Easy Home Improvement Projects for All DIY Rookies

Brits just love to do a bit of DIY.

Every year we spend an average of £1000 per head on home improvement projects. Sure, some people probably spend next to nothing, while others spend hundreds of thousands hoping to appear on Grand Designs, but the point remains: DIY is part of the British lifestyle.

We’ve all done a bit of DIY home improving in our time. It may be as simple as painting the walls or as complicated as installing a new bath, but it is a love we simply cannot shake. An acrylic splashback from Simply Plastics could be exactly what you need to add a bit of character to your bathroom.

DIY can reinvigorate our homes, improve the way we live and often just make us happier in our living space. Not everyone is a dab hand at DIY projects, but that shouldn’t stop you from getting stuck in. In this blog post, we look at some home improvement ideas that absolutely anyone can get to work on.

Reinvigorate Your Bathroom

Bathroom renovations are not for the feint hearted. Replacing things like baths, toilets and showers is something that requires expert knowledge. We recommend you find a plumber and leave this sort of job to the professionals. However, there are plenty of other home improvement projects you can carry out to spruce up your bathroom that don’t require a qualification.

A fresh coat of paint is a good start, but why not consider tiling, or re-tiling if your current walls  look a bit dull or outdated? Replacing tiles is an easy bit of DIY that requires only a few tools and a bit of patience.

You can also replace bathroom fixtures, like taps and showerheads. This not only gives the bathroom a shiny new look, but it can also drastically change the styling of the room, allowing you more freedom with your design choices. For example, get rid of your old taps and replace them with a waterfall fixture. It’s sleek, modern and means you can design the rest of the bathroom in a similar manner.

Pull Up the Carpet to Reveal Wooden Floors

Wooden floors are expensive, stylish and in high demand. Easier to maintain than carpets and often more aesthetically appealing, most of us love a good old wooden floor. In a poll run by Houzz, 84% of people said they prefer hardwood flooring.

Putting down your own wooden floor is possible, but not often recommended. Poor craftsmanship can result in problems ranging from wonky angles to potential safety issues, like protruding or improperly fixed panels. Still, you might be lucky; somebody might have already got round to putting wooden flooring down for you.

Many British homes have carpet laid over stunning wooden floors. All you need to do if you have wood flooring is simply tear the carpet up and give the woodwork a bit of TLC. It really is an easy home improvement project that anyone can do.

So, how do you know if you have wooden flooring? Well, if you had the carpet laid many years ago and fancy a change, you already know the answer. If you don’t know, things get tricker.

The best course of action is to turn up a very small section of carpet in a discreet corner of the room — perhaps where a piece of furniture normally sits. Often, all it takes to pull up carpet is a good grip and firm tug. If you can’t get your hands on the fabric, try gripping with a wrench or set of plyers. Pull up a small corner and look beneath; is there wooden flooring? If there is, hallelujah! If not, simply put the carpet back down and use something like a fork to push it back into the corners and make it look untouched.

Bring Some Colour to Dull Rooms

People often find themselves stuck in a single mindset. They go with what they know. When it comes to home improvement projects, we know that if we want to add a touch of colour to a room, we should paint the walls and put up decorations, right?

Not necessarily.

You can paint just about anything; A wall, certainly, but also doors, window frames, cupboards, desks, wooden bed frames, radiators, TV cabinets — the list goes on.

Colour can change a room, brighten your mood and help you love the space you are in. For a really easy home improvement idea, why not paint something a little less conventional? Imagine a vibrant purple radiator, or a deep red wardrobe. Make your rooms pop by thinking outside the box and painting objects usually left untouched by the brush.

Remove Doors to Open Up Your Living Space

Doors are great. We love doors! Well, most of the time…

Sometimes, a door just gets in the way. It breaks the flow of movement through a house or disconnects living spaces that don’t need to be broken up. An easy way to make your house feel more open and spacious is to remove pesky doors that really don’t need to be there and create open archways instead. Doors between rooms like the dining area and kitchen, for example, are often totally unnecessary.

Anybody can act on this easy home improvement project and remove a door from its hinges. However, you can even take it further than that. The entire door frame can also be removed to make the space feel much more like an archway and less like a doorway without a door.

This will require some tools and a bit of knowledge, though, so don’t go into it too lightly. You can find a helpful guide for totally removing a frame here.