GuideEvergreen guide

Five Weekend Projects That Add Real Value to Your Home

Water first, front door second, attic third. What each one costs, what to rent, and the project you should not start on a Saturday.

By Dean Shaw · Gear & Garage23 Sept 20266 min read

Start with water. Every other project on this list is decoration if the ground next to your foundation slopes the wrong way, and a $15 roll of 4-inch drain pipe outranks a $4,000 kitchen island in the order of operations. A home inspector finds the stain on the basement wall in about ninety seconds. He doesn't find your new backsplash at all.

So that's the sequence for a homeowner with two free days and a few hundred dollars: water, entry, attic, safety, storage. In that order. Here's what each one actually takes.

Project one: move water away from the house

Walk the perimeter after the next real rain. You're looking for downspouts dumping straight onto a splash block two feet from the wall, soil that has settled into a bowl against the foundation, and mulch piled up over the siding line.

Materials for a typical ranch with four downspouts:

Two 10-foot lengths of solid 4-inch drain pipe, roughly $14 to $20 each. Solid, not corrugated-perforated. Perforated is for French drains and it will water your foundation on purpose.
Four downspout adapters and a couple of elbows, $5 to $9 each.
Six to ten bags of topsoil at $4 to $6 a bag for regrading.
A pop-up emitter if you're burying the line, about $12.

You want the pipe carrying water at least 6 feet out, 10 if you have the room, and the grade dropping about 6 inches over the first 10 feet away from the wall. Check it with a 4-foot level and a scrap of 2x4, not with your eyes. Eyes lie on a lawn.

Tools: a round-point shovel ($28 to $40), a steel garden rake, a hand tamper ($30). Skip the trencher rental unless you're running more than 40 feet of buried pipe, in which case a walk-behind trencher runs about $90 to $130 a day and will save your back and your Sunday.

Call 811 before you dig. It's free, it takes a few days, and hitting a gas line with a shovel is a story nobody wants to tell.

Project two: the front door, done right

This is the cheapest visible upgrade in the whole house and the one people botch by doing the pretty half and skipping the strong half.

The pretty half: a quart of exterior enamel, $22 to $55 depending on line. Pull the door, lay it flat on sawhorses, scuff it with 220-grit, wipe it down, and do two thin coats with a 2.5-inch angled sash brush and a small foam roller for the flats. Two thin coats beat one thick coat every time. Dark colors on a south-facing steel door get hot enough to be a problem, so on full sun exposure, stay lighter.

The strong half is $60 and twenty minutes. Pull the two short screws out of the strike plate and replace them with 3-inch screws that reach past the jamb into the framing. Do the same on the hinge screws, top hinge at minimum. Then add a jamb reinforcement kit, $40 to $70, which is a length of steel that spreads a kick across 4 feet of jamb instead of 4 inches of pine.

Hardware pricing, honestly:

Entry-level rekeyable deadbolts run $28 to $45. What the cheap one gets right: you can rekey it yourself in a minute, and the bolt throw is a full inch, which is the part that matters. What it gets wrong is finish life and lever feel. Expect the brass to go blotchy in a few salty winters.
A Grade 1 deadbolt runs $70 to $130 and is built like a commercial door part. Worth it on the door nobody can see from the street.
Handlesets jump to $120 to $250 fast. That's curb appeal money, not security money. Know which one you're spending.

While the door's off, hit the hinges with a punch and replace any pin that's walked halfway out. And set a new weatherstrip kit, $18 to $30. You'll hear the difference the first windy night.

Project three: top up the attic to R-49

Most houses built before the mid-90s have 6 to 8 inches of settled insulation up there. Code-level performance in most of the country is R-49, which is roughly 16 to 18 inches of blown fiberglass or cellulose. This is the least glamorous project on the list and the one you'll feel in January.

Air seal first, or you're just putting a blanket over an open window. Foam the gaps where wires and plumbing stacks come through the top plate, using regular canned foam at $7 to $10, and switch to high-temp fire-block sealant around flues and chimneys. Never foam against a metal flue.

Then the fill. Blown insulation runs about $20 to $30 a bag, and most big-box stores will waive the blower rental if you buy a set number of bags. Ask at the pro desk before you load the cart, because the standalone rental is $60 to $100 a day. Set attic baffles ($2 to $3 each) at every soffit so you don't smother the ventilation.

Safety, and I mean it: an N95 or better, safety glasses, long sleeves, gloves, and two pieces of 3/4-inch plywood to kneel on so you never put weight between joists. Attics hit 130 degrees by 11 a.m. in summer. Start at 6, be done by 10, drink more water than you think you need.

Project four: the small electrical and safety swaps

Interconnected hardwired smoke and CO alarms run $35 to $60 apiece and they're a straight swap if the existing box already has one. GFCI outlets for kitchen, bath, garage and exterior are $18 to $28 and a buyer's inspector absolutely flags the ones that are missing.

Buy a $15 outlet tester and a non-contact voltage pen. Kill the breaker, test the outlet, test it again, then open it.

Stop and call a licensed electrician if the box has no ground conductor, if you find aluminum branch wiring, or if the wire insulation crumbles when you flex it. That's not a confidence issue. That's a code and liability issue, and the fix costs less than the fire.

Project five: storage a buyer counts

Double the hanging space in one 8-foot closet and the whole room feels bigger. Materials for a solid version in 3/4-inch birch plywood and poplar cleats: $140 to $260, plus a $28 closet rod set.

Wire shelving is $60 for the same closet and it deserves credit. It's fast, it's ventilated, and the clips actually hold. What it gets wrong is the sag under folded sweaters and the way hangers slide to one end like they're being paid to.

If you don't own a track saw, don't buy one for this. Use a $25 clamp-on saw guide with your circular saw and a 40-tooth plywood blade, or have the store break the sheets down for you. Cut list first, cuts second. Measure the closet at three heights, because drywall is never square and neither is your house.

The one you should not start on a Saturday

Don't demo a tile shower on a weekend. Same for pulling a countertop, same for ripping deck boards off joists you haven't inspected. The rule is simple: never open something you can't close up watertight by Sunday night. Rentals help here, a rotary hammer at $55 to $75 a day, an airless sprayer at $45 to $90, a drain auger at $50 to $70. What rentals can't do is make a surprise shorter.