Making DIY fun for the family

The summer holidays are now here and many parents who take the time off to spend with their children will also want to get some work in the home done during the summer months. This means that you are left with the choice of trying to keep the kids at bay as you paint, farming them out to grandparents and childminders or seeing whether you can get them involved. Getting your children involved with DIY jobs is a great way for them to learn, as well as seeing just how much work goes into creating the home environment that they live in.

Naturally, you will not want them involved in anything dangerous, so jobs that involve power tools, heights, electricity or chemicals are out. But there are still plenty of tasks that your children can be involved with around the home and which they may well enjoy.

The most obvious job that children can do is being an extra hand or two for tasks that need it. So, they can steady a ladder for you if they are big enough, pass you screws as you need them or even tidy up bags of paper as you strip it off the wall. If you have two children or more you can even turn collecting post-DIY rubbish into a competitive game, with a race to see who can fill their bin liner with old wallpaper first. Just be sure that any waste is not sharp or likely to cause splinters.

Dipping the paintbrushes in the paint or even cleaning them of water-based paints is also something that the young ones can do to help you with your tasks. When they are a bit older you can also get them to work doing a little painting. Painting with a roller is easy to learn and you can always treat their coat as the undercoat and you finish off with a neater top coat.

They will really love it if they feel that they have had a part in painting their own bedroom, or even the living room and you can even involve them in trips to the DIY store to pick up paint or other materials. Have them pick out colours they like from colour charts and let them be the ones to paint up the tester swatches from tester pots you have made up.

If your children are adept at maths then they can also help you with any measuring that needs doing. Hand them a tape measure and treat it as an impromptu test of their maths skills, as they measure lengths and calculate areas. Masking corners or objects can also be a useful task, as well as covering any furniture or the floor with dust sheets or plastic sheeting.

Teenagers can help more and can even learn useful life skills by watching you. You can certainly teach them to wire a plug and change a tap washer, as well as helping with stripping wallpaper. Younger ones can help with this task too and nothing beats the pleasure of tearing great big strips of wet paper off the walls. You can also have them add secret messages to their future selves or the next home owners before you paper the walls once again.

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