August is the best month to start something. Here’s what’s worth starting.
There is a particular quality to the last weeks of summer. The urgency hasn’t fully arrived yet — September is still weeks away — but the awareness that it’s coming has. The days are still long. The weather is still cooperative. Contractors are still available without a three-month wait. And the home improvement projects that have been sitting on a mental list since April are still sitting there, patient and unfinished.
This is the window. Five projects worth using it on.
1. The outdoor space upgrade you’ve been putting off
Every summer, somewhere around Memorial Day, there is a plan for the backyard. New seating. A pergola. A fire pit. Better lighting. And every summer, September arrives and the plan is still a plan.
The last weeks of July are the window to act. Outdoor projects completed in August get used through September and October — two months of genuinely comfortable outdoor living that most people don’t take advantage of because they spent the summer meaning to start.
Backyard Builds has documented this pattern across four seasons: the projects that get completed before August end up being the ones that transform how a household uses its outdoor space for years. The ones that get pushed to next summer tend to stay there.
The project doesn’t need to be large. A set of well-placed lights that makes the space usable after dark. A shade sail positioned to intercept the afternoon sun. A built-in bench that converts dead corner space into somewhere worth sitting. The compounding value of these improvements is in the months of use they enable — and that clock starts the day the project is finished.
Watch Backyard Builds on SHG Living →
2. The interior painting project that feels impossible to start
Painting is the home improvement project most people intend to do and least often complete. The prep feels onerous. The disruption feels significant. The color decision feels permanent. And so it stays on the list.
The truth is that most interior painting projects are completed in a weekend by homeowners willing to do the prep properly. The prep — filling holes, sanding surfaces, taping edges, protecting floors — takes longer than the painting itself and determines most of the result. A paint job that looks professional is almost always distinguished from one that doesn’t by the quality of the surface preparation rather than the quality of the application.
Homemade Modern has covered painting techniques in the context of larger builds, and the same principles apply to a standalone painting project: the right tools matter, the right primer matters, and the decision to use low-VOC paint in living spaces matters more than most people realize. August is the right time for interior painting — windows can be opened for ventilation, and the space can be disrupted without the cold-weather constraints that make fall and winter projects more complicated.
Watch Homemade Modern on SHG Living →
3. The smart home upgrade with the fastest payback
Of all the home improvement projects available, smart home upgrades have the shortest gap between the decision to act and the moment the benefit starts. A smart thermostat installed on a Saturday is saving money by Sunday. A whole-home water monitor connected on a Tuesday is surfacing consumption data by Wednesday. A set of smart plugs eliminating standby power draw from always-on devices starts working the moment they’re plugged in.
Smart Home Solver is built around the practical question of which of these upgrades actually deliver on their promises. Reed Keinmann’s consistent answer across five seasons is that the projects worth doing in the next thirty days are the ones with measurable, near-term payback — and that the list of those projects is shorter than the marketing for smart home technology would suggest.
The three upgrades worth prioritizing before September: a smart thermostat if you don’t have one (payback typically under eight months at current energy prices), a whole-home water monitor if you’ve been thinking about water efficiency, and smart irrigation control if you have an outdoor irrigation system running on a fixed schedule. All three are installable in an afternoon. All three start delivering value immediately.
Watch Smart Home Solver on SHG Living →
4. The handmade piece you’ve been meaning to build
This one is different from the others. It is not a practical upgrade. It is not a project with a measurable payback. It is the thing you’ve been wanting to make — a coffee table, a bookshelf, a planter, a piece of outdoor furniture — that keeps getting deferred to a time when life is less busy.
Life does not get less busy. The time is now, or it is not coming.
Robin Lewis Makes is a useful show to watch before starting a woodworking or craft project for the same reason that watching a skilled cook before attempting a recipe is useful: you absorb the thinking behind the technique rather than just the technique itself. The design decisions that Robin makes before a single cut — how a piece of furniture should relate to the space it occupies, what material is right for what purpose, where the joints should be and why — are transferable to any scale of project.
The gap between a handmade piece that looks handmade and one that looks considered is almost entirely in the planning. An afternoon with Robin Lewis Makes before you start is an investment in the quality of whatever you make.
Watch Robin Lewis Makes on SHG Living →
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5. The one room that never got finished
Every home has one. The room that is mostly done — functional, livable, nothing acutely wrong with it — but that has been missing something since the day you moved in. A light fixture that was always meant to be replaced. A wall that was always going to get a coat of something better. A floor that was always going to be refinished.
These rooms have a particular quality. They are fine, and fine is the enemy of finished. They don’t demand attention urgently enough to compete with the projects that do, and so they stay exactly as they are for years at a time.
Bring Your Own Tools addresses this pattern directly. Brent Gentling’s room-by-room approach to home upgrading is built around the idea that a single focused weekend can transform a space that has been almost-right for years into one that is actually right. The projects are not large. The materials are not expensive. The skills required are genuinely acquirable. What the projects require is the decision to start.
August is that decision. September will have other priorities.
Every show referenced in this article is streaming now on SHG Living, on Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, and on the web at watch.shgliving.com. No registration required.
