by Mindy Laughton

After revamping your living room with new furniture, color schemes and lighting, you might be inspired to keep the momentum going. Here’s an idea: catch up on other upgrades around the house you’ve been planning to do but never found the time or inclination to do.

Perhaps, you have one or more of these problems

1. You have not improved home security.
2. You have a slow Internet.
3. You have electrical problems.

Let’s take a look at how to tackle these important issues:

1. Improving home security.

Why it matters:

Your home is your castle. It’s your sanctuary from the world and your place of rest. While you may be living in a nice neighborhood with a low crime rate, that’s not a guarantee of protection.

Think of home security like you think about car insurance. While you hope you don’t ever need to make a claim, you’ll be glad you have it should you be involved in a car accident. Similarly, while your home has always been a safe place and you’ve never heard of any burglaries in your neighborhood, you should still secure it.

How to do it:

There are two levels of home security: DIY and Monitored Home Security Systems. Since they are both inexpensive and easy to implement, why not do both? Sure, there is some redundancy, but efficiency is not the goal here, safety is.

The DIY Approach:

First, walk around your property and see if you have any security risks—like doors that don’t close properly or windows that don’t shut tightly. If you see anything obvious, then fix it. For instance, you might already have deadbolts, but it’s still easy to force the door open and pry them loose. In this case, add two inch screws into a metal plate to make them much more secure.

Second, remove any places that a burglar could hide behind when sneaking up to your house. For instance, a garden shed close to the house or bushes near the living room window. Remove these if they don’t serve any aesthetic or practical purpose. If you don’t want to remove them, then improve lighting around them.

Third, change any flimsy doors you might have with solid ones, add deadbolts to your doors, and replace your windows with modern ones. You probably have old windows, if they are easy to pry open from the outside. (This will also improve your home insulation.)

Getting Monitored Security

For less than what you pay for a single takeout meal each week, you could get excellent monitored home security. These systems use infrared motion detectors to protect your home. If somebody were to break into your home while you were away, it would trigger an alarm and trained dispatch operators would send the local police to your house.

2. Speeding up your Internet.

Why it matters:

If you’re like most people, you use the Internet a great deal. Whether you telecommute and use it for your work or you like to watch streaming videos during your free time, a good Internet connection can improve the quality of your life. You’ll spend less time feeling frustrated and more time enjoying your digital life.

How to do it:

Check your plan with your ISP and ask them how you can check your speeds. You may have to upgrade your plans to one with a higher throughput or you may be getting slower speeds due to technical reasons.

Assuming you have a good ISP and have purchased a high-speed plan, then you need to figure out the technical reasons for your slow speeds.

Here are some possible reasons:

• You may have an old computer or some hardware problems with your current computer.
• Your Wi-Fi signal may be weak.
• You might be using plugins and applications that hog bandwidth.
• You might need to try out a new DNS Server.

If you’re good at computers, you can do much of this troubleshooting yourself. There are plenty of books available on how to upgrade your computer or your home network. If you don’t have the time or patience to do it yourself, then just hire someone to do it for you. You might be surprised to find that it’s something as simple as using an old DSL modem and all you need is a 1.1 or 2.0 modem to pick up speed.

3. Resolving electrical problems.

Why it matters:

If you have an older home, your breakers might trip often or your fuses might constantly blow. Alternatively, your circuit breakers might fail to trip, which causes shocks and overheating. If this happens, it’s a serious problem — because it could cause fires. [Editor’s note: this is also a good time to check that you have current smoke detectors with fresh batteries!]  All these problems are due to using an old electrical panel. Perhaps it’s a Federal Pacific Electric Panel or a Pushmatic Electrical Panel. Panels made after the 1980s are much better suited for our current electrical grid and the types of appliances we now use in our homes.

How to do it:

Essentially, this is something you don’t want to do on your own. There is too much risk of killing yourself or burning down the house. It’s much better to hire a professional electrician to come in and swap your electrical panel for a modern version.

All things considered, these upgrades are fairly inexpensive, but they can make a huge difference to the quality of your life and safety.