Every house wears out eventually. You and the family might have looked after it well, but colors of paint start to fade and the no-slamming-doors rule only works for so long before handles start to come loose and cabinet doors fall off their hinges. It’s time to upgrade because a deteriorating family home is no fit place to live. You might have let these things slide when you were a student or you simply lived alone, but you have to think about the quality of life of your kids and the family as a whole. Here are some tips to help you get started if the family home needs upgrading.
Move somewhere new –
This is a potential option if your current home is beyond repair. Perhaps the family has become too large for the home, perhaps the location is no longer appealing, or perhaps your circumstances have changed and you simply need to move. If your family has special requirements for a home environment, such as disabled access, then you may even want to consider home design firms such as Steven Docker Associates who specialise in individual requirements such as these. It may be too difficult to simply upgrade your current home to meet those special needs and building a brand new one might be the best option.
It’s so crucial that your home feels like a home; it should be tailored to you and your family as individuals and a collective rather than feeling cold and foreign. If you feel like strangers in your own house, and there’s too little space and too little hope for fixing the place up then it’s definitely time to move the family out to somewhere better suited to your needs. Or, alternatively, it’s time to build a house of your own in the exact image you desire. In any case, the following points will help you craft your home into the perfect image, whether it’s a brand new house or an old one that you’re giving a fresh face.
Set a budget –
You have a lot of ideas floating around in your head as to the way you’d like your house to look, but a lot of ideas will cost you a lot of money. Of course, it won’t necessarily cost you “too much” money to upgrade your home, but you definitely need to have an actual figure for the costs of this DIY project rather than a rough idea. Budgeting is an integral part of the process, and you need to do this before you even put hammer to nail. Go through each room in your house and make a list of the tasks which need completing along with every single resource you’d need to make that happen; furnishings, paint, wood, and any tools. Once you’ve got an overall list, add up all the costs and think about whether that’s a reasonable figure. If it is reasonable then buy all your resources and draw a line under spending any money beyond the budget. You need limitations when you upgrade your house so that you don’t run out of money before the project is completed; you can always make additions to your home in the future if you want to do more.
Make the home environmentally friendly –
This may sound low on your list of priorities, but there are many reasons to create an eco-friendly home beyond saving the planet. More than anything else, you’ll save money on your energy bills, and that’s certainly a point which shouldn’t be dismissed (especially when you’re spending so much money on this home upgrade). Environmentalism is all about reducing excess waste and being smarter about the things we do use.
You could make your home sleeker, more minimal, and far more modern by being environmentally friendly. For example, double-glazed windows and insulated walls will help to trap heat in the house and avoid generating heat only to unnecessarily waste it. Energy efficient appliances in the kitchen, and this refers to the oven, in particular, could help you save a fortune in money and avoid wasting electricity unnecessarily. The possibilities are endless, and it’ll make your home feel far more modern than it does already.
A fresh paint job –
There’s nothing that a fresh coat of paint can’t do. Faded walls in the house can be brought back to life with a sleek new surfacing. In fact, a fresh coat of white paint is a great neutral colour to choose because it reflects natural light streaming into a room and this, in effect, brightens the house. It’s all about giving your home a refreshing feel to bring it back to life. You should even paint external parts of the house; timber windows and doors shouldn’t just be painted so that they look nice again but so that they’re protected for years against the elements. Paint provides a coat of safety against rainwater and the sun for woodwork, and your doors and windows need that, no matter how much you were told your exterior property could stand the test of time. It might seem tiring and boring, but you need to invest time into repainting your exterior property so as to keep it safe.
Add space to your home –
Finally, the most important upgrade you can make to a family home is to increase the amount of space available to you all. We talked earlier about the possibility of moving house when your family grows too big for its home, but sometimes there are ways to make better use of the space already afforded to you. The roofspace could definitely be converted into an important living area if you invested time into doing so; clutter from the downstairs living room could be used to create a secondary lounge area in the attic, therefore splitting your possessions and creating two minimalistic rooms without too much clutter. You could do the same with the garage if it’s unused.
Of course, on a simpler level, you could simply find better ways to store things around the house. Put up shelves in the kitchen, bedrooms, and perhaps even the living room could be a pretty aesthetic decision in terms of interior design but also a smart way to create a home for clutter that’s never really had a home around your house. Think of ways to make everything look neat and tidy; it’s okay to have a lot of possessions if they all have storage spots so that everything looks intentional. Things can be stored under beds in bedrooms too; you might have to upgrade the bed, but every upgrade will serve your home well in the long-run.
Love,
*This is a collaborative post