There appears to be a widespread DIY epidemic taking over the USA with people rushing into improving their home often with very little planning. The outcomes are not always satisfactory and in a lot of cases, the house ends up looking worse than before you started. To avoid falling into this trap, don’t rush into any DIY job but plan your tasks in advance.

Try to see your home with new eyes. This can be difficult if you have lived there for years but you want to try to see what improvements you have to make and those that you can live without. Often all a home needs is a new coat of paint, change of color scheme and new flooring. If you have ever seen the House Doctor at work, you will know that she can transform living spaces by removing loud patterned carpets and clashing wallpaper and replacing them with muted creams and whites matched with a natural floor covering. The new color scheme opens up the room and makes it look bigger not to mention brighter. A huge difference but one you can achieve with relatively little work and not too much cost.

OK, so you may be thinking “I don’t have any loud carpets and my wallpaper is fine”. That isn’t the point. It was merely to illustrate the fact that small subtle changes can make a big difference. So have a look around your home today and see what changes you could make. If you have kids, think about putting up some cork board walls in their room. Children love to display their artwork and the beauty of cork board is the fact you can pin things to it without damaging the underlying wall. You can paint cork board too so the kids don’t have to live in a brown bedroom.

Don’t think you have to spend a fortune changing your home into a more comfortable environment. Try to work with what you have got in place already and you will reduce the cost and stress factor quite significantly.