Owning your own home is a great experience, but it is not without its responsibilities. Every house requires maintenance and beyond that, every house can benefit from home improvements. You need not be afraid of doing your own work on your home. With a few quick hints like the ones below, you can attack home improvement work with confidence.
Always keep the big picture in mind when embarking on a long term home improvement project. Your budget may dictate that you break up a project into several smaller, more manageable pieces, but take care that the finished product doesn’t look like a hodgepodge of unrelated, poorly thought out elements.
Decide in advance what changes you want to make before starting any actual renovation. This is crucial to make sure you stay on budget and within a certain time frame. Making adjustments here and there with no strategy can cause the completion date to drag and exceed the budget. Your contractors will be pleased if you have made a decision of what you want before they begin.
For a beautiful addition to your home, consider turning two windows that are close together into sliding glass or french doors. With glass doors, you are allowing the light to come in as well as the beauty of the world outside your door. Being able to look out at nature while having your first cup of coffee will make the investment worthwhile.
If you need to do a project around your house, but don’t have the tools to do it, consider how often you will use the tools before buying. It may be more cost-effective to rent or borrow what you need instead of spending the money to purchase items that will be seldom used.
You can stop heat loss from your hot water heater easily by covering it in a jacket. The jacket, which can be found at any hardware store, stops heat loss by 70%, making your home more energy efficient.This saves you money in the long run, as you can quickly regain the cost of the jacket in as little as 6 months.
Free up some cabinet space in your kitchen by using a metal desk organizer to store cutting boards, jelly roll pans and cookie sheets. This will not only give you the much needed cabinet space, but keep you from having to open every single drawer in your kitchen to find one item you could use.
Insulate exposed pipes in your home. If uninsulated, pipes can freeze during the winter. This can cause a great deal of stress and headache since you won’t be able to access running water. The pipes could possibly burst. Exposed pipes may be located where you are unlikely to see them, such as, in the attic or the basement.
If your shower and bathtub seem to be building up mildew, or leaking a little bit, it may be time for you to re-caulk. Removing your old caulk and putting in new should actually be done once a year as your typical bathroom maintenance. You can purchase calk from any hardware store for a very reasonable price.
Appliances
Devote some time into weather-stripping your home. Even though your house might be insulated, there are probably small crevices around windows and doors through which air will leak. That means your house will lose cool air during the summer and warm air during the winter, leading to a higher energy bill when you run heating and cooling appliances. Weather-stripping your doors and windows will keep that from happening.
When working on a home improvement project, make sure to buy high quality materials. You can save money initially if you buy appliances or cabinets that have imperfections but using these materials could reduce the value of your residence. If you always purchase the best for your home, the results will be astonishing.
Try not to cut corners when it comes to the quality of building materials for remodeling or you may pay for it later. Buying cheap wood, plastic or appliances with dings and dents, will reduce the initial cost of a project but devalue the entire house later. Since your home is a long term investment, build and rebuild with quality materials, whether for resale value or your own occupation of it.
If you are improving your home to increase its sale value, focus on the important portions first. Trying to renovate the whole home will become overly expensive and provide a diminishing return on investment. Items such as exterior siding, plumbing fixtures, lighting, and kitchen appliances, however, will be universally appealing as you try to sell the home.
When planning your kitchen, make sure your stove and your refrigerator are not right next to each other. If you set them side-by-side, they will both have to work too hard. You will waste energy and get less life from your appliances with this arrangement, and neither will perform optimally.
Take note of the final location of all appliances when you are planning to remodel your kitchen. If you need outlets or gas lines moved or installed, be sure to arrange to have a licensed contractor tackle this job. Don’t forget to have the contractor install a outlet in the cabinet above where the microwave will be housed.
When you buy new appliances to improve your home, don’t just set the old ones out by the curb to take up space in the land fill. Take some time to find a local recycler if they are broken. If they still work, donate them to your favorite charity or sell them for a few dollars to someone who needs them.
Getting new appliances is very helpful in adding quality and value to your home. No matter what you select, buying new appliances can be a great way to improve your home.
Little tips like these can keep the home improvement process painless and keep homeowners from getting frustrated. Working on your house should be an enjoyable and rewarding experience; educating yourself on the subject will ensure that this is the case and if needed there is always an appliance repairman.