Note: This blog post is a sponsored conversation written by Lynn Smythe, the Founder and Chief Blogger for The Creative Cottage lifestyle blog. The opinions, thoughts, ideas and text are all mine.
Our homes are not just places where we sleep, relax in front of the TV, and get ready for work in the morning. They are also the locations where we centre ourselves, organize our lives, get in touch with our own thoughts and feelings, and allow ourselves to be at our most vulnerable. Here are a few suggestions for remodeling your home.
One consequence of this, is that if your home is a cozy “dream environment” of sorts, you are likely to feel your best, and to be in a much better position to get the most out of your life, and the various opportunities that present themselves to you.
On the other hand, if your home is the opposite of a cozy dream environment, you can more or less count on the fact that your well-being is going to suffer significantly, and that you will struggle more to achieve your goals and to maintain productive habits, and so on.
We all know this on some instinctive level. And, so, it’s very common for people to daydream about finally remodeling their homes and turning them into places that they can occupy with a sense of happiness, peace, and purpose.
But what if you really feel like remodeling your home, but just aren’t sure where to start? Here are some suggestions that might help you get the ball rolling.
Changing Structural Issues
Identify any particular structural issues that really bother you, and see what it would take to change them. Structural issues with our homes are often pretty disheartening, because they seem so solid and immovable, and it’s not necessarily clear what could be done to actually resolve those issues. At the very least, a structural issue with your home is bound to be significantly more in-depth and ambitious project than anything related to simple decor.
Nonetheless, it’s important to break down the sense of limitation and stagnation, by identifying any particular structural issues in your home that are really bothering you, and to then see what it would take to change them.
Often, you’ll need to be careful when dealing with these issues, and will have to consult with the right specialists rather than attempting to do the job yourself – even if you are decent at managing DIY and even construction projects on your own.
Popcorn ceiling removal, for example, often releases asbestos particles, which can be very dangerous. Unless you’re well-versed in dealing with this sort of issue, you shouldn’t attempt to do it yourself.
Visualizing Your Dream Home
Spend some time imagining and visualizing your dream home, and use that as a blueprint for how to move things forward. There’s a famous saying that goes “if you can see it, you can achieve it.” Well, the opposite is also true. “If you can’t see it, you can’t achieve it.”
If you have a clear sense that your home isn’t the kind of environment you want it to be, that’s a sign that you need to take action and change things up. But, this realization alone doesn’t actually tell you anything substantial about what you can do to improve the situation, as such.
In order to remodel your home and turn it from the underwhelming or otherwise unhappy environment it may be, you need to spend some time imagining and visualizing your dream home in clear detail, and then use that mental image as a blueprint for how to move things forward.
It’s important to realize that your visualization of your dream home will, in this case, serve to act as a guiding principle of sorts, and not necessarily as a goal that you are actually trying to achieve in precise detail.
If your dream home is something like a castle, and you currently live in a small apartment, you’re unlikely to achieve the dream in the most literal sense, in the short term. But, you can take design cues from that “ideal home” vision of yours, to tailor and adapt your current home so as to make it more appealing to you.
Work on One Project at a Time
Break down elements of your dream home into bite-sized actions. A home remodeling project is more or less always going to be a very serious undertaking, that will require a pretty substantial amount of time, not to mention often a large investment of money, as well.
Keeping this in mind, it’s not always going to be very easy, or perfectly straightforward, to figure out exactly how you can best get started in pursuing that remodeling dream of yours. And even if you can think of what you need to do, you may well be discouraged and disheartened by the simple awareness that the project is bound to take a good deal of time, resources, and energy.
In order to move past this potential stumbling block, and get the ball rolling, it’s important to break down elements of your dream home into bite-sized actions that you can hit one at a time, without becoming overwhelmed.
For example – maybe one of the fundamental components of your ideal home vision has to do with dramatically improving lighting in the home. If this is the case, you can begin by looking into having different windows installed, and can think about purchasing standing lamps, and bulbs, of various types, as a more immediate and short-term solution.
Decluttering is Key
Work on decluttering the home before anything else. It’s difficult – if not impossible – to remodel your home in any meaningful way, if your home is heavily cluttered, and you don’t have a clear handle on just what’s happening with all your various assorted belongings.
Decluttering your home not only makes space for renovation work to be done without interference, but it can also help to give you a clearer perspective on what it is about your home itself – as opposed to just your belongings and decorations – that you’d actually like to change.
In fact, it may even be the case that undergoing a serious home decluttering process would make you a lot more content with your home in and of itself, and would reduce the apparent need to go through with a serious remodeling project in the first place.
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