ones we bought on Amazon didn’t work.

For the 8th year in a row, our air conditioning didn’t work when we turned it on this summer. We have two units, and neither worked. We didn’t spend hours fixing it, but we spent weeks waiting for the A/C repair people – and over a thousand dollars. I spent a couple of hours on calls to get it done.

We always have a few of these projects. Whenever we fix one thing, there’s another thing that breaks.

I often think, “When does this end? When does everything just work, and I can focus on starting a new project?”

However, I recently changed my mindset. I’ve started to look at the things that we’ve fixed in the past.

There was a time when a tree fell and went through our fence. That was a mess then, but now we have a nice fixed fence.

We replaced our upstairs carpeting earlier this year. It was exciting for a couple of weeks, and then it became “normal.” This was a time to reflect on how nice it is compared to what we had before.

I walked down to our finished basement and thought of all the things that I hadn’t done. The television isn’t hung on the wall. The couch is one my dog ate up 14 years ago. (We turned around the cushions, so it’s not obvious.) Last night I found out that the dimmer switch on the lighting was broken. There are probably at least another dozen things that I wanted to do.

But you know what? It’s a lot better than it was three years ago. Then it was a pile of old baby stuff and other things we never had a chance to put away properly. The kids can go down there and play video games or watch a movie. I can go down and use it as a quiet office space.

There are so many things in our house that are working well. Growing up, I had to fill ice trays with water. Now, I have magical ice without doing anything at all.

The other day I was upset that our Apple TV subscription doesn’t work on our Android or Amazon tablets or phones. Today, I am happy that I can watch thousands and thousands of other shows/movies anywhere in the house with an extremely lightweight, portable TV screen.

Appreciating what you have goes far beyond a stroll through your home. You can apply it to your health, relationships, and just about anything you can think of.

Take a few minutes and appreciate all the things that are working well in your home and life.