Home improvement doesn’t show any signs of slowing down next year, despite worries about a cooling economy, and changes in lifestyle and technology continue to evolve how we live, work, sleep and eat at home in order to make our lives more convenient and comfortable. We’re always going to have standard improvements like painting or annual checkups but these new upgrades may come as a surprise.
We’ve taken a quick look in our crystal ball, and here are some of the home improvement trends that seem to be emerging next year.
Changes in American demographics touch nearly every single aspect of our lives, so generational changes that are affecting the home improvement industry should be no surprise. In recent years, we saw a spike in home improvements for seniors, many of them executed by non-profit organizations or charities who work with older Americans to put in improvements like wheelchair ramps, grab bars and other advances to make aging in place easier.
Now, a recent report by the Home Improvement Research Institute finds that this generation’s do-it-yourself handy-people are more likely to be millennials. This generation, born between 1981 and 1996, did have a major delay in life changes like marriages and home ownership due to a crushing amount of debt. However, they’re now reaching the age where home improvement is not only a possibility, but can also be augmented by a near-permanent access to digital devices like computers, smartphones, and tablets. That creates a generation enabled by technology to make nearly any DIY project a realistic possibility.
Like it or not, smart technology is coming into your life and it’s expected to be worth more than 130 billion dollars in the next five years. That’s really only talking about voice-enabled technology like digital assistants (Siri, Alexa, and Google among them) as well as the physical devices they enable, including smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s HomePod and the Google Home.
Where homeowners may start considering upgrades is the number of smart appliances coming onto the market that are enabled by smart home technology, not to mention the aforementioned digital assistants and also, video upgrades. From ovens that can show you step-by-step how to cook a recipe to smart locks and doorbells to network-enabled diagnostics for your television, these changes are likely to be a big trend in home improvement in 2019.
That doesn’t mean scrubbing the pots and pans and mopping the floor — it means that the sight of all of these new devices on the market from blenders to toasters to “one pot” devices to grandma’s old crock pot can disrupt the feel of common areas and make them feel cluttered. There’s a trend towards more open kitchens that encourages lots of hidden storage and integrated appliances to make them feel more streamlined. From sliding doors that hide cooking and sink areas to large islands that encourage meal prep as well as entertaining, expect kitchens to change quite a lot this year.
