Researchers and marketing folks can tell a lot about people — and what they might be prone to buy — based on what they’re searching for online. So it may be no surprise that Empire Today, a seller and installer of carpeting and flooring, has researched the Google search trends on home renovation projects.
Like so many before them, the company then cranked out an infographic showing state-by-state which renovation projects are the most popular, at least according to our search traffic.
People in 19 states, including Washington, D.C., are most looking into living room renovations, for instance. Among those looking into new flatscreen television fixtures or sectional couches are the folks in Texas, Florida and New York.
The fiercely independent Maine is oftentimes an outlier in studies like these, but when it comes to home projects, the states where people are bucking national trends are, maybe surprisingly, California and North Dakota, the only states where they searched bathroom renovations above all others.
Only four states — including our New England buddy Vermont — picked the bedroom as their top room to fix up.
So how about Maine? The biggest home project on our to-do list is outside — the porch/patio/deck. Maine is one of 14 states, including New Hampshire and Connecticut, where we want the open air to be our living room.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Raise your hand if you still go out and barbecue on the deck during the wintertime. Maine is a state of skiers, hikers, kayakers, hunters and fishermen, so it seems to make sense that even when we’re home and relaxing, we want to do it outside.
Going a little deeper in Empire Today’s numbers, Google rates search interest on a scale of between one and 100, and while Mainers searched most for the aforementioned deck and patio projects, we frankly didn’t turn to the internet much for our home renovation questions.
Our top search term only topped out at 32.4. By comparison, porches ranked above 70 in Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Kentucky, but wasn’t the top home renovation search term in any of those states.
So we love the outdoors and we already know how to build our decks. Or we know someone who does without Googling it.
Do you have any home renovation projects in mind for the coming year? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook.
If you want to build a new deck next summer and you are looking for help online, you can start by checking out the relatively quick video below: