15 Awesome DIY Projects At Home You Can Do
Needing some inspiration for a DIY project at home? Well, we’ve done a lot of DIY projects at our house! In this post, we’ve rounded up 15 DIY projects to spruce up your home, many with an eco-friendly touch to them.
Updated 9/26/2023
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Many homes could use a little sprucing up or some added character. However, DIY is not just about making something pretty or nicer-looking. It can be building functional items too like storage shelves or rain barrels. Even if you think you’re not super handy, many of these DIY projects are still pretty easy and achievable.
What Does DIY Mean?
DIY simply stands for Do It Yourself. It’s a fairly straightforward concept and can be applied to a lot of home projects. If you do the project with your own hands, then you’re DIYing it!
What DIY Can You Do At Home?
There’s TONS of things you can DIY at home! Making your own playdough for your kid can even count as a DIY project!
For us, DIY has been our lifestyle for most things if we can help it. There’s so many reasons why we choose to DIY over buying a product or having someone else do the work. Here’s a few:
- Not compromising on design. It’s the design or exact outcome we want, typically.
- We learn new skills by DIYing.
- We’ve discovered new passions and grown confidence in our abilities
- It can save money and be significantly less expensive.
- We can control and minimize the amount of waste and use more eco-friendly products.
It’s a balance of what you’re willing to try and learn as well as what you have for a budget.
With all that in mind, here are 15 of our favorite DIY projects at home you can do. We’ve done all of these, so I’m confident you can too! They range from easy DIY projects to some that take more time and skill. Find one that inspires you and begin to tackle your next project!
15 DIY Projects At Home
Build A Hanging Daybed Or Porch Swing
It seems everyone spends more and more time at home nowadays. So why not make yourself a little oasis at home? A hanging daybed can be the perfect way to create a little place to escape. It could even be used as a porch swing!
This is definitely something you can buy, but it’s usually rigid and one-directional. And let’s be honest, most of them weren’t to my design aesthetic!
If you DIY it, then you can build in adaptability to the hanging daybed swing. For example, having removable headboards to allow you to face whatever direction you desire. It works great for our screened in deck as sometimes we can face the trees while other times we can cuddle up and watch a show in the other direction.
Check out the Hubby How To for full DIY instructions!
Build A Raised Garden
Looking to grow more of your own food or maybe just some herbs? Well a raised bed or planter box can be a great DIY projects at home. They allow you to use good growing soil (mixture of topsoil and compost), create a level surface for plants, and make it easier to access without crawling on the ground. Find a sunny spot and layout the size of the garden. Keep in mind, 3 to 4 feet in width maximum allows gardeners to reach across and the height can be anywhere from 12 to 36 inches.
A planter box can go on a deck or porch even if you don’t have a whole lot of space. Building a planter box is also a great DIY project with kids and it gets them excited about the garden!
You can buy a raised bed kit or make your own out of cedar, concrete blocks or landscape timbers. A raised garden can even help navigate sloped terrain. We built a terraced garden to negotiate our sloped yard and utilize the perfect sunny space. A DIY stacked rain barrel system can also collect water to water your plants with!
Build Open Shelving Or Add Shelves To A Closet
A quick way to add function and beauty is by adding some decorative open shelving. Simply determine a location and size for the new shelves. Then find your wall studs to attach brackets to support the shelf, and mark the height and distance for each bracket. Next drill pilot holes and then screw in the brackets. Lastly, place the shelf and test out its strength (You don’t want it to fall with breakable items on it!).
Building some open shelving was the perfect solution for more pantry storage. We try to buy in bulk to save money and be more sustainable. Thus we needed more storage for some of our bulk pantry supplies. Live edge wood floating shelves worked out beautifully and was an easy DIY project to do at home!
You can also add shelving to a closet to greatly increase it’s utility! We turned one closet into a full pantry and turned another into a linen closet just by adding shelves. We even added shelves to our laundry closet and our bedroom closets.
Install Flooring
Needing to bring some new life to a room? Updating the floors can do so much. We’ve installed several rooms with wood-like vinyl plank flooring and it absolutely transforms the space. Don’t cringe at the term “vinyl”! I promise you the vinyl flooring today is so much better than the original vinyl you’d find in a 70’s or 90’s house. The vinyl planks are way better than the stick-on sheets or tiles in our opinion.
We’ve found the planks to be super durable and do well in high moisture areas like bathrooms or even screened in decks. Vinyl planks are easy to cut, snap together easily, and don’t require any glue or bonding agent to the subfloor. You simply need to remove the room’s baseboards, make sure the floor is level, and then lay out the planks. A saw or utility knife can be used to score and cut the planks to fit around objects.
Upgrade A Door
Paint is a great easy DIY project at home to do! Paint the front door to add a pop of color and make it more welcoming. Make sure to sand the door, if needed, then wash and dry it before painting! Also don’t forget to remove any hardware to make it simpler.
It doesn’t have to just be an exterior door either! Give an interior door a makeover using wood strips to add depth and dimension. It’s great because you can be bold like an accent wall or subtle with shadow lines. Simply purchase or use some scrap wood pieces to layout a design, use wood glue to attach, and then paint your desired color. Definitely a quick and easy DIY project that can really transform your doors.
Modern Bedroom Makeover
Bedroom makeovers can do wonders to a space and there are so many things you can DIY! If there’s some inspiration you got from Pinterest, but the cost is out of budget, then try your hand at making it yourself. You can make your own bed frame, build shelves, create wall art or even door art. This allows you to accomplish your design aesthetic exactly how you want.
Build A Bed Frame
Furniture is another great step to take with DIY projects at home. We have a particular habit of designing or building bed frames now like our canopy bed with Japanese-inspired joinery. Bed frames like this are a little more advanced woodworking, but so worth it in the end for a beautiful bed frame you built yourself!
DIY-ing can allow you to have a multi-functional piece of furniture too! If you have a small space, try a full trundle bed with a bookcase to create a bed frame with storage and the ability to have an extra mattress tucked away.
Update Your Cabinets
Another great idea for DIY projects at home can be updating your cabinets. A simple upgrade of sleek new hardware can do wonders. Simply remove the old hardware, drill any pilot holes necessary, and then attach new soft-close hinges, drawer pulls, and handles. Check thrift stores and online marketplaces for more eclectic and second-hand options.
Go a step further by sanding and staining the cabinets. Remove any doors and drawers to sand and stain separately. We actually replaced the doors on our cabinets by purchasing unfinished ones and staining them to give the cabinets a simpler look. Be careful not to over sand the cabinet bases. Some cabinets only have a thin wood veneer facing out. You just want to sand enough to remove any old stain or poly-coat finish.
Update Your Fireplace
Spruce up your fireplace with a little paint on the exterior and a little spray paint on the interior.
Try using a high heat spray paint for the interior area where the wood goes. If you’re going to use the spray paint, then be prepared for overspray and the paint that settles after floating in the air. Lay down a dropcloth around the edges of the fireplace opening. Or if you’re going to paint the brick or stone around the fireplace, spray first, so you don’t have to do paint touch ups.
Whether or not the interior looks good, you can brighten up some old brick or stone fireplace with some paint. Truthfully, we just used an all-purpose white paint primer with a heavy 1 ¼” nap roller to paint our dingy brick fireplace. But there are specific masonry paints if you’re wanting a different color. It brightened the whole room and the built-in shelves now look like they belonged.
Add Solar Lighting
A great way to update an exterior space is adding some mood lighting. Solar lighting can harness the sun and be used anywhere without needing an exterior outlet. We installed solar string lights in our screened in deck to provide low light levels at night.
Simply use a staple gun to attach the solar string lights to ceiling or edges. Be careful and center the wire between the staple, so as not to pierce the wiring casing with the staple. We know from experience that this will break the wires, and we had to splice the wires together to fix them.
Keep in mind for this project, it pays to get a little bit better quality solar lights. Our original cheap solar lights stopped holding a charge after a few months. So we actually had to cut the wires and connect them to smart switch plugs using our house solar power supply in order to still have light when we wanted at night.
Build Storage Shelves
We try to live without a bunch of unnecessary stuff, but we still have quite a lot of items that need storing (baby stuff and decorations mainly!) and organized. DIY storage shelves can be customized and built fairly easily to fit your space. You really gain so much more space and organization by going vertical!
Check out our Hubby How To on building some simple customized DIY storage shelves that work great for storage totes or large items.
Install Solar Panels
Clean renewable energy is a no-brainer for most of us. Solar energy is one of those that is super scalable and you’re able to even DIY install. Solar panels can be small and temporary like what you might use for a solar generator. Or they can be used on a larger scale, and be mounted on roofs or the ground to power your home!
Now, this is a major DIY and takes a little more knowledge and skill. However, you can check out our full Going Solar Journey where we show all the steps of the DIY solar panel installation for our home!
Create A Playroom
Are the kids at home more often nowadays or do you just need to dedicate/update a space to be an organized playroom? A weekend DIY project can be creating a fun montessori-inspired playroom with storage shelves and DIY toys and activities.
Playroom storage shelves are something we instantly built to help organize all the toys a kid collects over the years. We try to minimize the amount of toys we receive as gifts and focus on toys that are montessori-inspired. You can build simple storage shelves using one 4’x8’ plywood board, jigsaw, and screws. Check out our plans on Etsy!
DIY Climbing Wall
As part of a playroom or any play space, a literal mountain climbing wall can be one of those fun DIY projects at home! Our toddler LOVES to climb, so this was a great build to channel that climbing energy in a safe place.
Climbing walls are also a great opportunity for new physical activity that doesn’t take up any floor space! Going vertical gives you a lot more room. It can also become a statement piece for the room if you stylize into something fun like a mountain or just use fun colors.
DIY Toys for Kids
Lastly, there are so many kid’s toys and activities out there you can purchase. However, building it yourself can be fairly simple and save you cash.
Building our own Pikler triangle set definitely saved us money as those can run upwards of $200. All you need is a couple of 2×4 boards, 14x 1 1/8” dowel rods, one 1/2”-3/4″ small sheet of plywood, and screws to make a simple one. There’s a lot of how to’s on building one on the internet, and maybe someday we’ll have one too! With that said, there are some fabulously crafted triangles by small businesses on Etsy that could be well worth it.
Another great DIY project at home can be a mud kitchen for outdoor play. Pinterest has a ton of great ideas for how these can look, but we kind of just made it up. The mobile mud kitchen we built was actually from an old hammock stand and a water bin we already had. So only item we purchased was a couple wheels, so we could roll it around. It has provided hours of fun outside for our little guy!
Hope this roundup of DIY projects at home helps give you some great project ideas. Let us know in the comments if you try any or have suggestions!
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