Do It Yourself, Add Value to Your Home

The wonderful Yahoo! Finance strikes gold once more, with a stunner of an article by Peter Boehm on how to improve the value of your home with some DIY projects. While the word renovations might send dollar signs spinning in front of your face, with some of these suggestions you can save money on home repairs and add extra value to your home. A personal finance win-win.

Let There Be Light
Lighting can be the difference between dreary and delightful. And while we invest a lot of time and energy in the lighting of our rooms, rarely do we think about lighting our outdoor areas. You might be tempted to go all out and put in a built-in lighting system, but with modern solar-powered alternatives, there is no real need. Once you’ve outlayed the initial money, they also cost nothing to run. Show off your house in it’s best light.

Green Thumb
When we go house hunting, how often we walk through lovely houses only to be confronted with a wreck of a garden. It’s not appealing for a possible buyer, and it’s easy to fix. Instead of forking out for the very latest in garden design, set yourself a working bee. Get your green thumb friends around, chuck on a BBQ and a couple of slabs of beer and tidy up the backyard. Buy some gravel cheaply from the local nursery and fix up the gaps between pavers. Plant some native plants and get a good headstart on the weeds.

Store It
For myself, storage is always an important consideration wherever I live. It’s not so much that I have a lot of things, it’s just that I like things to be tidy and to have a place. Else I end up with a room looking like it belongs to a teenage boy and feeling somewhat ashamed of myself. Find someone handy to pop a couple of extra shelves in some of the cupboards. Your house will look more appealing and organised, and you’ll have storage space as an extra selling point.

Gutter Mouth
The last house I rented was a disaster of damp, and all because the owners were too uninterested in the state of the gutters. It’s not an interesting topic, I know, but with the amount of rain that has been falling, it’s now a big issue. Gutters that aren’t running properly do more than undermine the aesthetic of the house. Water does long-term damage and certainly harms the value of the home. With a little bit of preparation, you can avoid costing yourself thousands of unnecessary dollars.

Painting Up A Storm
Painting is an arduous task, but nothing can revolutionise a room so completely at the price. The right paint can make a room look bigger, more comforting, or fresher. There’s no need to put a different bright feature wall in every room, sticking to a relatively consistent colour scheme throughout won’t hurt, especially when you’re looking to sell.

Magic Carpet
Drab carpets can do terrible things to a place. If you’re concerned about the cost of hiring a carpet cleaner, why not hire a machine from your local supermarket or Kmart? I had no idea of this until recently, but you can hire carpet cleaners for an hour and do it yourself. You can save a significant amount of money and your house will look a hundred bucks.

Source: Savingsguide.com.au