TIHS 2024: The Best DIY Products To Bring Excitement & Ease To Your Home

Ice cold, room temperature, sparkling, still, bottled, with a lemon, on the rocks ... no matter how you like your water, we all expect to have clean and safe hydration available inside our homes. Some may drink straight from the faucet without paying much attention to contaminants that could be lurking in the tap, but with reports from cities like Flint, Michigan making headlines in recent years, many people have begun to wonder about the quality of their own tap water supply. Unfortunately, finding detailed information about your local source can be difficult — even intentionally so. Enter: the Culligan Essential Water Lab Test Kit. This new product from the globally trusted water filtration brand is one of the best water test kits to ensure safe drinking at home, allowing you to understand your unique water quality and make informed decisions about balancing and purifying it before you drink.

As House Digest has continued exploring the array of exciting products offered by The Inspired Home Show (TIHS)– a multi-day trade show expo that highlights home and garden products — we made a point to stop by Culligan's booth to learn more about their innovative new lineup of filters and more. Needless to say, we were impressed. Not only that, but in the end, we have chosen the Culligan Essential Water Lab Test Kit as our winner for the Best DIY category at the entire show. Here's what wowed us about the Culligan Essential Water Lab Test Kit, and how it is helping consumers enjoy healthier, cleaner, and tastier water. 

The Culligan Essential Water Lab Test Kit, whose parent company is ZeroWater, is more than just your standard litmus paper test. This kit can detect all sorts of potentially concerning materials in your water, from lead to pesticides, nitrates, nitrites, iron, chlorine, and copper. The kit can even pick up on the presence of multiple bacteria types in your supply, an important factor that some other products tend to neglect. Besides picking up on potentially harmful contaminants in your water, the DIY test kit can also tell you about the pH, hardness, and total dissolved solids (TDS) of your water. These factors can affect taste, but they also affect your skin, hair, and nails, wear out appliances, and cause other horrors in your home.  

Why did we choose this product as our Best DIY winner? While the Culligan Essential Water Lab Test Kit provides a professional-level report of common water contaminants, it doesn't require professional skills to use yourself at home — which is paramount. In an exclusive chat with House Digest, Trenna Fulle, VP North American Sales and Consumer Products for Culligan expanded: "It's important for consumers to understand what's in their water, like microplastics and PFAS. The at home test kit can tell you if you have lead, arsenic, or other nasty chemicals [in your water]."

After following these simple steps, the test kit delivers a panel of results within minutes. And after learning more about your unique water makeup, you can browse more of Culligan's trusted products to filter, balance, and purify your water supply. 

This kit provides everything you need to expertly plan and hang a gallery wall. It includes a grid template for planning and a step-by-step guide. Tape, a pencil and sharpener, and 20 hanging hooks and nails, are also included. Best of all, it comes with access to Character Expert Support. Co-Founder and CEO Alex Onsager told House Digest that this service is comprised of home renovation experts "who can answer your questions 7 days a week. They can give you pointers on design advice, working with different wall materials, or just general troubleshooting."

If you're looking for a convenient option to hang just about anything, Wrap-It Storage's new straps have you covered. The velcro strap is connected to a carabiner, so you can wrap the strap around a branch or post and hang something from the carabiner, or clip the carabiner onto a hook. This can be used to hang tools or cords in your garage, or a bird feeder from a tree. They are available in black and orange, in a variety of sizes on Amazon.

This gutter cleaning system allows you to quickly clean your gutters so you can avoid leaks, mold growth, or potential pest infestations. This system connects to any cordless drill, and the rotary paddle works to clear out leaves from your gutter. Joe Hayman of Hy-C Company shared with House Digest that an important added benefit of this system is safety, saying, "It is a safer and faster alternative than using a ladder for routine gutter cleaning". The system is available for $70.39 on Amazon.