I thought I’d take some time now that we’re in the middle of summer to sit in the air conditioning and check out the top five home improvement articles by order of popularity here at Home Improvements Depot. As you can imagine, a lot of home improvement projects here become more popular with the change of seasons. Outdoor lawn and garden improvement projects tend to be popular when it is warmer and indoor furniture and interior projects tend to be more popular in the winter months. I looked at traffic coming into the online home improvement posts here from the beginning of may to the beginning of July and here are the top home improvement articles, as voted by your visits:

How To Hide a Flats Panel TV: Now that flat panel televisions are really coming down in price it looks like a lot more people are buying them and realizing how BIG they really are (or your spouses are complaining that these televisions are taking up too much space on the wall!) Either way, a lot of people have been looking at clever ways to hide their large flat panel TVs from view and this post offers a few different solutions and ideas that are commercially available.

How To Build Your Own Dirt or Rock Sifter: I guess a lot of people are working on big lawn and gardening clean-out projects when they’re not watching TV. A dirt or stone sifter is actually a pretty handy tool to have around. I used it to remove most of the stone from a large pit in my backyard left over from an above ground pool. I’ve also used it recently for a little cleanup work in the flower beds where I had stone and mulch and all sort of debris in there. I simply put a few shovelfuls of stuff on the sifter and rolled it back and forth. My sifting made a nice fine mulch and allowed me to just dump the larger stones and sticks and twigs.

Planting grass and dirt sifting for gardens are classic summer home improvement projects. For the record: I think planting sod is cheating!

Planting Grass Seed: After cleaning up the stones and debris I guess a lot of you have bare spots in your lawn and need to quickly plant grass seed. I find my method to be pretty easy and it always works well as long as I add plenty of that magic ingredient: water. I’ve learned that you really, really, really have to water new grass. Sure, some types of grass are more drought resistant and hardy than others, but without a good base of initial watering (a week or two at least) it’s difficult to really get grass to grow strong and quickly.

Removing Black Wood Stains Caused by Urine: Dogs may be man’s best friend, but apparently a lot of you were struggling with the same problem I had. My dog was wetting one particular rug repeatedly and I didn’t find it until the wood beneath the rug until I found that ugly black wood stain. My method is cheap and easy, though you have to careful not to stain the wood to too light of a color. I’ve recently found another black urine spot on my wood floors and I’m going to have to use this trick again… I’ve also learned to put down a plastic trash bag beneath my carpet (and out of sight) to act as a liquid barrier between rugs my dog particularly likes and the hardwood floor beneath. I’d love to hear if anyone has any methods for stopping a dog from using a particular spot, short of banning the dog from parts of the home altogether.

Ceiling Fan Direction: Ahh, the eternal ceiling fan question about which direction makes it cooler in a room and which direction makes it warmer. This has been a popular topic of discussing for as long as there have been ceiling fans, but I have to say that the direction a ceiling fan turns really does matter.

I’ve been working on plenty of other projects around the house and I hope to get some more photos and posts up soon. Some of the things I’ve been doing have been indoor projects, but I just completed some backyard fence replacement which is a classic outdoor summer home improvement project!

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