Renovating your home can be extremely expensive — when you pay other people to do it. Hiring a contractor and paying experienced laborers to complete projects that improve the look and function of your home will almost certainly cost you thousands of dollars, even when projects seem small and require less than a week to complete. Yet, if you can figure out how to do key home DIY projects yourself, you can save thousands of dollars and create the home of your dreams.
While you might eventually work up to the skill of a renovation specialist, capable of moving walls or constructing additions, for now, you might start with any of the following projects, which seem sophisticated but are certainly manageable by a home DIY novice.
Paint the Exterior
The transformative powers of paint are not to be ignored. If you have long been dissatisfied by your home’s curb appeal, you might be surprised how your feelings change after you apply a new color to key exterior areas.
Painting your home’s exterior requires a bit more time and effort than rolling paint on your interior walls. First, you need to wash your exterior, removing dust and other debris that might make your paint job look patchy. While you are at it, you might make repairs to any exterior surfaces, like replacing broken bricks, rotten fascia boards or rusty gutters. Then, you will need to tape off any areas of your home that should not be painted, like hardscaping or windows. If you have a paint sprayer, you will likely find using it to make the painting process go faster, but rolling paint onto exterior surfaces works just as well. Regardless, you might need a mobile scaffold if you have a particularly tall home.
At present, trendy exterior colors include dark and moody hues, like charcoal, forest green and black, as well as earthy neutrals. However, you should choose a color you like that works well with your landscaping to ensure that you won’t need to repaint in a year or two.
Hang Ceiling Beams
Ceiling beams are attractive architectural features that, contrary to popular belief, are rarely integral to the structure of a space. Except in the oldest homes, ceiling beams are hung intentionally to add character to a room; they might connect to ceiling joists or rafters, but they are not themselves holding a building up. In many cases, the beams themselves are not solid wood but rather lightweight, hollow boxes that slide onto mounting brackets attached to the ceiling.
You can buy premanufactured ceiling beams that fit your interior design style, and with some help, you should find it easy to attach these beams to ceilings in your home with little more than an impact driver and some screws. Of course, you should check the height of your ceiling before you begin this project; If your ceilings are only eight feet high, you might opt for smaller, four-inch beams to avoid unintentionally shrinking your room.
Build Mudroom Storage
Clutter is the enemy of good home design. To prevent your surfaces from filling up with bits and bobs, you should give your family a hidden place to stash things they need as they come and go — in the mudroom.
Placed near the door to the garage or yard, the mudroom needs storage solutions for shoes, coats, bags and other outdoor accessories and tools. As you begin this more intensive home DIY project, you should think critically about how your family functions and what space is available to you. Then, you can work with an inexpensive cabinet maker — like IKEA — to find the boxes and cubbies you require to suit your needs. You can install the cabinets yourself with careful measurement, clamps and a good drill. If your plans include shelves, you can make those too with a trusty circular saw, router and paint.
To give your mudroom a finished look, you might add some simple wall paneling on adjacent walls. Then comes the most difficult step: convincing your family members to use the mudroom instead of every other surface in your home.
You don’t need to pay experts for every update your home needs. By using up some of your free time and investing in quality tools, you can create the home of your dreams for a fraction of the cost.
Loves home. I am here to provide how to make your home a much better place. 🙂 Blogging about HomeDecor, Home Improvements and more.
