12 Simple Home Sprucing Tips To Improve Your Home Within A Year
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When your home needs a lot of love, it can be overwhelming. Not only can you feel like you’re never going to get it done, the idea of making a start can seem like a huge step. If you don’t have the budget to hire professionals to do a complete transformation for you, don’t panic. You can still make a huge difference to the look of your home yourself. In fact, make it your mission over the next twelve months.
Within the next year, you have twelve months to be able to get some improvements ticked off your list. That means you could allow yourself one project per month as a minimum and still be able to make a huge difference. Whether you’re a busy parent or someone that has a time-consuming career, this is a very manageable way to finally make the changes to your home that you’ve always wanted to.
If you’re on a budget and you’re not sure where you should start, these twelve tips should give you an idea of the kind of changes you can achieve over the next year. From giving the outside of your home a face list to make a few simple color changes, it’s time to create the home of your dreams.
Have A Huge Clear Out
One of the best places to start is always with the clutter in your home. Having a clear out of everything you own might seem like a big job, and it is – but the results will be worth it. If you have years worth of stuff that has piled up around the home, it’s time to throw out the things you don’t need. And if you think you’ll be too sad to see some items go, this view by Marie Kondo might help you to let go. When you’ve decluttered, and you’ve got a lot more space to play around with, you’ll be so glad that you cleansed your home.
Paint Your House
One of the first things people see when they come to your house will be its exterior. If the paint on your home is looking a little shabby, it could make the world of difference if you repainted. Depending on the size of your house, it could sound like a lot of work, but you can pick up paint sprayers that are easy to use and can give you a professional finish (sites like www.toolnerds.com have a ton of reviews to help you out). It’s one of the things that has the power to change the look of your home completely.
Change Your Outer Kitchen Fixtures
If you’re someone that loves to cook and be in the kitchen, it might get you down that your kitchen isn’t looking its best. So, change it. If you’re not looking at ripping the entire thing out and starting again from scratch, you can achieve a similar look by giving the fixtures a little attention. Simply change your cupboards or paint them and add on new handles and you’ll be surprised how different the entire kitchen will look. If the change isn’t enough, look into new countertops and pop a new lick of paint on the walls too.
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Upgrade Your Textiles
Your living room is the one room in the house where the entire family should feel comforted and at home. If your lounge space is feeling a little cold at the moment, you can easily inject a lot of warmth with the help of textiles. If you have hard flooring, think about adding in super soft rugs to warm the space up. You may want to think about buying a new couch, but if you’re still in love with it, you can give it a bit of a facelift by changing the cushions you have, along with throws and blankets too.
Redo Your Kids Bedrooms
As your little ones start to grow, their bedroom decor will start to get outdated. Their rooms will always be the ones that need updating the most – especially if you’ve gone with a very childlike theme early on in life. But, luckily for us all, kids bedrooms always seem to take the least work. A little wallpaper or wall art and a lick of paint later and they look completely different. You often keep the same flooring throughout their entire childhood, so it’s a lot easier to make changes quickly and cost-effectively. The older they get, you might like to think of using just one color or something simple so they can keep the style throughout their teens and still love it.
Landscape Your Yard
With a newly painted house, you might find that your yard lets it down. So, it might help you to spend one month landscaping. You may not even have a lot of work to do, but you’d be surprised at the difference just tidying things up can have. If you really feel like your outside area needs a facelift, then check out these backyard transformations for inspiration – http://www.hgtv.com/design/outdoor-design/landscaping-and-hardscaping/15-before-and-after-backyard-transformations-pictures. By doing a little bit each week, at the end of the month, you should be left with a brand new looking yard.
Order New Furniture
Sometimes, focusing on the actual house isn’t enough – you have to change the things you have in it too. If you have done what you can to save old pieces of furniture, but it still isn’t enough, you might want to think about saving up to order a few new bits one month too. You don’t even have to order a new set in most circumstances. You could find that one new piece of furniture in a couple of rooms completely freshens up the overall look.
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Change Your Flooring
Changing the color of a room or repainting doesn’t always give the effect you were looking for. If you’re struggling to see why it just doesn’t look spruced, look down. It might be that your flooring is letting the entire space down. Luckily, new flooring doesn’t have to cost the earth. In fact, you can get some really great inexpensive flooring ideas (like these – http://www.bhg.com/kitchen/flooring/inexpensive-kitchen-flooring-ideas-281474979572649/) that will give you the effect you were looking for and really upgrade your decor.
Paint Woodwork
We all know that details count. So, take a look at some of the smaller pieces of woodwork dotted around your home. Things like doorways, handrails, skirting and picture rails all add up to being a large part of a room or house altogether. If you were to spend a month going around and repainting everything, your home would look instantly brighter. So, it might be time to pick up a brush, grab a little white gloss and get to work. It’s not the easiest or most enjoyable of jobs, but it’s one that’s sure to make a huge difference.
Upgrade Your Heating System
Sometimes, upgrading areas of your home could save you money. These are the kind of home improvements we all like. If you have an old heating system in your house or an inefficient one, it might be worth speaking to a local plumber to find out what options you have to upgrade it. Focusing on energy efficiency in this way will not only save you money in the long run, but you might find that your home stays warmer or cooler for longer – and you can enjoy a more reliable stream of hot water.
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Switch Your Accent Colours
If you love color, you may be working with accent colors in different rooms. This is one of the smartest ways to be able to upgrade your decor overtime. When you have a basic backdrop (think walls, floor, and furniture), you can easily change the look of a room by changing the cushions, curtains, rugs and other accessories. Likewise, if you have a feature wall, you can change that every few years to completely transform the space.
Reorder Rooms
When you have a lot of unused or underused rooms in your house, it can be really refreshing to try and spruce them up and change their main use. If you have a tiny spare bedroom, why not think about turning it into an office or dressing room? Cluttered storage rooms could become cool looking libraries with organized storage boxes and books on show. You might also want to change your discarded basement into a more of a chill out room – after your declutter, you should have space.
12 Months To The Home Of Your Dreams
Right now, twelve months might seem like a long time – but once you get started, tick off each job on your list and start to see the changes that are happening around the home, you’ll be glad you got started. What’s more, if you’re not the biggest fan of DIY, you might find this is an easy way to ease yourself in and not take on a project that feels too big.