New Year’s Resolution Home Improvements
Saturday, January 16, 2016, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
Every year, at New Year’s, people make resolutions to better themselves and make sweeping, hopeful generalizations about who they will be in a year’s time.
However, another aspect of people’s lives that needs a little bit of New Year’s love is the improvement of their homes.
By setting plans early on in the year about what you want to accomplish on your home, you can begin to think about your schedule, as well as how you will go about taking the steps to getting your real home a little closer to your dream one.
Here’s some New Year’s resolution home improvements that you should be thinking about as the year comes to a close…
-
Energy efficient home
The best kind of home improvement plan is the one that improves your quality of life that you experience at home, as well as the health of your pocketbook.
Any work that goes into making your home more energy efficient certainly qualifies as both of those things.
Luckily, there are all sorts of simple things you can do to make your home much more energy efficient that won’t become a large, difficult project.
To start, since it is winter, you can inspect the furnace in your home and give it a good tune up. This might include changing the filters, cleaning the blower, and adjusting the burners so that you aren’t wasting any gas.
Even just switching the filter on a furnace can save you a little on your gas bill every month.
There are many other examples of things you can do to make an energy efficient home.
Another way to help reduce your gas bill is to go throughout your home and reseal your heating ducts with mastic tape.
Be sure to look for any leaks in the ducts as you go about doing this. Things like this are simple, cheap, quick, and go a long way to making your home much more cost effective and environmentally friendly.
-
Secure your plumbing
Few things can be as devastating to a home and a family as having all of their belongings destroyed in a disaster.
Aside from fires, one of the most common ways that this happens is when a home experiences a flood. Floods can be caused by environmental factors.
However, unless you live near some particularly volatile rivers or wetlands, the way this usually happens is when your plumbing gets damaged and begins to unleash a torrent of unwanted water into your home.
For this reason, now is the perfect time to thoroughly inspect your home’s plumbing system to look for any possible damages in the foreseeable future.
When inspecting, take a look to make sure that any drains in your home are completely open, and aren’t suffering from any sort of backup that could cause the water pressure in your home to be off-kilter.
Also check all areas in your home for current leaks, as these can usually snowball into larger leaks and cause entire pipes to break, if you are not careful.
-
Repaint
One of the simplest ways to change to entire feeling of your home and go for a new style is simply to change the color.
You don’t have to do an entire construction project to remodel, all it takes is some paint and primer!
If you’ve been wanted to update or change the feeling that you get when you walk into your home, then the New Year is a good time to plan ahead for some repainting this year.
When planning to repaint your home, think long and hard about the color pallette that you want to go for.
What is it you want to get out of this change? Coordinating the color of your trim and the colors of your walls will also help you make these sorts of decisions.
-
Eliminate mold
A safe home is a happy home. And typically, we expect our safe homes to be disease free.
This is why it is important to eliminate mold from our living spaces, as an excess of mold can cause the spread of disease and other health conditions. On top of that, it is generally just gross.
This New Year, make it a personal goal to go throughout your home and destroy any mold that you find, as well as outfit darker areas of your home so that mold may never again grow there.
There are several ways to get rid of mold.
-
A good mixture of water and a little bit of bleach is a good, general way to kill any mold that you find, although you will have to spend a good deal of time scrubbing, in order to get mold stains out of walls and floors.
However, this won’t prevent mold from returning.
-
Another good way to get rid of mold and prevent it from coming back is to use natural oils.
-
Certain oils like Clove and Lemon oils are able to destroy mold, and make it difficult for it to grow back.
-
For more information about how natural oils can help fight mold, check out this nifty post here.
-
Throw us a like at Facebook.com/doable.financeThis post is written by Aleksandre McMenamin.
