If you’re anything like me, every so often you look around your home and think that it’s starting to look a bit… lifeless. You know the feeling – perhaps a room’s not flowing properly, or the house could just use a little TLC. Whatever it is, it can bring your mood down instantly. Well, that simply won’t do!
Your home is the place where you should feel safe, comfortable and happy. You and your family should be able to love every moment you spend inside your home; whether the place you call home is an apartment, condo or house. With that in mind here are a few techniques that I like to use whenever I feel like I need to bring my home back to life.
Please note: this is a contributed post.
Deep Clean Your Carpets
Vacuuming will only get you so far. While it’s important to vacuum regularly, every once in a while you’ll need to break out the big guns. The best thing to do is to hire, borrow or buy a steam cleaner and go to work on those carpets! It’s best to pick a warm, dry day to give your carpets the chance to dry as quickly as possible. You honestly will not believe what a difference freshly cleaned carpets can make to a room. It can feel like someone’s finally turned on the lights after keeping you in the dark!
Give Some Love to Your Appliances
From your washing machine to your toaster, your appliances need love too. For a while, you can get away with a quick wipe down with a damp cloth to keep them clean, but eventually, dust and grime can build up. With metal appliances like toasters and tea kettles, a good scrub with a paste made with a bit of baking soda and a few drops of water works wonders to bring their shine back. For your bigger appliances, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and put your backbone into it. Your washing machine, oven, and stove all need a serious deep cleaning from time to time and your kitchen will feel all the more fresh and bright for it.
Don’t Neglect the Exterior
It can be tempting to ignore the outside of your house if you tend to spend much more time inside. But arriving home to an untidy front yard or looking out at an overgrown mess of a garden can really put you down in the dumps. Give your lawn a serious trim and sprinkle some grass seed over it to fill out any bare patches. If you have any wooden sheds or fences, provide them with a coat of fresh paint. And if you have any metal railings or decorations, give them a coat of RustBlock to keep them looking shiny and new.
Give it a Shuffle
Sometimes, making your home feel fresh and like new can be as simple as rearranging a room that doesn’t feel like it works anymore. Perhaps the flow is all wrong, or maybe you’ve realized that you could be using the space so much better. Either way, it’s quite refreshing to transform a space like this. It can make you feel like you’ve stepped into somewhere entirely different and can really reawaken your love of a particular room.
Let There be Light
One thing that can make a house feel drab and little bit lifeless is a lack of decent lighting. Some houses are designed with pretty limited lighting, with a single overhead light in each room. That means that you’ve got plenty of scope to get creative. Scour thrift shops for lamps of all shapes and sizes and use them to create a more pleasant, soothing atmosphere around your home. Don’t just think about lights for what they can do, use them as decoration. Find lamps that fit with your style and experiment with where you put them. You won’t believe what a difference it can make to the feel of your home.
Install a Security System
Wait, what? Look, I know this seems really impersonal and extreme but hear me out. Your home is your sanctuary. It’s the place where you and your family should feel safest. The worst thing that could happen is for something to break that feeling of safety. You don’t want to have to spend your life worrying about someone getting into your home. A security system is an excellent way to set your mind at ease and let you get back to enjoying your home in peace. The level of security you would use is up to you of course and make sure you check out link security reviews to decide what’s best for your home.
Think About All the Rooms
There are always rooms in any home that end up getting more attention than others. However, if you’re neglecting certain rooms in your home then that’s going to make the whole place feel more drab and dull. The bathroom is one of the most common of these rooms. Things like dull and grimy shower heads and taps can make the place feel dirty even if you’re putting in a lot of effort. Check out 10Mango’s look into the top shower heads to see if you can’t find a replacement that not only looks nicer but makes taking a shower a far more pleasant experience.
The same goes for places like your den or office, which can just end up looking more like a storage shed, rather than being a room that you actually want to spend time using. Your attic is another room that often gets ignored. You might think that the best thing your attic is good for is to hold all the stuff you either don’t want to throw away but don’t have room for or things you just haven’t gotten around to throwing away yet. However, if you were to convert your attic into a livable space you’re able to give yourself a whole extra room. This can both add a significant amount of value to your home but it can also give you somewhere to work, a spare room, or just a space for you and other people to chill out at the end of a hard day.
Get Personal
Have you ever walked into someone’s house and felt like you were in a showroom? It’s an odd, unsettling feeling when you realize that there’s no real sign of who lives in a house. The key to avoiding this is to make sure that your home is a representation of who you are. Cover the walls in your memories using photographs of loved ones and trips away from home. If you have kids, then this is an excellent opportunity to put some of their art on display. That way you can bring some color into a room and let them take pride in something that they’ve made. There is no better way to bring life into a room than to fill it with your personality.
The truth is that these are just guidelines or jumping off points that help you get a better idea of the kinds of things that you might want to try. When it comes to trying to bring your home back to life and stop it feeling dull, the only person who really knows what to do is going to be you. You need to think incredibly carefully about what the best possible options for your home are depending on everything from the style of your home, your budget, and your personal taste.
Do you have any home cleaning tips or tricks you’d like to share? Leave a comment on this post or shoot me an email: info@thecreativecottage.net and I just might feature your story in a future blog post.
Take care,
Lynn Smythe
Founder and Chief Blogger
The Creative Cottage
Sloth Athletica
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