50 Things to Do This Summer Before It’s Over

I have always been a summer person.

Winters are just not for me. The cold, the grey, the way everything feels a little heavy… no thank you. But summer? I love it. Ice creams and that fresh, summary feel throughout the year. This is my vibe. 😌

And it goes so fast. Every single year.

So this year I made a list of things to actually do before it’s over. Fifty activities to do that make summer feel like summer. 🌻

Summer Bucket List with 50 Fun Activities

At Home

1. Set up your own little summer corner somewhere in the house. A chair pulled close to a window, a cold drink on the table beside it, a good book. Just a corner that feels like yours this season. Having a dedicated spot actually makes you use it.

2. Make cold brew coffee at home for the first time. Coarse ground coffee, cold water, twelve hours in the fridge. That’s genuinely it. The difference in taste compared to regular iced coffee is wild and once you’ve had it, you’ll be making it every week all summer.

3. Sleep with the windows open on a cool summer night. Pick the night when there’s a breeze and just leave them open. The sounds of summer coming in while you fall asleep… I don’t know, it’s one of those small sensory things that makes a season feel real.

4. Grow something, even something tiny. A pot of mint. A single basil plant on the kitchen windowsill. One tomato plant on the balcony. Using something you actually grew in your own food is a satisfying feeling for how little effort it takes.

5. Watch a classic summer film you’ve somehow never seen. Pull something out from decades ago, the kind with actual pacing and a story that lingers. Summer evenings are made for this.

6. Build a proper summer playlist from scratch. Curate it yourself, one song at a time, over an afternoon. Something you’ll still pull up in January when the cold has made you forget what warmth feels like.

7. Set up a little ice cream bar at home one noon or evening. Grab tubs of your favourite flavours. I like to have simple vanilla for this ♥️. Everyone add their own topping like KitKat, Munch, waffle crips, Oreos, or maybe berries if you like? I don’t know. I have always used KitKat and munch and nothing beyond that.

8. Reorganise one room the way you actually want it. Open windows, summer playlist on, just take one room and change it around. Summer has this energy that makes you feel like reinvention is possible and honestly, use it.

9. Eat dinner outside on roof or in bacony. Pull a table to the balcony if you have one, or lay a proper spread on the floor indoors, candles and everything. Change the setting completely. You’ll enjoy this change a lot and it will become a memory.

10. Start a loose summer journal. Just a paragraph once a week about what happened, what felt good, what you’re thinking about. By September you’ll have something worth reading back.

11. Make a proper jug of something cold and keep it in the fridge all week. Homemade lemonade with mint. Watermelon water. Rose sherbet. Something that feels intentional rather than just reaching for whatever’s there.

12. Have a solo photoshoot at home. Set your phone up on a timer, find good light, wear something you love, and go for it. Delete most of the photos. Keep one or two. It’s more fun than it sounds. Doing it entirely for yourself with no posting agenda feels really freeing.

13. Sit outside in the early morning, just once this summer, before everything starts. Lukewarm water in hand, or whatever drink you have set for your morning with no phone. Just the morning air and whatever’s happening outside.

Out and About

14. Drive somewhere with no plan and see where you end up. Give yourself two hours and a direction. Turn when something looks interesting. Stop when you feel like it. Some of my favourite discoveries have been completely accidental.

15. Visit a local market you’ve never been to. Go to look and taste, not specifically to shop. Buy one ingredient you have no idea what to do with yet and then figure it out when you get home.

16. Find the oldest building in your town and actually look it up. You’ve walked past it probably a hundred times. Stand in front of it and think about everything that happened there, how long it’s been standing while entire worlds changed around it.

17. Eat somewhere completely new, alone. Sit by the window. Order something you can’t fully pronounce. Eat slowly with your phone face down. Solo dining in summer has this very specific lovely quality to it.

18. Catch a local outdoor event this summer. Open air cinema, a park concert, a summer street food festival. Most of them are free or almost free and they have an energy that nothing indoors can replicate.

19. Do a day trip to the sea or a lake town. Pack light, leave early, stay late. Drive back sun-tired. Day trips to water are genuinely one of the most underused forms of feeling better about everything.

20. Go to a flea market or boot sale in a neighborhood you don’t usually visit. Even if you buy nothing. The randomness of what shows up, the conversations, the sheer variety of what people part with… it’s genuinely interesting every time.

21. Watch the sunset from somewhere new. A hill, a rooftop, a bridge, a field somewhere off a road you took on a whim. Give it ten minutes and actually watch it move. Summer sunsets specifically are something else.

22. Visit a garden or botanical park. This is the season they’re at absolute peak. Bring a camera or just your eyes and your full attention for once.

23. Find a wild swim spot. A lake, a slow river, a hidden cove. Swimming somewhere that feels slightly unkempt and secret rather than a formal beach is its own category of magic. If you’ve never done it, this is the summer.

24. Explore a town you keep meaning to visit but never actually do. Give it a full day. Walk the main street, have lunch somewhere local, get a feel for it. 😌

25. Go to a garden centre just to be around plants and smell things. Greenhouses have a specific scent that is deeply calming. You don’t have to buy anything. Touch the leaves. Look at all the varieties. Walk around slowly.

With Friends

26. Host an outdoor dinner with an actual theme. Greek mezze, a taco spread, a proper picnic in someone’s garden. Something specific enough that it feels like an occasion. Summer evenings with food and people you love are one of the best things in life and they don’t happen enough.

27. Plan a road trip and give everyone the one-playlist-each rule. Everyone adds their songs to a shared list before you leave. You learn so much about people from what they put on. By the time you arrive you’ll know each other differently.

28. Go berry picking together. Strawberries, blueberries, cherries depending on where you are and when. You come home with too much fruit, sun in your face, and in a better mood than you went. It works every single time without fail.

29. Have a terrible film night. Everyone finds one genuinely, objectively bad film. You vote on which one to watch. You make equally terrible snacks. It’s one of the funniest and cheapest evenings you can have.

30. Take a spontaneous overnight trip somewhere nearby. One person books a room, everyone packs a bag, the rest you figure out when you arrive. Some of the trips people talk about for years started exactly like this.

31. Recreate a childhood summer activity together. Water balloons, sprinklers, building a den in someone’s living room. The point is to feel eight years old again for an hour. It’s genuinely wonderful.

32. Go to a theme park or fairground. Summer is the only real season for this. Roller coasters, too much fried food, that specific exhausted happiness on the drive home. Worth every bit of it.

33. Find a rooftop café or restaurant you haven’t tried yet. Book it early enough in the evening that the sun is still doing its thing when you get there.

34. Cook something elaborate together at home. Homemade pasta, a slow curry from scratch, a meal that takes the whole afternoon. Eat late. Linger at the table.

With Kids

35. Let them plan an entire day. Meals, activities, timing — all theirs. Follow it as closely as you actually can. What kids choose when given real freedom tells you so much about them and they will remember that day.

36. Do a proper backyard camp night. Tent, sleeping bags, a torch, some snacks, a sky full of stars if you’re lucky. You don’t have to go anywhere. Being outside at night is completely magical to small people and honestly to big ones too.

37. Build a blanket den inside the house. Chairs, blankets, fairy lights, cushions. Make popcorn. Climb inside and watch something together. Better than any cinema and it costs nothing.

38. Start a summer nature journal together. Press flowers, tape in leaves, draw a bug, write what the weather was like. By the end of summer you’ll have made something genuinely lovely together.

39. Have a full outdoor water day at home. Hose, buckets, water balloons, sprinkler, sunscreen. Let it go for hours with no agenda. Children do not require expensive entertainment. They require water and permission and your presence.

40. Bake something together and give it away. Muffins for a neighbour, cookies to drop off at a friend’s. The combination of making something with your hands and giving it to someone is an unusually good feeling and kids feel it deeply.

41. Go stargazing somewhere properly dark. Download a star map app, drive somewhere away from streetlights, bring blankets. Lying on the ground looking up at the sky is an emotion, an experience they will carry with them for a long time.

42. Make a summer memory box together. A shoebox. Ticket stubs, a pressed flower, a photo printed out, a note about the funniest thing that happened. Fill it all summer and open it together in winter when you need it.

43. Visit somewhere historical and make it interesting before you go. Look up one genuinely weird or dramatic story about the place. Tell it to them when you’re standing there. Moments like these feels one of a kind when it’s a historical story and you’re standing in it.

44. Set up a lemonade stand or small stall together. Old-fashioned and completely worth an afternoon. What they learn about money, people, effort, and transaction from one summer afternoon of this is more than you’d expect. 🍋

21 Things to Do When Bored and Mentally Exhausted

Just For You

45. Take a long bath with nowhere to be after. Candles, music you love, something cold to drink. Door locked. An hour coziest me-time.

46. Give yourself one morning that’s entirely yours. No errands to run. Food first. Then whatever you actually want. Just one morning this whole summer, entirely, genuinely yours.

47. Learn to make one dessert you’ve always thought but never made. Just once, from scratch following the recipe properly.

48. Write a letter to yourself to open next summer. What’s happening right now. What you’re hoping for. What you want to stop carrying. Seal it. Put it somewhere you’ll find it in twelve months. I did this once and reading it a year later was one of the strangest, most moving experiences… you realise how much shifts even when you feel like nothing is. 🎀

49. Find one kind of movement this summer that you actually enjoy. For the feeling during and after, nothing else. A long slow evening walk, a swim, dancing alone in your kitchen, a bike ride with nowhere to be. Movement you hate is not the only option.

50. Do one thing this summer that scares you a little. A class you’ve talked yourself out of, a solo trip, a conversation you keep putting off, saying yes to something you’d normally decline. Summer has this specific quality of making things feel possible that feel impossible in other seasons. Use that.

70 Thoughtful Things to Do Instead of Doomscrolling

Summer doesn’t ask for much. Just that you show up for it a little.

Save this. You’ll want to come back to it on a slow sunny afternoon.