January – Home Health Check-Up

January is the month for staying in, letting the bank balance and waistline recover, making it the perfect time for a home health check.

Here’s our Top 10 DIY jobs to do around the house in January;

Lag Behind

Jump into the New Year with a bit of high-octane pipe lagging… The colder months see an increase in burst pipes with plumbers cashing in and in some cases tripling their prices. Make sure outside pipes are wrapped up warm.

Save The Dates

When was the last time you checked the dates of food in your cupboard? In some households it’s never! “Wow, I think this tin of soup might have belonged to my great grandmother!”. Once you’ve thrown out food from the last century, you could check all those old tins of paint in the shed.

Paint It Back

Yep, totally misquoting The Rolling Stones. Now that you’ve established which paints are still usable, you can touch up all those little scuffs and scrapes on the woodwork and walls.

Green Machine

You’ve been promising to be kinder to the environment, so do it! Build that composter for the garden, start buying eco-friendly cleaning products, reduce your waste by shopping better… “If you wanna make the world a better place, took a look at yourself and then make that change. Hee-hee, shuh-mon!”

Make Room

Now you’re on your way to becoming the DIY God you were always meant to be, there’s a really good work bench and tools somewhere under that mountain of junk. Turn your shed/garage into a proper workspace and you might start getting some proper work done in it.

Care & Repair

While you’re on a roll, buckle up your tool belt and hit the rest of those ‘tomorrow’ jobs. That sticky door/loose handle/broken banister. It’s not like you’re going to be hitting the beach anytime soon, so make the most of your weekends.

Free Your Mind (and your cupboards)

“Don’t me stop now…”. Grab some bin bags and charity sacks and declutter. Cupboards, lofts, outbuildings, let today be the day you said “Roller boots were a bad idea” and take back that much needed storage space.

Get Draft Crafty

Older houses are to heat retention, what Christmas is to dieting. Older properties leak like a sieve so January is the time to tackle cracks, seal windows, add secondary glazing. It doesn’t have to be expensive or even brand new, it just needs to be more efficient and save you money.

Safety First

When was the last time you checked the batteries in your smoke alarms? How about the dates on fire extinguishers? Take five minutes to ensure everything is in date and still doing what it should.

Lean Green Gardening Machine

Get outside and get green. Whether it’s a bug motel, a pond, insect friendly plants or bird feeders, our gardens take up roughly 433,000 hectares of the British Isles, so we should use them wisely and help our wildlife.