Tight Budget Home Repairs

You may be under a lot of stress to find the money needed to repair your home. Right now a lot of people are struggling with a hurt economy, and are looking for ways that they can save money. The problem for those who own homes is that they don’t want them to fall apart. Homes need regular maintenance and it is important that this is done on a yearly basis. The following are some tips for tight budget home repairs.

There are several ways that you can get budget home repairs

The first thing you will need to do is survey your home. Walk around and take a look at the items that you think are the most important that need maintenance. Once you have your list of major repairs, you can make a list of minor repairs that may be needed around the house. The minor repairs are usually things that you can do yourself. For example if it is time for certain rooms inside to be fixed, and outside the home to be painted, you can focus on those. Any project that you can do yourself should be put as a family project. After you have both of your lists you can start figuring out how much money you will need in order to repair each item.

This would be a good time to visit your local home improvement store. You can price certain items that you need for each project.

Check out these 3 budget friendly porch renovation ideas

For your larger projects you will need to find out how much it will cost to pay someone to get it done.  You will be able to negotiate a pretty reasonable price with most contractors both inside and outside of your home. Be sure to take the time to check the references of anyone doing contract work on your home. Remember that going with the cheaper option is not always the best idea.

Check Out: 9 Tips for Selecting a Good Contractor

If you realize that the repairs your home needs are a bit out of your reach you can save for the repairs. One thing you don’t want to do is finance any home repairs. There is a way to get the job done, just by waiting a few extra weeks to save up the money. You may also be able to learn a new skill and make the repairs yourself. The key is to explore all of the options that you have. Don’t just assume that finance your repairs is the only way to go.

5 Budget DIY Home Repairs

1. Paint Jobs

There’s a good mix between people who paint their own homes and those who hire others to do it. However, you should always be able to paint your own walls inside your home. The outside of the house should always be left to the experienced though. Anyways, painting the inside walls of a home a pretty simple. A person just has to go down to a store that sells high quality paint and choose the colors that they want. Most houses look best with multiple colors throughout the home, but they must mix well together or the interior will just look tacky.

Next, you’ll need to get other necessary supplies and tools to start painting.

• Tarps to cover floors and furniture are always a good idea.
• Paint rollers
• Touch-up brushes are necessary too.
• Blue tape to line the corners of walls and doors to avoid getting paint on the wrong areas.

Do all of your tape-lining and carpet/furniture covering before you start painting or you will run into some problems later.

Finally, you need to start painting the walls. It is best to paint specific sections of the home over the course of a dew days. Starting in the kitchen or den and moving out from there works well, but the choice is yours. You will need to do a first coat of paint on each wall, followed by an extra coat or two to finish the job right. Undoubtedly, you’ll want to avoid getting paint where walls meet or where the ceiling meets the wall – avoid doors too. You should already have that problem taken care of with blue tape though.

Once you finish, then the job is done. You can then proceed to admire your work. It should only take a couple weeks at the most to paint the entire interior of the home by yourself. As with anything else, you can always ask friends and family members for help. This method of painting your own home can save you a great deal of money, but you have to do a complete and nice-looking job or it just won’t look right.

To Learn more about painting, check out: Painting, Easy Do-It-Yourself Repairs

2. Wood or Tile Flooring

These days, a lot of people are choosing to replace carpeting with either wood or tile. This usually happens in any room aside from the bedrooms. Typically, it is uncommon to see wood flooring throughout the entire house, but there’s nothing wrong with that. As for tiling, you shouldn’t expect to see it outside of the kitchen or bathrooms normally. The choice is yours to make though, so you can pretty much embark upon whatever flooring design that you want.

First of all, you need to choose the wood or tile that you want to place down and where. Taking care of this is as simple as going to the local flooring or home improvement store. You should take a little while to pick out the exact flooring that you want. Luckily, laying wood and tile involve similar steps, but most people will end up doing jobs involving wood or wood laminate flooring.

Second, you’ll need to remove whatever type of flooring you have down in the rooms that you want to change. Most people will be changing from carpet to wood or tile. Fortunately, carpeting is extremely easy to remove. You’ll need to cut out a section of carpeting to start out. From there, you can just rip the carpeting out or continue to cut it out. The carpeting should come out fairly easily. Those nail boards or staples that hold the carpet to the ground must be removed to, especially since they can be a safety hazard for young children. Luckily, these things only line the walls and are not under every inch of carpet.

Finally, you’ll need to get your wood or tile and necessary supplies to lay them down. We won’t go into specifics here, but you’ll just need to lay your flooring down where you want it to go. Both wood and tile are simple enough to lay down, but you need to be precise or the job will look sloppy. Luckily, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a straight-line tool that will show you where everything has to line up each time. You might need to cut up some of the boards for wooden flooring in order to make it fit nicely into your room. As for tile, you can’t really cut it without just breaking it, so you’ll need to get the right sized pieces when you place your order.

Doing your own wood or tile flooring can save you hundreds of dollars. Unfortunately, carpeting isn’t as easy for the average person, so it is not recommended that you embark upon that on your own. Always hire a professional for carpeting placement. As for wood or tile, you’re better off doing it yourself because it isn’t hard and it can be done in a somewhat short span of time.

Check Out: Repairing Wood Flooring to learn how to restore an old floor

3. Door/Cabinet Repairs

Doors and cabinets are pretty simple to repair, whether you need to replace a broken hinge or sand a section to make it fit right. Of course, you don’t need a carpenter to get this job done, so don’t even bother calling one. More than likely, all the problems you’ll run into with common doors and cabinets will revolve around faulty hinges or shape issues. Let’s take a look at all of this in a simple manner then.

First of all, hinges commonly start to wear on both doors and cabinets after a while. New hinges can be purchased at any home improvement store for a couple dollars at the most. This job is as simple as unscrewing the old hinge or hinges and replacing them with the new ones. Luckily, these new hinges should last for a pretty long time. Doors or cabinets need new hinges if they break, make too much noise, or there is a noticeable defect in the hinge.

Humidity and moisture can actually cause wooden doors or cabinets to increase in size. Unfortunately, this can cause them to either not close or to stick. Most people will find this incredibly annoying, but there is a simple fix to this issue, aside from replacing the door or cabinet. Just take the door off the hinges and sand the sides down a little bit. After that, put the door back up and there shouldn’t be any sticking or problems with closing the door. The same goes for most cabinets, but you need to remember that we’re talking about wooden objects. Obviously, you’ll have a hard time sanding down metal doors, but they don’t suffer the same “waterlogging” problem.

Both of these are simple fixes for doors and cabinets made out of wood that can save you some money. Of course, you don’t want to replace an entire door if all you have to do is replace the hinges or sand down the sides of the door. Save yourself some annoyance and some money by taking care of this job quickly by yourself – you won’t regret it.

Check Out: 10 Tips for Updating Your Kitchen Cabinets

4. Electronics

For this article, we aren’t talking about intricate electronics repairs. You won’t be opening up your T.V. set to fix it or working on the electrical wires inside your home. Don’t even try to do any of that. However, you can accomplish small repairs with various electronics in your home. Anyone can do these repairs without a chance of a mishap because they don’t involve opening up a device or anything like that to fix the problem.

Take electronics with external wires that aren’t the power adapter. Luckily, most people have home entertainment systems with speakers that connect to the main system. You might want to extend these speakers, yet the cords won’t go far enough or the cords might have broken somehow. Simply put, you just need to unplug the system, splice the wires, repair or elongate them with copper wire, electrical tape the new section, and plug it back in. Your speakers will start working again like their brand new, if you did the job right. Of course, you can do this with any similar thing, but don’t ever try to splice the power adapter because a error-filled repair can get you killed.

Check Out: How to Replace a Light Switch

Also, consider your other electronics. Some televisions can be fixed with simple adapter attachments. On top of this, one fix that you can try does involve your home’s electrical system. We’re talking about changing out the electrical outlets or wall switches. All a person must do to avoid danger is to shut off the power to those outlets. Luckily, you can buy a tool that can test if an outlet is live or not. The plastic device can be put into the outlet while it is live, and you don’t have to worry about getting electrocuted. New outlets are cheap and they are as easy as a simple screwdriver twist to replace. Sometimes, your electronics are fine, but the outlets are a problem. You can save yourself some money if you can identify the problem and fix it without calling someone who charges a bunch of money just to tell you something simple. However, don’t ever mess with the actual electrical system in your home or the inside of electronics either.

5. Walls

It’s the simplest thing in the world to fix a hole in the wall, and as far as budget home repairs go, this is one that can make an amazing impact. Despite how the hole got there, you can fix it in no time. Just head down to a home improvement store and get some spackle. You might need to fill the hole with some sort of packing material but probably not. Anyways, just spread the spackle over the hole and an inch or two around it. Let the paste dry for a few hours and and then proceed to sand the excess spackle off the wall. At the end of this process, you should have a repaired wall. It might take another spackle job or two to completely fix the hole, but the problem will be fixed. Sadly, the spackle probably won’t match the color of your wall, so you might need to go out and get some paint. Either way, the hole itself can be fixed within a few hours in a cheap and efficient manner.

Check Out: What You Should Know About Repairing Drywall