DIY Hacks: 10 Little-Known Home Improvement Tips to Make Your Project Easier

Whether you’re taking on an ambitious construction project or just decluttering your garage, by the time the project’s complete you’re going to be left with plenty of garbage. Bagging it all up is time consuming, and since keeping your work area clear is generally necessary for getting the job done efficiently, it can eat up lots of valuable work time.

A dumpster rental can save you time and money on all but the smallest home improvement projects. And it’s easy to find a dumpster size appropriate for the job: roll-off containers come in 10 yard sizes suited for general decluttering or a small scale remodeling project, all the way to up to 40 yard dumpsters capable of holding the equivalent of 12 truckloads of waste. Depending on your project and space you have available, you can even opt to have your dumpster placed under a window in the room where you’ll be working, making your cleanup even easier.

Waiting for paint, joint compound, or other common materials to dry so that you can move on to the next step of your project is one of the most frustrating aspects of remodeling. Luckily, there are plenty of home improvement tips to shorten drying times.

First, if the weather permits, simply open the windows. Fresh, circulating air is key to making anything dry faster.Obviously, you can also use oscillating fans for this, but if you don’t have any on hand, a simple open window does the trick.

To make paint dry faster, a couple of preemptive measures can serve you well. Choose a zero-VOC paint, and paint with foam brushes or rollers. Foam absorbs less paint than other materials, allowing you to apply a thinner (and thus quicker-drying) layer to the wall or object you’re painting.

Another great painting hack is to paint only one wall of a room at a time, rather than having multiple helpers paint everything at once. This way, the first wall will be dry, or nearly dry, by the time you finish the fourth wall, vastly cutting down the time you need to wait between coats.

If you need a quicker way to dry joint compound while you’re patching drywall, you can use a hair dryer, moving it rapidly back and forth about 2-4 inches from the compound. If the area you need to dry is too large for a hair dryer, you can set up a space heater several feet from the area.

You’ve finished a remodeling project, you’ve done the cleanup (maybe renting a dumpster to make it easier!), but when it comes to the tiny debris like nails and screws, it’s hard to be sure you got them all. Especially if you have young children or pets in the house, you obviously want to be sure there aren’t nails or other bits of metal lying around. If you have a large magnet on hand, sweep it around your work area to pick up stray metal. If not, you can rent a magnetic broom from many hardware or home improvement stores and use it the same way.

Unless you’re a professional or an extreme DIY junkie, there are a huge number of tools that you’ll only ever need to use on occasion. In fact, for most of us this applies to the majority of tools beyond the basics. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize just how many tools can be rented rather than purchased. This applies both to very specialized tools and to more general items like chain saws, masonry drills, and stud guns. All of these tools and more can almost certainly be rented from your preferred home improvement store. Renting these tools is almost always more economical than buying them, not to mention the added convenience of not needing to make room in your garage to store them.

If you’re constructing new walls (whether to build a walk-in closet or partition off a portion of a room) then it’s essential that your wall studs be positioned “16 inches on center,” meaning that the center of each stud is spaced 16 inches away from the center of the next stud. This is currently the standard measurement for stud spacing, and drywall, cabinetry, and other building materials are made to fit this framework. For those of us who aren’t pros, getting stud alignment right can be tricky. There are other methods out there that might suit those with more carpentry experience, but for the beginning DIY-er, here’s Bob Schmidt of Home Remodel Workshop’s fool-proof method for framing walls that are 16 inches on center:

Cut two 2X4s to the length of the wall you want to build. These will be your header and footer plates. Lay out your plates, one above the other, and stretch a tape measure across their full length.

Most tape measures have red markings indicating where studs should be placed when framing a wall. Wherever you see these marks, use a permanent marker to make an X three quarter inches back from the mark, on both boards.

Once you have done this down the full length of each board, place the thin side of a framing square over the first X on both boards, and draw a line across both boards on either side of the framing square. Repeat for all of your Xs. The thin side of a framing square is the same width as a stud, so when it comes time to nail in your studs, they will slot right between these lines, giving you a wall framed perfectly 16 inches on center.