Easy Summer Home Improvement Projects

Home Improvement Projects Inside & Out

Summer is a wonderful time to beautify your home with home improvement projects inside and out. The days are longer and lend themselves to working on projects after work and on the weekends. Most of the projects we share are simple and easy. These projects can also be split over a few days, so you are only dedicating a couple of hours to these projects. Many of the home improvement projects we discuss can be a family affair, with your older children pitching in.

Outdoor Home Improvement Projects

Summertime is a great time for outdoor projects because of our longer days and warmer weather. Some of these are creative, and others are good home maintenance projects that lend themselves to warmer days.

• Landscape Renewal: Improve your home’s curb appeal and value by updating and maintaining your landscaping. Minimizing plants that require a lot of water and replanting with California native plants gives you a hardy landscape that uses less water and reduces your water bill, too. Adding cut flowers that are perennials to your garden gives you cut flowers for your home throughout the year.
• Add Outdoor Lighting to Your Home: Installing or upgrading your current outdoor lighting is a fun and creative project. With the wide variety of solar lighting available, you don’t even need to have any electrical skills to add beautiful outdoor lighting around your home. We added solar post lights around our pool last year, and they look so pretty in the evening when the sun is setting and the moon is rising. So many choices in lighting, from path lights to post lights, deck lights to overhead lighting.

• Refresh Your Home Paint: Refreshing your home’s interior or exterior paint is a great summer project. A home painting job doesn’t need to be large to make a big impact. Many times, changing your front door color or updating the color of your trim gives your home a refreshing look. Inside painting can be as simple as adding an accent color to a room, such as painting one wall a new and upbeat color.
• Pressure Washing: Summer is a great time to pressure wash your decks, driveway, patio, and siding. Pressure washing is a cool job on a hot day. Older children can help pressure wash some things with guidance and training. Only pressure wash your siding or decks at low settings unless you are plan on paint nor stain soon.
• Gutter & Roof Cleaning: Keeping your house’s roof free of debris is wise any time of year, but especially in the summer, with fire safety in mind. There are new tools available that don’t require climbing a ladder to clean your roof, even if it is two-story.
• Add a Vegetable Garden: Planting a vegetable garden or adding deck pots filled with vegetables is an easy way to add fresh produce for your family. With a small trellis in a pot, tomatoes and cucumbers even do well in pots. Also, there are now smaller raised bed kits made especially for decks or patios, so you don’t need to give up yard space for a large vegetable garden.

Many projects make a big difference in how your home looks and feels without a large monetary outlay.

Indoor Home Improvement Projects

When the weather gets hot, it’s a great time to take on indoor home improvement projects. Many of these projects can be accomplished in a few hours, whereas others will take a few days.  Also, I’ve realized that even large home improvement projects can be broken down into doable small steps that can be fit into a busy schedule.

• Update Your Interior Paint: Summer is a great time to freshen your indoor paint colors. Sometimes, just updating the color of one wall in a room will give the room a completely new look and feel.
• Organize Your Home: Decluttering your home and organizing to gain space is an easy summer project. Tackle one area at a time, such as a bathroom or pantry. You can give extra food to a food pantry or donate to the barrel at Whole Foods. There are so many useful and pretty organizing products available today that not only make your space more organized but also add style to your space at the same time. If organizing is not what you want to do with your summer, give us a call at Crystal Clear Home and use our organizing services.
• Add Ceiling Fans: This is a simple electrical job, but unless someone in your family has electrical experience, hiring an electrician to install a few ceiling fans isn’t that expensive and can lower your utility bills while making life more comfortable in the summer. If you have a covered deck that has electricity handy, installing a ceiling fan in your deck ceiling keeps the bugs away and creates a cooling breeze on hot days.

• Upgrade Your Windows: Window technology has made many advancements over the years. There are so many different options for windows these days that add beauty and reduce utility costs. If you have any single-pane windows in your home, replacing them with double-pane windows will lower your utility bill. Windows are available tinted to reduce glare, reduce UV rays, reduce energy costs, enhance privacy, and improve aesthetics. Also, California now has available storm windows and extreme weather windows that withstand high winds up to 150 miles per hour. If you live in the mountains around Sonoma County or on the coast, this can be a wise investment for your home.
• Replace Light Bulbs with LED Lights: LED lights use less energy and last longer. LED lights have many options: dimmable, natural light, bright white, and warm white. I just replaced four bathroom vanity lights that were 40-watt LED with 20-watt LED lights, and what a difference they have made in the look of our bathroom. Many times, the maximum wattage is not what you need when choosing light bulbs for a fixture, and you can choose a lower watt bulb, and you might like the look more while saving money.

We hope you enjoy doing some summer projects that help your life be more organized, renew your home’s look, and save you money at the same time. If you want to free up time this summer to do more of what you love, delegate your house cleaning to Crystal Clear Home. Just give us a call at 707-827-3316 or fill out our FREE Estimate Form, and one of our cleaning professionals will be in touch promptly to answer your questions and schedule your house cleaning.