Good morning Dinks. It’s almost officially summertime, are you ready? All around the county people are refueling their barbeque tanks, setting out their patio furniture and cleaning out their pools. Are you getting your house and your backyard ready for summer?
Four helpful tips to DIY and get your house ready for summer:
Make your backyard gorgeous with a garden. Have you ever wanted your own garden but didn’t know where to start? Some people think that gardening is back breaking work and it can be if you bend over instead of crouch down but it can also be a lot of fun. Gardens are a great way to get fresh veggies for free all summer long. So before you head out to the market think about growing your own veggies, it gives you a chance to get outside, soak in the rays, get some fresh air and save money on groceries at the same time.
Update your patio furniture with a fresh coat of paint. Patio furniture definitely takes a beating during the seasons with rain, sun and snow. The elements can harm the esthetics of your patio table, chairs and loungers but you don’t need to head to Home Depot. All you have to do to update the entire look of your outdoor space is buy some paint. A new bright colour and a fresh coat of paint can make any outdoor space seem new. I personally love doing some DIY outside because we don’t inhale as many paint fumes and I get a tan while doing it.
Keep your curb appeal with landscape skills. There is no need for a professional landscaper this summer, search the web for photos that you like and then DIY your landscape. When I was a kid I absolutely despised cutting the grass but as I got older I actually started to like it. By the time I was sixteen I was begging to cut the grass because it let me work on my tan. Taking care of your grass, gardens and plants is a great way to make your outdoor space gorgeous and you can DIY. So before you hire a maintenance company to take care of your lawn grab a shovel and a hose and DIY. My dad borrowed a book from the library, watched the Home and Garden channel for a month and then dug his own pond…with the help of my two cousins.
Turn up the night time heat with an outdoor fire pit. There is a show on the DIY channel that I love watching called Yard Crashers. In a nutshell a professional landscaper hijacks someone’s day while they are shopping at Home Depot and offers to redo their entire backyard. So what’s the catch? The shopper has to get their hands dirty and help out and they can’t object to any of the landscaping designs. Almost every single episode the landscapers put a fire pit into the backyard. I personally love the smell of natural fire and there is something really soothing about the crackle of a fireplace at night. So grab a shovel and a few bricks this summer and make your own relaxing fire pit.
What is the best thing you ever DIY’d?
Photo by sskennel
Kristina Tahnyak
Tahnya is a Certified Financial Planner and former Investment Advisor turned marketing and communications professional She holds a degree from Concordia University, is debt free and currently works in the field of digital marketing.
I am doing a few of these. Just put in a fire pit a few weeks ago and will be making use of it this weekend (weather permitting). I plan on putting in a garden pretty soon here so that we can start planting veggies and herbs. Finally we plan on redoing the landscaping around our house.
These are great DIY projects and they’ll help raise the value of your house in the process. We have a garden that we keep nice every year. We also try to make our house look as nice as possible from the outside. It just makes the entire neighborhood look more inviting.
We do several of these things and have a vision for what we want to turn our backyard into. That, though, requires us saving to get that as there are a number of things we want to get done.
I love some DIY. My biggest one outside project was my wooden fence. It was quite the project.
Does painting my own walls count as DIY? I live in an apartment so there isn’t any landscaping to do here. Or fences and such. We did paint our living room walls and bedroom to brighten it up and make it feel more like home.