15 Cheap & Fun Things To Do When You’re Bored At Home

Stuck at home today? Looking for fun things to do to prevent boredom?

Sometimes staying indoors isn’t very fun — especially if you’re an outdoors type of person.

Whether you’re homebound because of an illness, hunkering down inside due to bad weather, or you simply don’t feel like being outside today… there are plenty of fun and cheap things when you’re stuck at home alone!

Here are my top 15 things to do when bored at home…

#1 – Go On A Virtual Museum Tour

Many museums offer free online virtual tours of their exhibit halls, allowing you to become a little more cultured right from the comfort of your couch. Check your local and regional museums as well as your favorite national museums to see which ones are offering these fun virtual museum tours. You can get started on your virtual journey by checking out the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History virtual tours.

#2 – Take Free Online College Classes

Some of the nation’s most prominent and respected colleges and universities offer free online classes. While these generally do not offer any credits, they do provide a wealth of knowledge that can help you become more adept in an array of skills, careers, and hobbies. Get a jump start on this next chapter of your education while being stuck at home by checking out Harvard University’s free college classes!

#3 – Create A Tutorial

Maybe there’s something that you’re super skilled in! If that’s the case, maybe you should do the teaching… by creating your own online tutorials. Many people record videos of themselves teaching an array of skills — ranging from how to play the guitar to where to find the best rock climbing sites. Best of all, making a video tutorial is virtually free. And if you’re able to make yourself go viral, you can achieve Internet fame and fortune!

#4 – Clean Out Your Closets

Being stuck at home doesn’t have to be all about surfing the web. Why not do something to make your home a neater and cleaner place to live? One of the best places to kickstart a cleaning spree is by tackling those closets! Make a plan now and decide what you want to do with all of those unwanted items in your closets. There are lots of DIY closet organizers you can try. And, who knows… you might even make a few bucks by selling the things you don’t want online!

#5 – Learn How To Meditate

No matter what your belief philosophy, meditation is one of the keys in helping improve your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Meditation is a highly individualized and personal thing. What works for one person may not work for another. To get started, check out these meditation basics for beginners to help you decide what type of meditation is right for you. Mindfulness meditation is one of the easiest to start with.

#6 – Start A Journal

Whether you’re spending your time stuck at home enjoying new hobbies, cleaning out closets, starting a business, binge watching your favorite TV series, or doing something else entirely, it might be fun — even cathartic — if you chronicle your experiences and feelings each day in a journal! Writing a journal is a great way to rethink the things you do and plan out the things you hope to do the next day, next week, next month, next year, and beyond. Plus, for many, journaling is a wonderful stress reliever. There’s something totally empowering about putting your thoughts down on paper! Journaling is one of the very best (and easiest!) ways to sort out the things that are going on in your life so you can improve your mental health and make your tomorrows even better.

#7 – Makeover Your Finances

One of the best ways you can spend time stuck at home is going over your finances. That may not sound like a lot of fun at first — but just imagine all the fun you could have if you had a little more money to spend on the things you really want. And if you’re like me, you might just find a financial makeover to be quite rewarding, too. Especially when you begin freeing up more of your income. Now there’s a way to relive some stress!

#8 – Download Free Game Apps

Want to play a game? There are countless game apps you can download on your phone for free. And many of the best free games for your phone are just as fun and challenging as the games you’d pay $50 apiece to buy for your computer. Plus, they’re better than board games — because these games can be played alone.

#9 – Write A Book

It seems just about everybody and their brother wants to write a book — but how many of them actually follow through with this goal? If writing a book is something you’ve long dreamed of, what’s stopping you from doing it now? And if you’re stuck at home, then you’ve got an advantage that so many writers wish they could have — the chance to sequester themselves on a retreat and focus on their writing goals. So, if you’re bored at home and have the inclination to write, why not take this opportunity to put pen to paper and begin writing the book you’ve always wanted to write?

#10 – Start A New Business

Do you have that entrepreneurial spirit? Ever thought of starting a small business? Think you have a skill, product, or service other people need — or want? If you answered yes to even just one of those questions, perhaps you should start a business! Finding out how to start a business is the first step. You’ve got to make a simple business plan, decide who your customers will be, and determine how it is you plan to sell or deliver whatever you have to sell. Millions of people start new businesses each year — why not you, and why not now? Here are some fun entrepreneur ideas to get you started!

#11 – Take Up Indoor Gardening

Who says you have to do all of your gardening outside? You can get your hands just as dirty indoors — and no, not necessarily by cleaning out that closet (referring back to idea #4)! Indoor gardening is increasing in popularity because it’s so simple, so convenient, and (can be) so free! For example, here are 11 plants you can re-grow from kitchen scraps. Here are some fun indoor gardening hacks to get you started:

#12 – Read A Good Book

The simplest things are often the most enjoyable, and in this wild and crazy digital world of whiz-bang smartphones and computers that can fly you to the Moon if you want, there’s something enchantingly quaint about reading a book. Chances are pretty good that you’ve already got a book laying around at home that you’ve been meaning to read — or finish. If you’ve exhausted all your book options at home, there are tons of free ebooks you can download and enjoy!

#13 – Organize Old Photographs

Before smartphones, if we wanted to take a photo of something we had to work with cameras, film, and if you’re old enough you may even remember using flashcubes. Many folks to this day still have shoeboxes full of photographs that were never organized into photo albums or scrapbooks. Organizing your old photos can be a fun and productive way to spend your time when you’re bored at home alone. And reliving those old memories is a wonderful way to take a free trip back in time!

#14 – Take Up A New Hobby

Hobbies don’t have to be expensive, but they do require free time — something that you have plenty of right now. When you’re stuck at home, you have the chance to embark on new hobbies or maybe even get back in touch with ones that you put aside a long time ago. There are all kinds of hobbies to enjoy from the comfort of your home! They range from the practical (such as sewing and cooking) to the artistic (like drawing or playing musical instruments). Then there are the myriad “collecting” hobbies — including coin collecting, stamp collecting, rock collecting, and so on. There are also hobbies that can take you beyond your own realm and into other places entirely — as you can experience when studying other nations, the weather, or even outer space. When it comes to hobbies, the world of joy and discovery is limitless.

#15 – Catch Up On Your Favorite TV Shows

If all these ambitious ideas on and fun things to do when you’re bored at home are making you tired just reading them, maybe it’s time to sit back, relax, and catch up on a TV show. Binge watching a TV series is one of the most enjoyable things to do — especially if there are shows you wanted to finish watching a long time ago, or there are programs that your friends and family told you about but you never got a chance to see because you’ve been so busy. If you’ve got a streaming service, then you’re just one or two clicks away from binge watching a great series. If you don’t have streaming services, you can watch over-the-air network TV for free or check out YouTube to enjoy full episodes of many great old TV shows.