5 Back to School Home Improvements

Now that the kids are back to school and the weather is getting colder, you may be spending more time at home, making it the perfect opportunity to make time for some of the home improvements you’ve needed for a while. Here are a few ideas for some autumn improvements to help with a more harmonious family life or just to update your look.

Create a Homework Area

Now that the kids are back to school, it’s good to have a routine and set schedule again. However, that can mean that everybody needs to use the same parts of the house at the same time. Creating areas for different activities is the perfect way to make the mornings and after-school hours a little easier. Rather than everybody doing homework on their bedroom floors, it’s a good idea to set up a homework area.

This can be as easy as making some wooden stationery holders to get everything out in one go, to actually building a homework table so that they can sit down, spread out their textbooks, and get to work comfortably.

Make Some Radiator Covers

Colder weather means that your central heating is coming back on. Radiators are typically seen as dead space in a room – you might hang up your drying on them or see one of the pets cosying up, but they’re not particularly useful. It’s actually surprisingly easy to make a wooden radiator cover out of MDF and wood – and suddenly you have a small shelf to keep keys, pencil cases, and other odds and ends that start showing up once the children are back at school. (Thisoldhouse.com)  has a great instructional post on how to build radiator covers, and you can find everything you need in our sheet timber, timber, ironmongery, and decorating sections.

Turn a Wall into a Home Planner

If everybody has activities on different days, you can update your home and create a helpful tool to keep track of them. All you need to create a wall planner is a large sheet of wood (plywood or MDF are perfect), and a few coats of waterproof, matte black paint to make a chalk board. You can paint on the days of the week and people’s names, and make sure that your schedules are all up on the wall. Here’s a great example on (iheartorganizing.com).

Replace the Boiler

If your boiler is unreliable, old, or you think it’s time for an upgrade, it’s a good idea to replace it now before it dies completely. The additional strain of increased usage on a very tired boiler could mean that it breaks at the worst possible time, leaving you without heating or hot water until you can book an engineer to come out. Re-empting it could save you a lot of stress!

Organise Your Hallway

Between school shoes, work shoes, bags, coats, sports kit, and everything else, your hallway might be looking a bit hectic. You can make it easier for everyone to put things away by creating a home for everything that might be lying about. Shelving for shoes, hooks for coats and bags, and maybe even a shelf for ‘things you need to remember’ could transform your hallway.