I grew up in a very DIY family. My parents built our first home, and I mean they actually built it. There was no hiring out of tough jobs or allowing others to oversee the process; they built a two-story, three-bedroom home from the ground up. My mother hung sheet rock and laid tile all while nine months pregnant with me. She’s a brute.

When I was 10, we moved to town and lived in a home that was built in 1877. My parents gutted the entire thing and, you guessed it, started from scratch so they could DIY. By this time I was accustomed to falling asleep to my father pounding nails or sanding floors, but after a while I just wanted a “normal” house without an inch of sheet rock dust under my feet. I always swore to my parents that I would NEVER live in an unfinished home when I grew up, and would always hire other people to do the work.

My actual floor.

Ha! Fast forward to today and guess what I did all weekend … sanded our hardwood floors so we could re-stain them. Yep, the DIY bug was not something I could escape from and now I live in a “fixer upper” and can honestly say that I am proud to be a DIYer.

I have to give props to my ‘rents for doing all this DIYing before there was an arsenal of tips and tricks available at their fingertips. When my boyfriend and I encounter a problem, we have the option of quickly looking up a how-to on YouTube or a quick search in Google to help us solve the issue. My favorite way of acquiring information is a good ol’ DIY/home improvement blog. I love a good blog. A step-by-step guide to how the average Joe attacks a home improvement project, along with real-life tid bits of information that you only get from messing it up yourself first.

I am such a fan of a certain DIY blog that I recently stood in line for four hours to catch a glimpse of the real people behind my favorite blog, Young House Love. I’ve followed this blog religiously well before I had my own home to renovate, but fell in love with their quirky style and funny home improvement tips enough to check their blog daily (sometimes multiple times a day).

So whether you fancy yourself a die-hard home improvement buff like my parents or maybe you reach your limit at painting an accent wall, in today’s DIY-world you will always have a place to find inspiration and guidance. Maybe you will even become so inspired (see Young House Love, I swear you will get hooked) that you will completely change your mind, like me, and decide doing it yourself isn’t so bad after all.