1. Change the toilet. There are many different styles of toilets today, many different colors, many different ways to flush them, etc. Obviously the toilet is the focal point of every bathroom, so why not start there?

2. Paint the walls. Paint always changes the complexion of a room, and it doesn’t have to match any other room in the house. You don’t even have to paint the entire bathroom; you can alternate with wallpaper, linoleum, or any other material you might want to put on your walls.

3. Change or alter the cabinets. Get a different style of medicine cabinet. Add or subtract cabinets. Strip, paint, or stain cabinets. Change the handles or knobs, or get cabinets that don’t need either.

4. Change the counter tops. Many people are changing counter tops these days, going for something more durable and eye catching than what used to be considered as traditional bathroom styles in the past. Boring it out; style is in. Think about going for a marble countertop; that would definitely give your bathroom some class.

5. Change the sink. There are so many styles of sinks, so many colors, that it’s almost a throwaway idea. Many people love sinks that sit on top of the cabinet these days rather than down in the cabinet, which is an interesting style, and they usually are either made of glass or metal. They become easier to clean and harder for water damage to take place.

6. Change the faucets and knobs. If you’re going to change the sink, why stick with old, traditional faucets? You can get faucets that curve high, that have sprayers, multiple faucets, gold, silver, aerated, etc. Most of the faucets of today resist things such as calcium deposits or copper staining, and because they fit better they’re easier to clean.

7. Change your shower curtain or shower doors. Whether you have a shower/bathtub combination or just a shower, these are relatively quick changes that can make your bathroom feel like a warm, inviting place. And there are so many styles that you’re sure to find something that’s representative of who you are.

8. Change your bathroom floors. Once again, there are many styles and colors, including insulated floors that will keep bare feet warm. Some people are starting to opt for actual stone floors, an odd choice, but anything seems to fit these days. This is always a nice way to upgrade a bathroom.

9. Change the faucets and knobs in your bathtub and shower. The best thing to do is get something that matches whatever style you’re changing for your sink to keep some type of symmetry, but you don’t necessarily have to go that route. However, keeping similar coloring is easily the best way to go.

10. Change your shower head. There are many options in showerheads, including detachable shower heads, shower heads that shoot water from the sites, massaging shower heads, etc, that you could literally spend a day at the hardware store trying to make up your mind.

These ten ideas should help to spark thoughts of how you can upgrade your bathroom, and I’m sure you can come up with plenty more on your own.

One easy kitchen upgrade concerns your cabinets; all of your cabinets, both upper and lower. Other than the sink, it’s probably the first thing most people look at when they walk into your kitchen. There are three things you can do that are pretty easy, though one will sound hard.

The first thing is to change the handles or knobs on the cabinets. Basically, all you need is a screwdriver for handles, and just some elbow grease for knobs, which should twist off easily enough. Then go to the hardware store, find something that looks nice, and pop them on there. If you pick something fancy, instant glamour! While you’re at it, think about changing the handles or knobs on any drawers you have in the kitchen also.

The second thing, if the cabinets are painted, is to strip the paint off and bring them back to natural wood. If you have a heated paint stripper this is a snap, as it will lift the paint off without having to do any scraping. Natural looking wood finishes are in, so this will be impressive.

The third thing is to either stain, varnish or clear lacquer your cabinets. Any of these changes will make your entire cabinet stand out and look like new, and it’s also a very easy upgrade to make.

Next, take a look at your stove. The easiest upgrade is to change the pans that surround the burners, something that a lot of people rarely think about. Nice, shiny new tins can bring a whole new look to your stove.

And let me ask you a question; when is the last time you cleaned the inside of your stove? All modern stoves have a setting where it will literally clean itself, leaving you only a little bit of residue to clean up afterwards. And, if you clean up the inside window a bit, then clean up the outside window, and, while you’re at it, clean the rest of the stove up, it’ll look like new.

The next thing you can do that’s an easy kitchen upgrade is to add some throw rugs into the mix. If your floor is either totally wood or linoleum, adding a couple of rugs here and there can make it look nicer, no matter if it’s in good condition or not. Put one near the sink, one near the refrigerator, and if your kitchen leads to the garage, put one there also, so your family will be prompted to wipe their feet before coming in.

The final upgrade may be the most expensive, but it’s still easy. If your kitchen is large enough, think about putting a moveable island in the middle. They only come up about three feet, and a small one, around 26”x20”, is plenty enough. If you get one with a marble top, even better. It not only gives your kitchen another nice surface for whatever you wish, such as cutting or putting hot food onto, but it makes the kitchen look bigger and fancier than before you added.

These easy kitchen upgrades will spice up your kitchen and make it look more spectacular.

The easiest one to do is to go around and put air blocking inserts around each of your electrical outlets. Many people don’t know just how much cold air leaks into their houses via outlets. It doesn’t even have to be blowing through; if cold air gets into an area where an outlet has access to your home, it’ll send cold air into the room.

The next easiest thing to do is put up plastic along the windows in the winter. This isn’t necessarily an upgrade, but it’s something you should consider doing. While you’re at it, though, take a look at the seals along your windows. You might need to think about resealing them in some fashion, either with caulk or other weather stripping. You might even have to think about replacing your windows if you still have single pane glass in them, which offers no real protection from the cold. Many of today’s modern windows come with great sealing, and when installed, there are new techniques to make sure air can’t seep in to your rooms.

Another interesting energy efficient home upgrade involves the number of air vents you have coming into your rooms. The thing about warming up rooms is how fast you can get them warm, along with how long you can keep them warm. If you can add just one extra vent into each room, they would warm up faster, without using up any extra energy. There are also vents nowadays that have sensors, so that when warm air is blowing they’ll open up, but once the blowing heat stops it will seal up the vents, helping warm air stay in the room. That may cost you, but you’ll only have to pay it once.

Something else that will cost you, but might be imperative, is changing your fuse boxes. Technology has drastically changed in the last 10 years, and now they help the electricity flow through your house more efficiently. However, while you’re doing that, you might have to have the lines in your house checked, and even changed, because old lines might not be properly prepared to accept how the current comes into your house.

If you live in cold but sunny climates, finding ways to let the sunlight into your house during the day will help keep your house warm without your having to turn on your heat. The addition of large skylights not only allows the sun to heat your rooms, but it provides ample light during the day, so you don’t have to use any electricity for that purpose either. And you can add blinds to it so that, in the summer, you can close them up if you choose to keep your rooms from getting too hot. And skylights aren’t as expensive as you might think they are to get installed.

Following these few tips will drastically upgrade the energy efficiency of your home.

The first is the fuse box panel itself. Most of the older models were built to handle 100 amps of power, but these days most of us need 220 amps or more. The newer panels know how to handle all the electrical needs better, because some of our electronics are quite powerful compared to what they were back then. The cost for this is fairly high, mainly for labor, because this is something you definitely want a professional to handle.

Next: the number of electrical outlets. Most of us don’t have nearly enough for all the things we have, which means we put great stress on our outlets. I know I’m not the only person who has, in some places, triple extension cords coming off one outlet. By adding a new fuse box panel, your home can now handle up to 5 times as many wall outlets as you used to have. Don’t go crazy, but try to evaluate how many electrical appliances you have in each room and then add as many as you need. You may still not come up to as many as you need, but you’ll reduce the worry of one outlet suddenly cracking under the stress and taking out many of your electrical appliances with it. While you have your professional at your house to install your new fuse box, ask him about a whole house surge arrestor, which protects the entire house against strong power surges.

Something else you want to think about is having all the freedom you want with wall switches to operate certain things. For instance, you might want separate switches to operate the fan in your bathroom from the lights, if right now both come on at the same time. Or you might want the ability to turn on and off more than one light in your room, and from multiple locations. It’s easy enough to either add multiple switches, or a wall panel you can label that can address all of them. These days, you can even add wireless technology and run all of these things through your computer, or remotely; how’s that for a modern house?

If you live in cold areas, or areas where power usage is so high that you’re always putting up with brown outs, you definitely need to add a generator to your house. Depending on your needs, you can buy a relatively inexpensive one that will give you a few hours of power or a larger one that can run half a day. Some of them run on gas, while others store energy from other sources and becomes available when you need it. Those are more expensive, but if you’ve ever been caught in an ice storm when the power’s gone down and the roads are inaccessible, you might find this a lifesaver.

These are only a few home electrical upgrades you can consider, but they’ll give you a lot of peace of mind.

1. Your house probably already has some kind of insulation, but it may not be in all the areas you need it to be. Areas that are often missed are under rugs, on the floor of attics, between internal walls, and on the upper floor of basements.

2. Sometimes you need some extra insulation, or makeshift insular devices, to close off spaces such as the space from an attic door, bilko doors, and basement doors.

3. A lot of cold air can get in through electrical outlets. There are foam inserts that can be added behind outlets that will help keep extraneous air from coming in.

4. Most doors that give you access to the outside can use some extra insulation. Weather stripping is great for that, whether you need to actually put it between the areas where cold air might be coming in or on the inside or outside of the doors to help seal things up. You should think about doing something like that before you think about adding a little more protection with those portable air stoppers. Don’t forget the door to the garage and any pet doors.

5. You definitely need to check all of your windows for leakage. If you have storm windows, those will offer some kind of help, but it’s best to buy double paned windows to help keep the air out. Add extra caulking along the inside of the windows if you feel it’s needed, but don’t forget about caulking the outside of the windows if you can get to them.

6. If you have areas of the house that you can divide off, one thing you can think about is putting up curtains of some kind to keep heat in one area, while closing vents in other areas that you might not need as much. For instance, if you’re staying in one half of your house, you could put up a small curtain and only warm that one area while allowing your living room and kitchen to stay a little colder. A small space heater might be all you need to stay warm in this instance.

7. There are vents today that will automatically close if no air is blowing into the house. That keeps hot or cold air in, and the opposite out. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to install them, and it may be just what you need because, when air isn’t blowing through these vents, cold or hot air could be coming in.

8. One final place air could be getting into your house is around the air hose of your dryer, if you have a dryer in the house. You need to make sure it’s sealed properly, and if it’s windy you might want to install a cover to put over the hole, if you can access it easily enough, so that you can open it when you’re using it and close it back once you’re done.

These are some easy home insulation upgrades that should make your home more comfortable.

Home Theater upgrades

1. Change your speakers. Unless you bought the top of the line Bose speakers years ago, your speakers could probably use an upgrade. As we’ve moved towards more digital technology, sound has improved along with it. Strangely enough, smaller can actually be better now, and of course smaller gives you more room to do other things with the space. When you’re thinking about new speakers, and if you have the extra cash, think about getting wireless speakers so that you won’t have to worry about people tripping on your stuff, or ugly tape all over the floor.

2. Get a hi-definition flat screen television. If you still have one of those 65” monster projection TV’s in the middle of your room, you’re not only taking up space, but you’re way behind in technology. Yes, flat screen hi-definition TV’s cost a lot of money, but no more than that beast did when you bought it. You don’t even have to get one as large as 65” to make it worthwhile for a home theater; the clarity of everything you see makes a big difference.

3. Great seating is a must. Furniture that you may not want in your living room works great in a home theater. Think about buying one of those suites that has 5 leather reclining chairs, a surface to put something on, and cup holders for each seat. Talk about watching moving in style and comfort! They come in many different colors, are easy to clean, and definitely comfortable.

4. Think about buying a blu-ray DVD player. I fought this one until I went to a friend’s house and saw his version of Ironman versus the version I had at home. True, you can’t watch blu-ray DVDs on a regular DVD player, but you’re putting this in your home theater. You won’t believe how dynamic the image can be until you’ve seen it in play. You can play regular DVD’s on a blu-ray player, and it enhances them a little bit also. But pop a blu-ray into the player immediately afterwards and you’ll think you were watching a grainy music video from the 1970’s beforehand.

5. The last thing to think about for your home theater upgrades is your sound; rather, how you hear everything in your media room. There are many things that can be done to enhance the sound; from changing the type of panels you have on the walls to the type of flooring, to even adding other items in the room to help change the sound. So you like dynamic sound, or do you want to dim it a little bit? Do you love all aspects of surround sound, or are some pitches way too much for your ears? Do you have too much echo, or do you want it to reverberate like you were in a live theater? Everyone knows how they like their sound, but may need some help from a professional in trying to figure out the best way to get to what you want.

If you upgrade your home theater, you not only enhance the value of your home, but you’ll have many hours of enjoyment, alone or with family and friends.

If you’re going to change the toilet, take a look at your floor and see if you need to change the flooring. This is a relatively easy change also, as bathroom flooring is easy to pull up and easy to change. These days, you can even get flooring that your feet will stay warm on, which is nice. You can even think about putting down a wall to wall rug, but it’s not recommended because it’s hard to clean if there’s any flooding from any place in the bathroom. Changing your flooring and then adding a throw rug or two is a much better choice.

If you have a bathroom and shower combination, it means you either have shower doors or a shower curtain. Each is pretty easy to change, and you can select from many styles and colors for each of them. With curtains, you should probably get two of them, the inner one being plastic and waterproof, the outer usually some kind of terrycloth that can literally be anything you want it to be. Shower doors are harder to replace, but there are still different styles, from sliding doors to doors that you just pull open. There are also different styles of glass, including glass that doesn’t fog, which may be a little more expensive, but is better protection against mildew and calcium deposits.

If you need to replace bathtub, you actually have the option of getting a bathtub covering instead. There are companies that can cover either just the tub or the entire bathtub/shower area. It’s not cheap, but it’s fast, usually only taking a few hours to get the job done and not requiring the tearing down of walls and any changes in plumbing. But beware, because the cost of doing that can be as much as redesigning your entire kitchen with the right contractors.

You can even think about painting bathroom walls, and there are many ways to do that. You can just paint them, and you can have different color schemes. You can have half the wall painted, with the other half some kind of linoleum covering. You can put glass panels on the walls, although this is an older style, but some people still love lots of reflective glass everywhere. You can even put wallpaper on the walls, or maybe find a pattern you like and just put it along the top of every wall in your bathroom, except around the bathtub, unless it’s also waterproof.

These are just a few things you might think about if you want to upgrade your bathroom.

The first is your home water heater. Most of us don’t need water heated as fast as its heated today, and we certainly don’t need it on all the time. These days, adding a home water heater that you can program to go off and on at different times of the day, depending on if you’re home or not, can help save money and stop wasting energy. The same goes for your heater. These days, panels can be installed that offer multiple settings for times when you can turn the heat completely off and times when you may need to boost the heat for a little while. You can also have a minimum setting if you live in a cold climate, since it’s always suggested to keep the temperature at a certain minimum to make sure your pipes don’t freeze and possibly burst.

A very important green home energy upgrade concerns your windows. If you haven’t already done it, update your windows to at least double panel glass, which adds insulation to your home and helps keep air from outside out and your heat inside. If you’re not keyed about getting new windows, at least check the sealing of your present windows and think about adding new caulking, window jams to help the glass part stay sealed better, and if need be, during the winter, put up plastic over your windows to help cut down drafts.

If you only have to heat one room at a time in the winter, think about adding a pellet stove. It will easily heat a nice sized room, burns clean, and saves both gas and electricity. They’re also not all that big, so you can put them in many places, although, for safety, you’re going to want to keep it close to a wall and have it on some kind of stone or rock bottom.

If you live in a pretty sunny area, you might think about adding skylights to your roof. In the winter, the sun will come through the lights and heat up your house, so you won’t have to turn the heat on during the day. In some areas of the world, homes will come with the ability to open up the windows to let heat escape from the house also, which helps keep it cooler in the summer.

And if you really want to find new ways of bringing energy into your home, you could try to find some used solar panels to add to your home. This may sound like an odd concept, but they are out there, and they probably work great. Any energy you can provide for yourself helps to offset costs, as well as saves in energy usage from outside sources. You’ll want a professional to install it for you, but even if it only saves you 10% of your usage, that goes a long way towards making your home more green.

The very first thing is to hire a licensed electrician to do all of your work. Let the electrician walk around your home, poke into walls and attics and basements, and give you a recommendation of all of your needs. Old wiring might need to be replaced or changed up. There are some wiring rules from the past that don’t work in today’s world.

For instance, many older homes don’t have wall plugs with the grounding wire built in. That third little appendage on the end of plugs is there for safety reasons, but it does no good if you can’t plug it into your wall. For a professional, that’s a minor fix, but for your home, it’s drastically important.

While you’re at it, have more electrical outlets installed in every room in your house. These days, all of us have way more electrical appliances or things that use electricity for charging, and what we end up doing is using multiple series of extension cords. This can get dangerous for more than one reason, so having more electrical outlets could help to solve this problem, or at least reduce it if you still need to use one or two extension cords.

There are three other things you might want to ask your electrician about.

1. One is called a whole house surge arrester, which can protect your entire home against strong electrical surges, no matter what’s stemmed them.
2. A second is called a ground fault circuit interrupter, which these days is required by code for bathrooms, kitchens, garages, on outdoor outlets, and in crawlspaces or unfinished basements, which protects against electrical shock caused by leaking electric current.
3. The third is called an arc fault circuit interrupters, which protects your home against electrical fires by interrupting power in areas where it detects faulty wiring or problems with wiring.

One of the things to understand about wiring is that you don’t just go into the walls, pull out old wiring and install new, although, if you want your walls torn down to get it done, you can do it that way. Wiring is timely work, trying to thread it through spaces that can’t be seen. In many instances, professionals can take your current wiring and figure out ways to change it so that it not only works with new things such as new fuse boxes, but is safer than it was before.

One thing you can do, that you should do, is fix any electric objects you have in your house that have a damaged cord. This is more of a danger than you could possibly imagine, and in many cases, just wrapping it in electrical tape isn’t going to get it done. It’s better to either fix the wire or get rid of the item and buy another one. Not only is it not safe, but it leaks electricity, which means your bills will be higher. They may not be noticeable for one item, but if you have a lot of them, it could be draining money out of your wallet also.

Upgrading your home wiring is a crucial step, but a dangerous step; always let a professional handle it for you.

Obviously everything starts with a great heating system. There are a few choices you can make.

Forced Air Heating

You can have forced air, which is the most common for most homes. Today’s heaters are most energy efficient, so that shouldn’t be a problem. You can get panels that will let you program your heater so that you have different temperatures at different times, including weekend and hours.  That will help save more costs on energy consumption.

If you have forced air, you’re going to want to take a look at your vents. You need to clean them at least once a year to remove dust and any other bad things that could be floating around in the air. You might want to add more vents to a room so that it heats up faster, which helps to keep the running time of your heater down. Make sure the register which helps keep the air circulating isn’t being blocked.

Radiator Heating

Another type of heater you can have is radiator heat, which is based on steam. This works well in getting heat into a room and maintaining it, but it can also lead to overheating in some circumstances. Some of them will make interesting noises from time to time also. With radiator heating, you don’t need vents, and therefore you won’t lose heat through them.

Natural Gas Heater / Fireplace

Something else you might want to try is buying a heater that taps into your natural gas and provides heat to a room. Gas fireplaces bring a lot of style into your house, but more important, they heat a room up quickly. You can get one with a blower than pulls the hot air into the room even faster. Some can be installed in a wall that will serve more than one room. You can even use it as your main heating source and have ducts going from it into other rooms of your house.

Pellet Stoves

There are pellet stoves that you can buy in all sorts of different styles that can bring heat into a room. They’re relatively inexpensive, and you can put them in any room, as long as you have it sitting on slate or stone for safety. Pellets aren’t that expensive to purchase, and they will heat a nice sized room efficiently. And you can get them in styles that remind you of olden days or modern styles that remind you of avant garde artwork.

Portable Gas Stove

You can also get a portable gas stove that looks like a small wood burning stove. They burn natural gas also, but are only for heating one room, and therefore are more efficient than having to heat the entire house.

Electric Fireplace

One last choice in upgrading your home heating is that you can purchase an electric fireplace, which simulates a real fireplace, only it’s flatter and cleaner, and also can be concentrated in heating only one room quickly.

These home heating choices can upgrade any room in your house, and won’t cost you too much money either.