While DIY is a term that’s often associated with fixing problems around your house without the help of a professional, for many people DIY is actually a hobby too. And there’s many ways it can be adapted as such.
In general people who take on DIY projects as a hobby will be making furniture out of wood or crafting toys and trinkets out of a wide variety of different materials or maybe even making rugs, clothes and curtains from scratch.
It’s a broad term really, but it’s an extremely rewarding hobby as well as being a healthy and creatively liberating one. It’s also one that can make you money if you’re really good about and you know how to market yourself.
But if you’re skeptical on the idea of DIY right now and the reasons why people bother putting these crafts and projects together, why not think of the benefit of it for your home? Let’s think about 5 things you can make from scratch that will look awesome in your home.
- Lamps
Any parent who had kids that took woodshop in high school have probably got at least one wooden lamp around the house somewhere. Probably in the attic. There’s a good reason for this though.
A lamp is a great project for a beginner to try their hand at because they tend to be relatively easy to make but the process is also one that covers a lot of the basics of woodworking as well as some general electrical wiring.
Now to go the woodworking option for a lamp, it’s probably best to have a lathe and a circular saw. If you’ve got those that’s great, but if you don’t, there are numerous other ways that you can put a DIY lamp together.
Many of which involve household items that you might just have lying around. You could get a glass bottle, cut out the bottom of it (very carefully) and thread through the electrical wiring. You could also make a lamp out of a standing fan that’s not in use anymore.
This would involve replacing all of the blades with light bulbs and reworking the electrical wiring a little bit. There are numerous household items that can be adapted into lamps or other kinds of light fixtures.
- Fire Pits
For then the summer rolls around and your want to relax out in your garden, or better yet you want to throw yourself a little bit of a garden party, building yourself a fire pit is the right way to go about it.
It’s a surprisingly easy thing to make too and oftentimes the more minimal the design the better it looks. The appeal is going to be the fire, and so a good DIY fire pit is going to have little materials involved in the building so as to not take away from the flames.
If you can get your hands on a bunch of cement blocks, you can make a great fire pit just with that. Build up a square using the cement blocks and then inside you can have free reign to use wood, charcoal or whatever else you want to burn with.
You could also repurpose some plant pots. Make sure that you don’t use plastic ones of course, but a concrete planter or even a large metal one could be used as a fire pit, with little to no modifications necessary.
Or you could just go ahead and make a concrete fire bowl from scratch. It takes surprisingly less time and less effort than you think.
- Bookshelves
If you’re a reader you know how much we like to show off our book collection. You probably already have a bookshelf but a big problem that people face is that they end up running out of shelf space the more books they accumulate.
So is the solution to buy another bookshelf? That’s one solution, but why not spare yourself the expense and instead have some fun with it. One great method is to repurpose a wooden pallet. It’s already got the baseboard and part of the frames in place.
All it would take is a few extra planks of wood that are cut to the right size. You would need three or four for the shelves depending on how long the pallet is and then another few for the sides, the top and the floor of the shelf.
You could make a hanging bookshelf using just a single plank of wood and some strong rope to hang it with. Or another great method is to dress up a ladder. In fact, there are numerous ways to make cool bookshelves out of ladders.
- Backyard Patio
Having a patio laid in your garden can be a very expensive thing. It’s also a time consuming process and maybe you don’t want to have builders coming in for several days to work on your garden when you could just do it yourself.
There’s also a variety of different choices here. You could go the route of concrete stones and arrange them in whatever pattern you desire. You could also get ceramic tiles which always look great.
There’s also quite a few different styles, colours and designs for you to choose from and then of course you can arrange the tiles however you want. A wooden patio can also be nice, although it will probably take a bit more time.
The thing about all of these though, is that they will still cost quite a bit of money. Less so than having to buy the materials and hire someone to lay it all, but it can still be a tad bit pricey. So maybe you could go for pea gravel instead.
A lot easier to lay and nowhere near as costly as tiles or wooden planks.
- Window Trim
When you’re stuck at home for whatever reason like bad weather or illness or something to that effect, it’s always nice to put yourself in a position where you can see out the window, wouldn’t it be nice if the window itself was a pleasant sight.
By building some trim around the frames you can get them looking chunky and full as opposed to the normal, bare, plain windows that we’re used to these days. It’s a very easy thing to do by just installing some wooden boards around the window and painting them.
What’s known as a ‘Farmhouse Window Trim’ is a popular method, because it resembles the look that you would often find in old farmhouses. Just $10 worth of lumber and an afternoon of painting is all you’ll need for one window. Super easy.
And all this stuff is just a taste of the different elements of your home that can be upgraded and reworked with some simple, cheap DIY projects. You can also make coffee tables, desks, bed frames, cabinets. The DIY possibilities are endless.
