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It’s not exactly news that being more active makes you fitter, and many of you DIY Doctor users will identify with the thought that physically ‘doing stuff’ makes you feel better about yourself, and gives a sense of satisfaction to what you do.

In addition to the feel-good factor, moving around has many other physical benefits too. According to a report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) around 25% of breast and colon cancers, and 27% of Heart disease and Diabetes could be caused by a sedentary lifestyle. The human body just wasn’t made for inactivity, and sitting down is killing us.

With this in mind we thought we would point out the health benefits of basic DIY and Home Improvement tasks.

We have researched and displayed the amount of Calories per hour for each task, as a guide to show the exertion involved, but it isn’t just about weight loss it is also about decreasing blood pressure, improving mood, lowering cholesterol, and improving the immune system:

Mowing the lawn
Even with electric and petrol mowers there is a certain amount of physical effort involved so this could burn around 250 Calories, but this would be more like 325-425 Calories per hour if you use an old fashioned push mover. If you include fighting the machine out of the shed, and walking backwards and forwards to the compost heap you are getting a full body workout.

If you don’t have a lawn to mow why not find out if an elderly neighbor could use help in the garden. This could benefit both of you if they do the easier tasks and you do the more physical ones, you get the health benefits of the work and the feel good  benefits of being outdoors and helping other people.

Gardening
Depending on what you are doing – gentle sowing, weeding and planting is a good all round exercise, but raking leaves, fencing, double digging, laying walls, or building a shed can be a very physical workout. 200 – 450 calories per hour.

Walking around a garden in the fresh air makes you feel good, improves your circulation, reduces stress and gives you sense of satisfaction when the work is done.

Snow shoveling
There has probably been a fair amount of this going on recently – expect to burn up about 415 calories per hour, and come back indoors with a warm glow.

Chopping wood
If you have a fire or log burner chop your own wood and get your heart pumping, but be very careful, wear leather gloves and safety glasses, for added protection against flying wood and splinters wear a leather apron. Approx 300 Calories.

Stacking and carrying the wood, as well as sweeping the fire and disposing of the ashes are also good physical activities.

Painting and decorating
Bending, stretching, climbing ladders, it is a work out in itself isn’t it? This burns about 215 Calories per hour. However if you are also plastering, artexing, and doing your own carpentry this can be increased to 325 Calories.

There are lots of helpful guides in the DIY Doctor projects section if you want advice on how to decorate. If you haven’t tried plastering but would like to have a go then visit DIY Doctor’s plastering section for a ‘How to’ guide.

Sweeping up after yourself
Be honest, this may not be the thing you are best at but sweeping and mopping burn up about 240 calories per hour. If you are using a vacuum cleaner to clean up after yourself that uses similar amounts of energy and all involve movement lifting and walking around.

The health benefits of doing this is one thing but think of the Brownie points you will earn if you leave your DIY job looking finished, clean and tidy at the end. This increases the feelgood factor tenfold for you and spreads a warm glow into the heart of your partner too!

Washing the car
if you wash and vacuum your car, and give it a nice vigorous polish you can work up quite a sweat. There is lots of upper arm workout and cardiovascular activity, especially if you are carrying buckets of water rather than using a hose to do the job. 300-400 Calories.

You could even do a charity fund raiser offering to wash neighbors cars in return for donations to your favorite charity, get the children involved and away from their computer games for the day.

A cautionary note

Be careful to increase activity gradually, if you have not been doing anything physical. You could split tasks down to half an hour sections at first, building up to a couple of hours a day.

Be careful of your joints, if you have been sedentary you may find your wrists, knees and back are prone to injury. Vary the tasks you do over the time you have allowed and ensure you maintain a good posture.

Take regular breaks from very physical tasks and monitor how you are feeling, if you push yourself too hard and hurt yourself you won’t want to start your DIY task next time.

If you are any doubt about your general health, ask your doctor’s advice before making a lifestyle change.

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One might prove me wrong but when it comes to New Year’s resolutions, most people tend to settle for things that don’t really suit them, so they lose their motivation soon afterwards. Surely, we all can read more, exercise more, spend less time browsing the ‘net and do more around the house. However, one can only be so determined about it.

This year then, why not look to break an old habit or two and start from a place so close to every DIYer’s and gardeners heart? Our pride and joy, the garden shed!

Image by Lenore Edman

Surely, the lazy part of us would insist that de-cluttering our sheds during the season that we can’t use most of its contents is an absolute waste of time. Yet wouldn’t it be nice to have all your tools and equipment all lined up for when the next season of maintenance works and gardening comes around? Here are five easy steps for sorting out that handyman hideout of yours.

Clear Out Everything

It may seem quite obvious, but the first step to de-cluttering is to actually acknowledge what kind of tools and fixings you’ve been hoarding, along with all the odds and ends and, let’s face it – rubbish. In order to be able to organise everything, clear your shed out completely and move on to grouping the contents, separating garden tools from DIY tools, garden equipment from power equipment and so on. Throw out all the obvious rubbish and set aside the things you’re unsure about. Give your shed a good sweep and, if necessary, a scrub too.

Know What You’re Doing…Or Get Planning

Now that you’ve got a clearer vision of all the hidden treasure you’ve been storing in your shed for so long, the next thing you need is a clear vision of what you want to store in there. Think of what you use all those tools for, and why you’d want to keep them there. Obviously there’s no point in moving your garden tools away from the garden, but if you happen to do most of your DIYing in your basement and just use the shed for all your spare equipment and materials, it’s a sure sign you needn’t keep them there.

Invest In Storage Units

In case you’re still under the illusion that you’re quite an expert when it comes to organising, you’ll be surprised what difference storage units like shelves, box sets etc. can make. As we’re talking sheds rather than a living room, you don’t have to worry too much about making them look aesthetically pleasing which also equals lesser expense. Pick up a plain shelf set and a few plastic storage boxes from your nearest homestore – or, being a hardcore DIYer, you can always make them yourself. However, it may unnecessarily drag out the process. Besides, you can still put your skills to use in our next step.

Use Vertical Space and Walls

Not everything can go on a shelf or in a box, so this is the time to take advantage of our handiness and come up with some installations to make the most of the space in your garden shed.

To prevent any future clutters, focus on solutions that will help you keep things off the floor. Your solutions should also be easily accessible to increase the chance of things being put back again once you’ve finished using them, instead of leaving them lying around.

Try to use as much vertical space as possible: use ceiling racks to store away bikes and bulkier equipment. Use walls for organising tools and smaller hardware; pegboards are great for adjustable shelves and can hold heavier stuff like brooms, garden spades and rakes. If you start running out of space, remember the door is another surface you can make use of.

Quality Control

Even if you’ve managed to rid yourself of a fair share of your shed’s contents, simply stacking everything back would be a crucial mistake if you want to minimise the clutter.

Ideally, I’d recommend you carry out a proper inventory of your tools and equipment, focusing on the ones you really use. Unless it’s a piece of family heirloom, there’s no need to keep holding on to any half-broken or broken stuff that you’ve been meaning to repair for months. Or the one you’ve never used, like that heavily discounted wood-carving set you got yourself two years ago, strongly believing that you might have a knack for that (but didn’t).

However, that doesn’t mean you’ll end up wasting all that hard-earned money spent buying these tools – you can easily try and sell some of the relatively unused ones online. Or why not donate some to charity.

So, did you find these tips helpful for de-cluttering your shed or does it still look like a battlefield? And have you got any useful suggestions of your own?

Estelle Page is an interior designer and a passionate DIYer who knows how easily all those odds and ends one doesn’t want to waste can make a clutter. She blogs for Dunster House.

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While we don’t like to think about such sad matters, very young children can drown in less than 2in (6cm) of water. Ponds have become very popular in the last few years, they provide biodiversity, reflections, movement, and sound in our gardens. However if you have young children this may not be the best thing to have outside your home.

Cover your pond
A grille or rigid mesh can be used to secure a pond, however for very young children it should be noted that this must be fitted above the highest water point in order to prevent a water hazard.

Make sure the following further safety precautions are followed:

• Make sure it is must be firmly secured
• Check regularly for signs of deterioration.
• The mesh or grille must to be able to support the full weight of a child
• The mesh should have a grid size of no more than 80mm x 80mm – to prevent a child getting trapped
• The mesh should be heavy duty (i.e. 6-8mm diameter wire) which will make it self-supporting. Thinner wire mesh will require supporting with a frame.
• Over a large pond, a frame may be required to provide stability and anchor points. The frame should clear the maximum height that the water level could  reach and take into consideration any sagging that might occur.
• If this is the case the methods used to secure and lock the frame in place should not allow a child to get trapped in any moving parts.
• Do not remove the cover until the children are old enough to recognise and understand danger.

Source

Fill your pond in
If you want to be absolutely sure that your pond doesn’t present a water hazard, then you should fill it.

Make sure to remove or thoroughly break up any liner. This allows water to drain away, otherwise you could end up with a bog garden which might be just as dangerous. Then you can fill your hole with soil to make a flower bed or more lawn. If it is a small pond it might make a nice sandpit. Some people fit their trampolines into a hole to avoid having such a large structure in the garden, and this might be a better use of an old pond for your family. Care will have to be taken that very young children can’t get trapped or use the trampoline unsupervised.

Another use for a big hole left by a pond is to have a sunken seating area, which can make a great sheltered spot in a windy or overlooked garden. See the example above from the Hmpton Court Flower Show.

Fence off your pond
Fencing off the pond is a partial solution to the dangers of water in the garden. Do not allow yourself to fall into a false sense of security. Fences will need to be panelled, or have vertical railings with bars no more than 100mm apart. They should be at least 1.1m in height to follow the Building Regulations safety principles. If you have a gate it must be a similar design to the fence and be locked shut. You could consider using a swimming pool gate, which have been designed with extended latch mechanisms to be out of children’s reach.

We have lots of fencing projects on our projects pages including:

Fencing – close board
Fencing – concreting fence posts
Fencing – fence panels
Fencing – post hole sizes

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Tree houses and sheds are a few of our favourite things, this one was shared by a friend on Facebook today, so I can’t tell you where it is – if you recognise it please let us know where it is and who built it.

Even better if this is your treehouse please do get in touch and we will give you full credit for your marvelous construction.

Any of you who a regular visitors here will know our penchant for sheds, if you missed earlier shed-related news then check out our blog on the Shed of the Year Awards, and get yours up to scratch in time to enter for the 2013.

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A new phenomenon is going on that is surely an indicator of how masculine and feminine roles are blurring.

The humble garden shed is being ‘feminised’.

We saw this fantastic picture on the Garden Resources Blog, and we were very interested to read that they are finding that what was once the male domain is now being claimed by women.

At DIY Doctor we have noticed that a large proportion of our users are women, which surprises some men when we tell them, but we are delighted to be a resource for both sexes. In fact back in 2000 when we started the site, one of our very first questions was from a women who couldn’t afford a plumber, but her immersion heater had stopped working. We explained how to change the immersion and she wrote back so pleased to have been able to get hot water. This allowed her to save money, but also it made her feel more independent and in control to be able to make her own repairs.

It has been one of the main objectives of DIY Doctor to give people the confidence they need to carry out Home Improvement tasks safely and effectively. We know what a sense of satisfaction it can bring to complete a job really well, stand back and say ‘I did that’.

When we started the site we could answer all your questions individually ourselves, but as the site grew we were able to write projects for many of the subjects because we noticed the same questions cropping up time and time again. Now we have hundreds of Project Pages from ‘acrylic cutting’ to ‘wrecking bar’, plus a forum in case you can’t find what you are looking for.

We just wanted to say thank you for using the site, whatever age or gender you are.

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