Be Your Own Handyman With These Tips

You can increase the value of your home and change the way it looks. The following article gives you tips on how to make the changes you desire.

Insulate your home in order to save energy and lower your heating and cooling bills. Check the attic, as well as windows and doors. Any leaky spots should be fixed. Weather stripping can be added to doors and windows and new insulation can be added to the attic. You want to keep air that you paid to heat or cool, inside the home.

Instead of purchasing plastic boxes for under bed storage, buy some square baskets. commercial accordion doors are a great way to store items you may need throughout the day, while keeping your room uncluttered and neat. Plastic doesn't look very nice, but using baskets can be a touch of professionalism in any environment.

Burst the bubble in your newly applied vinyl floor covering then patch it! Vinyl floor covering will bubble up for a number of reasons. One way to fix it when it has just been applied to the floor is to pierce the bubble with a needle, let the air escape, and weight it down until it dries.

Put in an outdoor motion detector for your outside lighting. This way the lights will only be on when they are activated and not all day or all night unnecessarily. Most people don't need their outside lights other than when they come home or leave after dark.

One home improvement project that will reap considerable dividends for the homeowner is fitting the house for modern electronics. Adding more power connections, phone jacks, and even ethernet ports will make an older home more compatible with the panoply of electronic gadgets the modern homeowner uses. This modernization will have a small but significant impact on potential buyers' opinions of a house.

When deciding what exterior renovations a home needs to make it saleable, step out to the curb and take a picture. The picture on your listing is the first exposure any potential buyers will have to your home. If your picture shows a dingy house with overgrown landscaping, fix it!

Only clean your furniture with furniture cleaner. Meanwhile it is tempting to just use a rag cloth and run over your furniture with water, it in fact ends up damaging your surfaces. Use specialty cleaners such as Pledge and spray liberally over your surfaces. It not only protects your finishes, but also repels dust.

You should always make sure your contractor is licensed and bonded. All states require general contractors to have some kind of certification. The requirements aren't a guarantee of competence, but they are required. Unlicensed contractors are not insured. This makes working with them very risky.

Even if you don't use your fireplace much, it's important to get your chimney inspected and cleaned regularly by a professional. Burning wood can cause creosote to accumulate, and that could lead to a chimney fire. Avoid burning pitchy wood like pine to help keep creosote under control after a cleaning.

Ask an electrician to install an outlet in the cupboard over where your microwave is. It will make for an easy way to plug in your microwave without having a cord that is visible. Simple improvements like this can help you avoid a bunch of dangling cords in the kitchen.

Prior to beginning chromadek garage doors on any electrical appliance or lighting fixture, make sure the circuit breaker switch for that area of the house is turned off. Touching live wires when the power is on is a serious mistake that can lead to electrocution and even death.

When you are doing renovations to floors in your home, make sure that there is a flow from room to room and that the flooring does not change too dramatically. Many buyers are turned off when the house has one type of flooring in a room and a dramatically different type in the next one.


If you are doing a home improvement project that involves demolition, slow down and take your time. It may be exciting to smash that wall open, but you could damage structural supports, plumbing, or electrical connections. The same is true of pulling down cabinets and other fixtures. Once you've demolished it, it can't be put back, so pay attention to what you're doing.

When planning home renovations, use the first portion of the year for planning, as you will likely have considerably less money during this time due to the holiday season. The reason for this is sometimes more money creates more stress, so you can ease the problem by budgeting during the first few months of the year.

Home projects not only improve your home, they maintain the home, so the understanding of how to perform the necessary projects is important. Reading up on home improvement will make finishing a job much easier! Use the tips you just read to get started.