If you love completing home improvement tasks, you’re already on your way to saving money. However, with good planning, you can change the atmosphere of a whole area with a single task that costs only a few hundred dollars.
Budget-Friendly Home Improvements
Choose from our list of value-added enhancements that are all under $500—some even less. They will not only be kind to your pocketbook today, but some will even save you money in the future. Check out our simple home renovation suggestions below.
Use Paint to Refresh Your Rooms
Pick up a paint can and give your dreary, washed-out walls a blast of bright depth (or wash away your decorating sins with virgin white). That’s the magic of paint: it reorganizes your world. As a result, painting is the most popular DIY home repair project.
While you don’t have to be an expert to learn how to paint like one, a decent paint job requires more than just slathering some color on the wall. From the initial scratch of the pole sander to the final feather of the brush, follow our how-to instructions to skillfully coat your walls in one weekend.
Add Crown Molding Easily
Crown molding is high on most restoration wish lists because it adds beauty and value to a home, not because people enjoy spending a Saturday polishing the corners. Fortunately, miter-saw irritability is easily remedied.
Canamould Extrusions’ Trimroc molding is a lightweight polystyrene foam coated with durable plaster. It’s simple to cut with a handsaw and quick to assemble with a joint compound. There is no coping, no difficult angles, and ragged joints disappear with a dab of mud. So, with only a weekend, you can change a plain room into an appealing space—and still have time to complete the rest of your to-do list.
Install an Economical Stair Runner
Want to keep your footing on slick stairwells? Make your runner. Jaime Shackford, a TOH reader, took on the project herself after receiving a price of $2,500 to carpet her dangerously slippery oak staircase. She made her staircase non-slip by using simply two off-the-shelf woven runners ($125 each) and components from a home center.
Save Water by Using a Dishwasher
Your old dishwasher might be damaging your electricity and water bills. It’s time to upgrade to an Energy Star-qualified dishwasher, which can save you more than $30 in power and 500 gallons of water each year. If you don’t have a dishwasher, hand-washing dishes takes 40% more water!
What is the most important cost-cutting measure? You may install a dishwasher yourself in the afternoon. You won’t need a plumber or an electrician, and you won’t have to spend your retirement savings on a load of clean dishes.
Rewire an Old Entry Lantern
Many early twentieth-century hanging lanterns were rudimentary in design, looking to have been fashioned by blacksmiths rather than machines.
These rustic lanterns were popularized by the day’s tastemakers, such as Gustav Stickley and the Roycroft craftspeople, and reflected a back-to-basics design ethos. By reusing an antique lantern, you may encourage folks to “come on in” whether you bought one at a yard sale or have one stashed away in the attic. Once you have the necessary components, the job is straightforward and affordable.
Use Paint to Restore Old Flooring
The ruby crimson floor of Sara and Andrew’s Massachusetts farmhouse master bedroom didn’t match their young and vibrant personalities. However, with a restricted budget, refinishing was not a possibility. So they painted the floor in a light checkered pattern, using beige and white to warm up the cold blue walls.
Here, we demonstrate how a little measurement and a few coats of long-lasting floor paint can bring a lot of individuality to a space at a low cost.
Provide shade and solitude with inside shutters.
Sunlight streaming through windows may be bothersome. Not to mention the neighbors who have more time at night to peek into your well-lit living area. To keep prying eyes out, you could add shades, but swinging wood shutters would be considerably more beautiful.
Interior shutters were the earliest “window decorations,” and they continue to be an excellent method to add an architectural and historical appeal to both Southern and urban homes. They also keep the bitter winds of winter and the blazing heat of summer at bay. They also attach to a little frame that goes within the window opening or around the outside of the casing, making them easy to install on any window.
Apply a Flawless New Finish to Kitchen Cabinets
Your kitchen appears cave-like because the black cabinetry has sucked all the light out of the area. A brighter makeover, on the other hand, does not always require completely replacing those drab boxes. As long as the frames and doors are structurally intact, you can clean them up and put on some new paint over the weekend to convert your kitchen from dreary to cheerful. A strong cleaner, sandpaper, a paintbrush, and some elbow grease are all you need. What you don’t need is a lot of money, because the transformation will cost you a fraction of the price of even the most basic new cabinets. Choosing a custom range hood might also be a good idea.
Purchase More Flowers Without Spending a Dime
Divide perennials every three to six years to thin clump-forming kinds such as the daylily (pictured below), which blooms from late spring to late summer. This method may also be used to regulate plant size, stimulate growth, and increase the number of specimens in a garden. Splitting apart spring- and summer-blooming perennials in late summer or before the first frost is a reasonable rule of thumb.
Get a Water Filter and Stop Using Expensive Bottles
Because of worries about the quality or flavor of their tap water, millions of households have converted to bottled drinking water. Such issues occur throughout the country, regardless of whether the water is supplied by a municipal pipeline or a ground well. Installing an under-sink water filtration system is a simpler and less expensive approach to acquiring clean drinking water.
