Improving your house may help you prevent numerous problems. Installing a security system with cameras, home alarms, and safe locks, for example, eliminates any risk of a break-in.
Here are 20 budget home renovation ideas:
1. Paint Your Rooms
By simply picking up a paint can and getting to work, you can breathe new life into dreary, washed-out walls (or wash away your décor sins with pure white). A fresh coat of paint may change your reality.
2. How to Add Crown Molding
Crown moulding is on most renovation lists because it adds beauty and value to a property, not because it is fun to perfect the corners on a Saturday. There is a simple solution to miter-saw irritation.
3. Install a Cheap Stair Runner
How to hold slippery stairwells? Make a runner. After receiving a $2,500 quotation to carpet her slippery oak staircase, TOH reader Jaime Shackford took action. She made her staircase non-slip by using two pre-made woven runners ($125 each) and materials from a home store.
4. Install a Water Saving Dishwasher
Your ageing dishwasher may be causing high power and water costs. It’s time for a new Energy Star-qualified dishwasher that may save you over $30 a year in electricity and water. If you don’t have a dishwasher, you’re consuming 40% more water!
5. Paint Old Flooring
The ruby crimson carpeting of Sara and Andrew’s Massachusetts home didn’t match their youthful personalities. But refinishing was out of the question. To warm up the icy blue walls, they painted the floor a light checkered pattern in beige and white.
6. Interior Shutters Create Shade and Privacy
Sunlight from windows may be an annoyance. Other neighbours who have more time to peer into your brilliantly lighted living room. You could add blinds, but swinging wood shutters would be more appealing.
7. Refinish Kitchen Cabinets
The black cabinetry have sucked all the light out of your cave-like kitchen. But a brighter facelift doesn’t always equal new packaging. As long as the frames and doors are physically good, you can clean them up and paint them, transforming a dull kitchen in a weekend.
8. Get More Flowers for Free
Dividing perennials every three to six years helps thin clump-forming kinds like the late-blooming daylily (seen below). This method may also be used to manage plant size, stimulate growth, and increase garden specimens. Split spring and summer flowering perennials in late summer or before the first frost.
9. Get a Water Filter and Stop Buying Bottles
Millions of homes now buy bottled water due to worries about the quality of tap water. These issues persist nationwide, whether the water is from a municipal pipeline or a ground well. Install an under-sink water-filtration system for cleaner drinking water.
10. Use Eco-Friendly Insulation
Getting up in the morning is difficult enough without the frigid jolt of a cold floor. You need some warmth and a cushion while you go about the home. Cork. A natural cork floor may transform a cold space into a warm retreat.
11. Refinish Your Beautiful Wood Door
The weather and the years had taken their toll on this 94-year-old solid cypress door. Some varnish flakes clung to the wood, but the remainder was rough and sun-dried. Wooden entrance doors are attacked everywhere, and many are trashed, replaced by low-maintenance metal and fibreglass substitutes. But a few inexpensive items may give your ancient door new life.
12. Reapply Bathroom Caulk
You’ve seen the ageing caulk indications. Then the dark tint along the margins. Its once-soft skin is now brittle and fractured, allowing mildew colonies to thrive or water to soak through and mush up wallboard and frame. It needs to go — around the sink, between a tub and its tile surround, or covering the shower stall’s seams.
13. Renew Your Deck
When contractor Stephen Bonesteel arrived, this wood deck was in bad shape. The harsh upstate New York weather has weathered its once-bright boards, flecked with slimy algae and dark leaf stains.
14. Create Visual Interest With Stair Brackets
Newel and baluster posts receive all the attention; most exposed stairwells are overlooked. Decorative stair brackets transform a plain stringer into an exquisite eye-catcher. We utilised easy-to-install wood brackets with glue and nails.
15. Invest in Low-cost Laundry and Mudroom Flooring
There existed vinyl tile long before durable sheet flooring and plastic laminate planks. Vinyl tile gained popularity as a linoleum substitute because it was colourful, simple to clean, and non-crackable.
16. Easy-to-clean backsplash protects walls
Installing a typical tile backsplash may be out of your reach, but a solid surface backsplash may be your saving grace. This affordable stock material, available from businesses like Swanstone, which creates the beadboard backsplash pictured here, in a range of colours and patterns, is easily shaped, cut, and glued.
17. Bathroom Vent Fans Prevent Mold Growth
Installing a ventilation fan in your bathroom does more than merely clear the windows and remove smells. It also prevents moisture-related issues like mould and mildew development, which may be expensive to remove and cause health issues.
18. Using Ceiling Fans in Summer and Winter
As more people find remarkable year-round energy savings, ceiling fans’ popularity continues to increase. In the summer, ceiling fans provide breezes that relieve air conditioners. In the winter, they circulate heated air.
19. A Programmable Thermostat Saves Money
Going digital with a device that automatically adjusts the inside temperature will save you about $180 annually. Simple heat-only units cost roughly $25 at home centres.
20. Make a Tool Bench
Amy Paladino is an expert at balancing work and family. But, like many of us, she needed help organising her equipment for DIY tasks.
This is a design for a custom-sized tool storage bench with a work top.
