Let's Hope Those Home Improvers Actually Are Improving Their Homes

Given the mania for home improvement in the past few years, one might think people would be ready to sit back and admire their handiwork. But they aren’t. For marketers, the beauty of home improvement is that one expenditure leads to another. Say you’ve modernized your kitchen. All of a sudden, the dining room—which, until then, had seemed perfectly satisfactory—looks outdated and in need of renovation. What sort of projects will homeowners take up in the year ahead? A poll by Vertis offers some indications.

Painting is the most common task, with nearly half the respondents (48 percent) expecting to do interior painting in the next 12 months.