In spite of what you might have heard, the colder winter months are not a bad time to take on home improvement projects. Well, at the very least not all home improvement projects. While you’ll want to avoid any work that involves opening your home to the outdoors, the colder months are a perfect time to tackle those indoor projects you’ve been putting off all year. Here are some of the best home improvement projects that you can tackle this winter.
Upgrade Your Cabinetry
The pros at DeWils Custom Cabinets say it best: “Despite your best efforts, it all happens in the kitchen when friends and family get together. So why not give the heart and soul of your home the beauty, style and quality it deserves?” You know this is true. You get everybody together for game day or movie night and you wind up spending most of the evening hanging out in the kitchen. This isn’t just because that’s where the food lives; it is because that’s the room where everybody feels at home. If it’s been awhile since you gave that room some love, this winter is a perfect time to change that.
Redo Your Flooring
How old is your carpeting? How long has it been since you gave your hardwoods a deep clean and re-sealing treatment? There’s no time like the present to give your floors a spruce. You don’t necessarily have to do any sort of expensive upgrading but at the very least, a good deep clean is probably a good idea. And if you do want to put in new hardwood flooring, there are kits out there now that will help you turn this into a DiY project and save some money.
Painting
If you own your home, the winter is a great time to touch up that home’s paint job. We don’t necessarily recommend painting entire rooms as the ventilation required for those projects and the time it takes for that paint to dry could mean turning your home into an icebox. But maybe you’ve always wanted an accent wall. Or perhaps you love the look of stencil design. Give it a go! You can always paint over it if the result isn’t what you’d imagined.
One of the current trends that we love is choosing one wall and painting a mural onto it. Murals are all the rage right now and they are a great way to add personality to a home without being too huge a project.
Clean Out Your Closets
Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it. Donate it to your local church, shelter, or a secondhand shop, sell it online, whatever: just get rid of it. Even if you’re pretty sure you will wear it again “someday” unless that piece of clothing has the same significance as, say, a wedding dress, out it goes. You will be amazed at how much space you’ll have in your closets once you do the annual purge.
DeClutter
There is no rule that says you have to declutter your home all at once. In fact, this style of marathon decluttering is often where people go wrong. They’re overzealous in the morning and by the evening they’re ready to just sweep their arms along shelves and dump everything into garbage bags.
Instead, do this a little bit at a time. We talked about closets already. Once those are done, take an hour or so each day to tackle one small space in your home. For example, today tackle your medicine cabinet. Tomorrow tackle the junk drawer in the kitchen. The trick to this, of course, is to resist the urge to fill your recently decluttered spaces back up.
Deep Clean
Why wait for spring to deep clean your home? You’re going to be spending many months wearing grooves in your floors, the cleaner your home, the better, right? This is something you might want to hire professionals to do. They’ll have better cleansers and tools to really give your home a good going over. If you do decide that you want to tackle this project on your own, there are a lot of great guides out there that you can use to help make the project a manageable DiY experience.
These are just some of the projects you can do this winter. What are some of your favorite interior projects to tackle when the weather outside is frightful?