Dwell’s DIY Resolutions for 2024
From learning how to refinish furniture to finding a proper place for the dishwashing gloves, here’s what we're going to tackle in the new year.
Another beautiful year has passed, and along with it, a pile of half-attempted, not-quite-finished projects sit gathering dust, mental or otherwise. The nice thing about a new year is that it’s a clean slate—you can go into 2024 being a version of yourself that finally, finally hangs the art on the walls or upping the charm factor of your rental. Read our DIY resolutions and maybe find some inspiration here for your own.
Making my apartment feel more like a home
One lesson I took away from interviewing people like Angela Triumbur and Brigette Muller is that I shouldn’t let living in a rental get in the way of making my apartment look more charming. I don’t want to spend a ton of my own money on major upgrades but there are so many little DIY projects I can do for cheap to make my space cuter like Angela and Brigitte have done for their apartments. In the new year I hope to replace all my switch plates, get a nicer toilet seat, swap out my doorknobs and cabinet handles, and maybe even install one of those water-filtering shower heads (I’m convinced it will make my hair and skin look better). –Jinnie Lee
The bar in the basement, part 2
Do you want me to just copy-paste my answer from last year? :) –Kate Dries
Wallpaper and redecorate my child’s room
I managed to convince my six year old that she doesn’t need wallpaper for Christmas by offering a room makeover for her birthday. Full disclosure: I had already purchased MoMA’s Paper Moon Lamp from her wish list, and that was her big ticket item. So now my DIY resolution is to try to wallpaper a wall or two and redecorate a child’s room—a child who has the style sensibility of an 8th arrondissement Parisian apartment with the budget of a downtown Brooklyn art director. Tips for finding affordable landscape paintings anyone? Perhaps a DIY resolution for next year… –Suzanne LaGasa
Plant some flowers in the garden
My DIY resolution for 2024 is to turn the back half of our backyard into a flower garden. We spent too much of this past summer asking ourselves whether we should hire contractors and landscapers to, like, make it all artistic or whatever—but after we received a few quotes and designs, we decided that we didn’t really need statuary and water features and one of those little stone borders that is way more expensive than it looks because apparently they charge per stone!
Right now our plan is to fill the space with impatiens, phlox and other hardy ground-cover plants, interspersed with lawn decor we already own (bird feeders, lanterns, etc.) Instead of a border, we’ll put out wildflower buckets (we already have the buckets) and a wrought-iron bench (ditto). It probably won’t look as artistic as some of the plans we saw, but it’ll look like it was created by two people who love where they live and want to make their lives as beautiful as possible. –Nicole Dieker
Making a home for the dishwashing gloves
I will devise a solution to hold my dish gloves! They are annoyingly draped over the sink and get drips everywhere. Via TikTok (cursed), I saw a solution to use these things to hold them, but they failed—and I should have always just employed my creative brain. I sense there is a future for me with two binder clips on a little ribbon that’s like hung on a nail on the cabinet door below the sink?? –Maggie Lange
Buying a new rug or peeling and sticking the kitchen floor
This isn’t really a DIY project per se, but rather a large overhaul that will start with some teensy tiny steps that will hopefully snowball into major change. (That’s how it works, right?) I’ve lived in my apartment for four years now, and I’m getting the itch to completely overhaul my living room. I’ve already chalk-painted two hideous wooden furniture items, transforming them into slightly less hideous furniture items, thereby injecting some color and fun into the space. While I yearn for this sofa and this chair, I will pin those to my vision board for 2025 and instead turn my focus to rugs. Again, it’s not quite a DIY if you’re spending money to just buy something, but once a rug is in place, I imagine my desire for new furniture will subside, and then, just maybe, I’ll do peel and stick black and white floor tiles in the kitchen, which is quite visible from the living room, and drives me insane with how boring it is. –Megan Reynolds
Getting my various closets in order
I would love to exist in my home without items falling on top of my head or feet every time I opened a cabinet or drawer. This would mean paring down my mug collection (so many unnecessary mugs in my mug cabinet stacked on top of each other, a genuine hazard), figuring out a way to store Tupperware that isn’t "throwing it into the cupboard and closing the door quickly before it falls out," and getting some sort of insertable drawer situation for the cubby where I store my always-toppling sweatpants and sweaters. All of this is, technically, quite doable, and the amount of effort it would take to accomplish would pale in comparison to the benefit doing it would bring to my daily life. And yet I still haven’t done it. Will 2024 be the year? God, we can only hope. –Kelly Conaboy
Refinishing furniture
I mean it this time: 2024 is the year I learn to refinish wooden furniture. I’ve become completely obsessed with the idea, watching a parade of people on Instagram Reels strip dinged-up but basically gorgeous old pieces and return them to their former glory. I’m a grumpy old man about the quality of most modern furniture in my price range—fast fashion, the lot of it—I just find the idea so satisfying. (Also, there’s something very…. peeling a sunburn…. about the stripping bits. Disgusting and wildly compelling.) No more excuses: I’ve got decent access to thrift stores and estate sales, I have a big enough ride that I can transport a decent-sized dresser if I fold down the back seat, and I have a driveway where I can work. I’m about to replace every Ikea nightstand in this place with something massive and 80 years old and good as new. –Kelly Faircloth
Letting go of the dream (and learning needlepoint)
I am not what you’d call a handy person, and I come by this lack of domestic ability honestly, because my father was the same way (we’re talking about a man who would sooner throw a stained shirt in the trash rather than figure out how to get it clean). And yet: as a person who writes about home, interiors, and design, I am often seduced by the thrill of a good DIY project: painting a bunch of Mason jars blue to hold flowers and lipsticks, putting up decorative hooks to create a vintage dress storage and display system, thrifting scraps of fabric for a quilt I know, in my heart, will never be made.
My resolution for 2024, then, is to be radically honest with myself and admit that I am simply not a DIY kind of girl. I resolve to pay a premium to buy things I could make myself, and to hire out tasks I don’t have the skills, attention span, or strength to do on my own. I’m an ideas person, and this year I am putting down the hammer and going back to Pinterest where I belong. (I would also like to learn how to needlepoint so I can make my own throw pillows.) –Angela Serratore
Get some stuff up on the walls!
I am absolutely terrible at hanging things on the wall—so much so that I recently bought these little hooks you can press into the wall at Target so I could finally hang some stuff in my office so that the white wall that everyone sees on Zoom calls could be slightly less boring. But that’s really just a bandaid fix—the solution of a lazy person who took all the art off the walls in the other rooms of her home to hang wallpaper more than a year ago… only to never hang them again. That changes in 2024. These walls have been bare for long enough. (I am 1,000 percent going to end up hiring a Taskrabbit for this!) –Leslie Horn Peterson
Top image by Morsa Images/Getty Images
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