Requirement
2. Outside and weatherproofing: choose three of six
Required
Four of the six need your home to supply something: a yard tool, cracked paving, a screen, or a broken pane. Two of the six are closed in cold wet weather. Weatherstripping is the one option available to anybody in any month.
Notes and warnings
Warning. WALK THE HOUSE BEFORE YOU CHOOSE, HERE AND IN THE FOUR MENUS AFTER IT. Around a dozen of this badge's thirty-two options need your home to supply something first: a fault to fix, a fixture to fix it on, or a material the building is actually made of. In this menu alone, four of the six do. You cannot recondition a yard tool you do not own, repair paving with no drive, mend a screen in a building that has none, or replace a pane that is not broken. Nothing here suggests breaking something in order to repair it. Twenty minutes with the whole list, walking from room to room and then round the outside, tells you which options are genuinely open to you, and it is the single most useful thing you can do before starting this badge.
Note. A PARENT OR GUARDIAN MAY SUPERVISE, NOT ONLY THE COUNSELOR. The badge carries a standing note that a parent, guardian or the counselor may supervise your work on any Home Repairs requirement, and every menu from 2 to 6 repeats it. That is a permission rather than a restriction, and it changes how this badge is scheduled. Most of the fourteen jobs can be done on ordinary evenings at home. You need the counselor for requirement 1, which is two discussions, for requirement 7, and to show what you have done. This is a badge that suits a long slow run rather than a single merit badge day.
What this is made of
Where this step comes from
- Home Repairs Merit Badge Requirements (Merit Badge Hub, last modified 2025-12-31), Requirement 2 · The 2025 Boy Scout Requirements book (33216) offers eight options here and asks for four, including waterproofing a basement and soldering, neither of which appears on the current page.