7 DIY Projects to do With Your Kids

By now, because you have been diligently following your pal Captain DIY, you are a do-it-yourself pro. You have successfully changed a window, installed flooring, and even remodeled your kitchen! Way to go, sport!

Well, all of this time you have spent swearing at your house is time that you have not spent swearing at, er, being with your kids. It’s time to remedy that! 

This article is proudly sponsored by the amazing Half-Hour Hank app, which helps you chip away at that never-ending list of projects. We here at Headquarters would also like to thank David of fiology.com for the idea behind this article, as well as giving Captain DIY the kick in the pants to actually buckle down and write the damn thing. Thanks, fellas!

Geez, pipe down before the social workers hear you! But seriously, yes you should let those snot buckets touch your tools, and I’ll tell you why: because if they learn these skills now they won’t be calling you in the middle of the night twenty years from now complaining of their drywall cracking from their lousy tape job, that’s why.

Okay, from a less cynical standpoint, there are other very good reasons to have your kids help you with home renovation and repair projects. In fact, any project you have that they can help with is a good one for them to get involved in. Not only is it a great excuse to spend some real quality time with them, it also gives them the opportunity to learn physical skills, build confidence, and really see what kind of work goes into fixing and maintaining things.

It also lets your kids see you in all of your fallible glory, and lets them know that while you are an amazing, near-perfect super-human, it doesn’t come easy. Their little minds need to know that it’s not a failing on their part that they can’t do what you can do, it’s simply a lack of practice.

Here we go with the piece of resistance. No wait, the piéce de raisistaunce. The pie of recipants. The damn project list!

The first few projects are going to be for the younger crowd, and they’ll be projects that are incredibly simple. These are probably not things you have listed in your Half Hour Hank Brain Dump, but they are great ways to get your chitlins used to the idea of manipulating tools.

• Hammer Some Nails

While this may not qualify as an actual project, hammering nails is a functional skill that can give kids a real sense of satisfaction. Not only does this teach them tool manipulation, hand-eye coordination (even better than video games because it’s in real space) and get them comfortable with a tool, it will teach them patience. And it will teach you patience. A lot of patience. 

You don’t need to come up with anything fancy here, just make sure that whatever they are hammering on is sturdy and the nails aren’t too long. You can start them to make it even easier. You can also start them on the right path by having you and your minions, er, children, start the project by all putting on your safety glasses together. 

• Carve A Marshmallow Roasting Stick

Every kid loves gooey, messy, sticky stuff, right? So why not give them all of that in one simple project? It’s about as sticky as it gets! Get it? Because it’s a stick?

Ok, now that I’ve lost the adults, let’s get down to business. Kids, grab a carving knife and some adult supervision. Next, go find yourself a sapling. For you city folk, a sapling is a young tree. Preferably, your sapling is fairly straight without too many branches, and is about 3-4 feet tall.

Chop that sucker down like a tiny Paul Bunyan and cut it to a decent length that will allow you to fry a marshmallow without frying your fingers. Now all you need to do is sharpen the business end of it and you’re good to go!

Holding the stick in one hand so the soon-to-be pointy end is facing away from you, set the blade of the knife against the wood a few inches from the end and flick it out. You should be aiming to slice a bit of the bark off without getting too deep. Now rotate the stick and repeat until it’s semi-sharp, and get cookin’!

• Check Your Tire Pressure

I wrote a how-to a while back for this one so I won’t get too involved here, but this is a great way to get the kiddos started in an illustrious career of swearing at the family car at an early age.

Set them up with your tire pressure gauge, keep a close eye on those little caps that cover the tire inlet, and off you go!

For the rest of the list, we are going to get into some projects that require a little more motor control. If your kid still has a hard time getting Cheerios from the table to their mouth, perhaps this section should wait a few years.

For those of you whose kids are able to not die if left unsupervised for more than ten minutes, let’s continue!

• Paint A Room

Kids love to rearrange their space, and giving their little stink pit a new coat of paint is a great way to make a huge difference without spending a ton of money. As long as you cover any surface that shouldn’t get painted, lock their bedroom door from the outside, and keep them away from sugar for 24 hours beforehand, it should go swimmingly!

But seriously, this is a great way to connect with your kid while giving them a real chance to express their budding autonomy. Grab some paint and some dropcloths, and before you know it you’ll have a closer relationship and a room decor that would make Martha Stewart’s head explode.

• Build A Birdhouse (or Bathouse)

Small carpentry projects are fantastic for introducing kids to woodworking, which is a stupendous way to introduce kids to magnanimous DIY projects. This section proudly sponsored by Thesaurus, everybody’s favorite dinosaur.

The best thing about building birdhouses is twofold: they don’t require a whole lot of materials or fancy tools, and they can be terribly built and still function perfectly. Check out youtube for a few tutorials, or search for blueprints. Either way, this project will provide you and your child hours of fun and learning while you rack up those brownie points with your bedraggled spouse who finally has time to take a goddam nap.

• Replace the Toilet Flapper Thingy

Every house has, at one point or another, had an issue with the toilet flapper thingy. You know, the old “jiggle the handle so the toilet stops running” deal. These are, believe it or not, fairly easy to replace and moderately inexpensive depending on your level of lifestyle creep. If you want to spend a lot of money on something that is submerged in toilet water all of its life, go right ahead! Granted the water on this side of the toilet is clean, but it’s still in a toilet.

Again, this article is more about ideas than the actual execution, so go ahead and hop on the ol’ inter webs to find tutorials as needed. You won’t need much for tools besides a bucket, towel, and maybe a wrench, so drag your kid away from their friends and get them fixin’ before they get old enough to run faster than you!

• Change A Doorknob

If your house was built anytime prior to ten minutes ago, there will come a time when your interior doorknobs start falling apart. This is because they are all crap, and kids are incredibly destructive. I’m assuming you have kids at home that are destroying your stuff, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this stupid article.

I actually wrote an article on just how to do this, which I will link to right here. When you’re done reading this article and sharing it with all of your friends and neighbors and newspaper editors and TV anchors, head over there and check it out. This one will challenge your kid’s patience a bit, which will in turn challenge yours, which will help both of you grow and build character. Assuming you both survive it, of course.

Give yourself a big old pat on the back, parent! You have successfully spent at least several minutes of quality time with your child, and hopefully even taught them something beyond what a box of band-aids costs. 

Just remember, these are the days on which your kid will fondly reminisce from their comfortable and successful adulthood, and their therapist may even think of you as less of a monster because of it. 

Parenting isn’t about being perfect, it’s about being there. Getting your hands dirty with your kid is not only a great excuse to spend time with them, it might even make them like you a little bit. At least for now. Soak it in, parents! Soon they’ll be teenagers and you will be supremely uncool, but for now you can be their DIY hero.