Have you ever wished you had the skills and talents to fix things around your house? How about getting involved in arts and crafts with your kids or friends? While hiring professionals to work on home improvements almost always guarantee excellent results, it wouldn’t hurt to pick up around the house occasionally or get creative with your holiday presents. Learning how to do-it-yourself (DIY) can save you money while keeping you busy and entertained. Here are five simple tips to remember when doing your very first DIY project.
1. Start with Something Small or Familiar
DIY projects can be both simple or complicated depending on the kind that you want to pursue. Some projects take a few minutes while others can take a few days or even weeks. If you are a beginner, tackling something simple and familiar is the best option to get your foot at the door. It can be painting a wall with a different color or making bookmarks out of colored cardboard. The process doesn’t take too long, and you don’t need a lot of tools to finish the project. Conquering simple DIY projects will help build your confidence so that you can move on to the next level.
2. Purchase Basic Tools
What’s a DIY project without tools? When you’re trying to tear apart a box or connect two sticks, you need the right tools to move around quickly and to not hurt yourself. As a beginner, you should keep essential tools like scissors, cutters, glues, screws, tapes, markers, and other things that you can probably find in an office. I found this site helpful when shopping for power tools, accessories, and safety gears. You can shop for specific categories or your favorite brands.
3. Learn from DIY Tutorials
If you don’t have any background or experience building anything from scratch, you can look at tutorials online for inspiration. There are easy DIY projects that you can try from blogs, Google, and Pinterest. You can also watch online tutorials from video streaming sites like YouTube so you can see how the process works and if the outcome is what you would expect.
4. Use Safety Gears
Some DIY projects require the use of heavy-duty tools like a drill, hammer, or a nail gun. As much as you want to be careful, accidents can happen. Even with simple DIY projects, you must take the necessary precaution by using safety gears like safety glasses, knee pads, dust masks, and even hard hats. Safety glasses help protect your eyes from dust and getting injured. Unless you have a studio or a space to do your DIY projects, you’ll probably use your living room or garage, and it’s doesn’t hurt to be safe all the time.
5. Keep the Cleaning Supplies Close
Creating a mess is inevitable when doing do-it-yourself projects. Either you spill some paint, or you get wood shavings everywhere, you need to be prepared to do some cleaning afterward. If you can make it happen, always clean after every step of your DIY project and not just in the end. When you spend so much of your time working on a project, you tend to get all your tools and materials scattered everywhere. If you stay organized, you can save some time looking around for the right size of nails or screws to build a customized bookshelf or a side table.
