73 Things You Can Only Do In Your Own Home

Before you ink up that contract with your landlord consider some of the fun you’re about to bury for several years. One of our clients showed us an apartment lease he was departing from. It was 44 pages. It basically told him where and where not he could walk into his apartment campus.

An apartment will provide you with a safe place to operate from and clean accommodations for your working life, there are things that you won’t have access to until you buy your own home. 

Here is a list of some of the practicalities, curiosities, and absurdities you’ll need to shelve until another chapter of your life because you can’t do them from your apartment – only in your home.

• Let your inner cook sizzle hosting dinner for 25 friends, 7 of them quite boisterous. 
• Uncork your repressed mezzo-soprano opera voice.
• Unwrench your hibernated car mechanic.
• Discover an unknown talent carving a tree trunk with a chainsaw. 
• Build a backyard JUMP for your snowmobile. 
• Instead of auto-ACH-ing your rent, you make a monthly transfer to “equity”
• Play a tackle football game without hearing a whistle from your property manager.
• Paint a jungle scene on the walls of your bathroom.
• Light a bonfire to celebrate Solstice.
• Pitch a tent in your backyard and listen to the coyote’s howl.
• Beat the snot out of your drum set with the garage door wide OPEN.

• Babysit Robinson’s Racing Pigs for a week while Robinson vacations in St. Croix.
• Shearing the ice with friends on your own skating rink.
• Collect fresh eggs in the morning from your Rhode Island Red hens.
• Burn photographs of your ex in your fire pit.
• Drape a sheet and host a movie showing on the side of your garage.
• Lobbing watermelons from your balcony to a chalk-drawn bullseye in your driveway.
• Practice axe throwing.
• Make a hot tub out of a galvanized horse feeding trough.
• Walk your dog wearing a bathrobe.
• Surprise a retiring co-worker with a whole-company cookout at your place.
• Buy and park literally any type of car or truck you choose: Absurd car
• Get approval from your significant other (or not) to set off fireworks.
• Provide a final resting place for your loyal dog (or defiant cat).
• Hire an electrician to set up a crypto-mining operation in your home office.
• Install an overhead rain showerhead.
• Switch from an electric stove to natural gas, if you so choose, (while you still can).
• Plant an annual flowering tree to memorialize a departed loved one.
• Do a burn-out in your driveway (@Dave Colburn).
• Give Thanks by displaying parade-size plastic inflatable animals.
• Enjoy “Hammock Time” with a lucky person.
• Build a Bocce court and host a club.
• Pick up your dog do-do tomorrow, if you feel like it.
• Build an outdoor shower.
• Adopt a horse from Nevins Farm Horse Adoption
• Hand wash and wax your car.
• Buy a kid wading pool and subscribe to the Wim Hof Method
• Install a chin-up bar and outdoor squat rack.
• Enjoy your wood-burning fireplace.
• Supercharge your weedwhacker or lawnmower.
• Line your walkway with candled Jack-O-Lanterns. 
• Roast a pig.
• Let your wild cousins stay with you …. for a month.
• Use the outside of your trash barrel for political messaging.
• Stage a community-wide fund-raising yard sale.
• Grow a pumpkin patch, and adorn it with a Snoopy silhouette cut from an 8’ plywood. 
• Let your kids try a small business lemonade stand.
• Get into a philosophical conversation with a door-to-door solicitor.
• Espalier a wall. 
• Attach a mailbox on top of a 20-foot pole and call it Airmail.
• Weed your own garden.
• Curb global warming by installing solar panels.
• Store a snowplow for the off-season.
• Fly a flag.
• Turn an old canoe into a flowerbed.
• Enjoy natural honey from your own beehives.
• Leave stinky shoes outside for the night.
• Be your own wedding venue.
• Howl at a full moon.
• Buy an Egg smoker.
• Tempt fate with a game of vintage Jarts (which are still legal for sale in the EU).
• Host foreign exchange students.
• Win an award for the best flower boxes. 
• Topiary a boxwood like an elephant.
• Add homegrown blueberries to your Cheerios.
• Go full-on National Lampoon Clark “Sparky” Griswold with Christmas lights display.
• Satellite dish it up if you see fit
• Start a business; make your garage a fulfillment center.
• Stack two years’ worth of firewood.
• Rake a sizeable leave pile to jump in.
• Invite your fr-enemies over for a snowball fight.
• Set up a composting program.
• Drip out a scarecrow in seasonal threads.

John Donlon, nor the team at GoldCoast Mortgage recommends or condones all these activities (especially Jarts) but the list has been compiled from 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd hand stories of some of the liberties that homeownership provides. Not all of them may be legal in all states.

If you’re a tenant and curious about the path to HomeOwnership consider taking our Free HomeOwnership Score Quiz.