DIY

You have probably worked long and hard on designing your living room. The colour of the couch perfectly positioned vases and an ornamented fireplace are just some of the detail that took you hours to arrange. However, there is one element of the living room’s décor that can cast a shadow over the entire space, quite literally.

The lighting levels need to be adjustable in order to accommodate different activities that take place inside the living room. After all, this is the social hotspot of the entire house/apartment so it is essential that several lighting levels are at your disposal, like ambient light.

Softening the edges

If your living room faces the north side of the house, then creating a glow around the edges of the room should be a top interior design priority. The glow should meet two general guidelines: it should be warm and it should be even in intensity, running the entire length of the wall. That’s why lights should be mounted onto the wall, rather than on the ceiling.

From here, they will be able to send the light back into the room, basically “cooperating” with the fading natural light or moonlight coming from the outside. As the end result, the room will not only appear to be brighter (and bigger, which is ideal for small apartments) but you’ll get a level of depth that overhead lights could never provide.

A touch of the Orient

If you’ve dreamed of living in a Bedouin tent fit for a chieftain, you can turn this dream a reality just by playing with the lights. The first thing you’ll need to get are lanterns that differ both in size and the patterns printed on them.

Once you place an ottoman next to the coffee table and spread out a couple of silk cushions on the floor, you’ll get the atmosphere of the Orient you have been aspiring to. Modern lanterns come with LED lights inside that are elongated and made to look like candles. Of course, you can always go with the real wax or paraffin candles but be aware that they pose a fire risk.

Controlling the lighting levels during the day

All the lighting forms we have been discussing so far relate to the period after dark. However, it is equally important to regulate lighting levels during days with plenty of sunlight, as too much sunlight can prove to be a nuisance.

What you need are plantation shutters like the ones Suncoast Shade Sails make. The slates of the shutters can regulate the amount of light that enters the living room. In this aspect, plantation shutters are far more efficient than blinds and curtain that let light in near the frame of the window.

Facilitating a home office

If you have ever noticed a difference in the quality of light at your office and back home, that’s because there does exist a disparity. While you are arranging your note or just doing the taxes, you need a stronger source of light in the form of a desktop lamp.

Such functional lighting is an integral part of any home office so you should place a lamp inside the part of your house reserved for the office. The best solution is a wall-mounted lamp that you can extend using just one hand. Once you are done reading or writing, just return the lamp to the initial position to save on space.

A well-lit gallery wall

We have been mentioning lamps so much that one might forget that they are art pieces of their own, not just a source of lighting. In fact, lamps can be couple with the art hanging from the walls to form the ultimate luminescent gallery wall. You can line the frames of pictures with inexpensive LED strips or turn the lights themselves into art pieces by covering them with multicoloured glass. Modern LED light bulbs that change colours are nothing compared to these wacky, one-of-a-kind gallery wall pieces.

In the end, any of the 5 ideas listed here can be used to illuminate the amount and the type of lighting inside your living room. Remember that light is not merely a switch and light bulb but an integral part of interior décor of the most important room in the house/apartment. By toying with lighting just a little bit, you can create wonders in terms of interior décor solutions.

Photo by Vecislavas Popa from Pexels

About the Author

Patrick Adams is a freelance writer and rock-blues fan. When he is not writing about home improvement, he loves to play chess, watch basketball, and play his guitar. More than anything, he loves to spend his time in his garage, repairing appliances and creating stuff from wood.

Your entryway is the first impression of your home. No matter who comes in, they’ll judge the beauty of your home by what they see first. On the other hand, you have your family who has to walk through that same entryway every day. In this respect, it’s important to make your entryway more stylish because both your guests and your family members will benefit from it. The guests will get to visit a beautiful home while your family will get to enjoy the superior style each and every day.

Let your creative juices flow and don’t be afraid of any ideas that come to your mind. Here are a few to start off your brainstorm session.

1. Add a nice plant

Houseplants can generally do wonders for your home. The same can be said about houseplants and your entryway. If you pick the right plant, you’ll give your entryway a warm and welcoming feel that your guests will love. As well as that, there will be a lot of oxygen in the room, so you’ll feel fresh and get a quick energy boost as soon as you come home.

If you have awkward spaces you can’t fill anything with in your entryway, you can always fill them with plants. Whether they’re tall or short, stubby or slim, they’re bound to fit in the room perfectly. You can go for a neutral green if you want to keep things smooth and elegant or for colourful plants if you want a more creative vibe.

2. Create a pattern

When you play with the colours correctly, your walls can speak volumes. Creating a pattern with paint or tiles can make your entryway look amazing. Of course, you’ll need to make sure you’re combining the colours in the right way so as to achieve maximum effect and really up the wow factor. You can do this by picking a base colour like white or beige, then picking an accentual colour. The accentual colour should be visible through the décor in the room.

So, if your base colour is beige, your accentual colour can be red. In this case, you’d pick a red coat hanger, a red chair or seating bench, and maybe even paint the front door red. You can also choose more than one accentual colour, but that might make the entryway overwhelming. The ideal balance of playing with colours is to add just enough pizazz to make it look like you did it on purpose, not that you made a mistake.

3. Focus on the doors

We tend to forget about the doors of any room way too often. In truth, they’re part of the room as much as every other object is. The way you style them can completely change the ambience and improve the overall look of the entryway. When it comes to your front door, you can always repaint it to match the rest of the entryway. As well as that, put a personal touch on it and leave a permanent stamp on your home. You can ask your kids to help you with this and turn it into a fun family project.

When it comes to the doors leading to the other rooms, they should be styled as well. What this primarily means is that you’ll need to fix all the imperfections on the doors. You could repaint them as well. Choosing one colour for all of them means you’ll create a unifying effect and tie the room together. If there are any gaps between the floor and the doors, consider turning to companies like Access Hardware for help. Door seals aren’t that expensive, yet they make a huge difference. The room looks more sophisticated and elegant without you having to replace the doors entirely and waste valuable resources and time.

4. Add a blackboard

A blackboard on the wall is the perfection entryway addition for a big or busy family. As well as giving your entryway some style and a unique look, the blackboard can help you keep track of everything you need to do. You can easily write your weekly schedule on it. This way, it will be much easier to actually do what you have to do. The kids will be less forgetful as they’ll always have a reminder right before they leave the house and you’ll be able to organize yourselves much more easily.

There will also be less room for miscommunication about who was supposed to do what. As well as the organizational part of the equation, you can also use the blackboard to leave your family-friendly and motivational notes to help them have a better day.

Conclusion

As you can see, styling up your entryway can be both fun and exciting. Think of this as a challenge instead of an obligation and you’re bound to have a good time doing it. The entryway of your dreams is only a few modifications away. Style comes with beauty, creativity, and originality. Sprinkle a little bit of each all of your home, and especially in your entryway, and you’ll get exactly what you were looking for.

About the Author

Sarah Jessica Smith is a young blogger from Sydney. She is in love with life and all the things that can make her daily routine easier. She loves to write about home improvement, lifestyle, and all the small things that make life such a great adventure.

Our homes might just be the most important buildings in our lives. That’s where you create valuable memories with the people you love, where you see your kids grow up and do amazing things, and where you get to be yourself completely. As you and your family grow, your needs and wants change over time. That means that a certain style and layout of your home isn’t going to be sufficient forever. Your home should grow and develop with you so that it can always meet new needs and standards set by your family.

Renovating is easier said than done, though. Not only do you need a lot of time and effort to pull something like that off, but you also need a lot of money. When you’ve got a growing family, home renovations never seem to make it into the budget, as there are many other more important things to take care of. Luckily, there are ways to decorate and renovate your home on a budget. All you need is a little creativity and some guidance to pull it off.

1. Update the kid’s room

The kids are always growing and their rooms should be too. The most difficult part of the house to renovate is definitely the kid’s room as you know you’ll just have to renovate it again in a few years. Your kid is going through different developmental periods, and they’re just discovering who they are as people. As a result, their interests change often, and you never know if you’ve nailed the room just right. So as not to completely overstep your budget every time you have to redecorate your kid’s room, try updating only the simple details.

Invest in high-quality furniture in the beginning, so you’re sure it will last them a lifetime. Then simply change the rest according to their age. It’s much easier, more convenient, and cheaper to replace the sheets and give them something more age-appropriate than it is to change the whole room. You can also update the carpet and the clock, or get them a bigger desk chair. These details may not seem like much, but they’ll give a whole new vibe to the bedroom. You could also simply rearrange the furniture to shape the room in a whole different way.

This way, you’re only spending as much as you have to, but you’re still giving your child a room they’ll be happy to spend time in. Of course, make sure to involve your child in these changes and let them express themselves through the details and décor pieces in their room.

2. Do something in each room

Each room surely has something about it that you don’t like. Well, it probably has more than one thing that you would like to change. Because of the budget, it’s impossible to change all of those things at once in each room. You could just put all the money towards fixing up one room entirely, but that doesn’t get you much. Your goal is to refresh your home completely, not just partially. This is why you should change only one thing in every room. Choose the thing that annoys you most or you think is most urgent. Is it the colour? A leak? Old furniture? Tacky and outgrown décor? Change it!

The rooms may not be fixed up entirely, but they’ll be on the right track. You’ll be giving yourself a beginning of a true home makeover, one item at a time. When walking around your house, you’ll have something new to admire and marvel at in each room. You also won’t hate the other rooms and want to spend time only in one, as the case would have been if you only renovated one room completely. Most importantly, this approach gives you hope that it’s not over for your house. You can still bring it back to life, and even though it may take some time, it will be worth it. The potential of the space will be much more obvious and fun to think about.

3. Upgrade your appliances

One other idea is to put your budget completely towards upgrading your appliances. If you’ve got an old oven, no coffee maker, and a TV from the last century, it’s time for a change. Technology advances more each year so it’s a shame to opt for appliances that don’t match the standards of modern technology. As well as being up to date, you’ll also make life much easier for yourself. You won’t have to wait as long for something to cook, you’ll get better colour and sound on your TV, and you won’t have to spend ages in the morning making yourself a cup of coffee.

You should invest in high-quality appliances from trusted brands, as they are less likely to malfunction and break. Their lifespan will be much longer, too. In a way, high-quality appliances pay themselves off as the years go by because they save you a lot of time and money. As most new and technologically advanced appliances are also energy-efficient, you’ll also be greener, waste less energy, and have much lower bills.

4. Play with tiles

Tiles are the perfect material for kitchens and bathrooms. They’re even suitable for balconies and some hallways. You already probably have tiles in your home, but when was the last time you changed them? The style you have now might be cute, but you’ll benefit much more from changing the tiles you have in your home. Don’t be afraid to get creative, either. Instead of just replacing the old and cracked tiles with new ones, you can give your bathroom and kitchen a complete makeover.

Change the colour of the tiles, the style, and even make patterns. Using more than one colour could give you a modern and fancy look for a very low amount of money. Contrasts are best for such effects. For example, you could create all sorts of wonders with black and white in your bathroom, or beige and red in your kitchen. The tiles that are on floors could even match throughout the whole place. This gives your home a unique vibe and ties all the rooms together. The rest of the details in the room could match one of the colours you chose and make the place really pop.

5. Focus on the floors

You could spend all your money decorating and renovating without feeling like your home has improved even a smidge. If you can’t afford to completely renovate, it’s best to focus on the most important thing: the floors. You don’t even realize how much the floors influence the way you perceive the room. If the floors are wooden, the room will feel warmer and cozier. Tile is cold and sterile, while carpeted floors inspire fuzzy feelings.

Even if you don’t have money to replace the floors, you can still redecorate. One idea is to re-polish them and give them back their old shine. Another one is to decorate with mats and carpets. You won’t have to spend a lot to invest in a swanky new carpet for the living room, or non-slip mat for the kitchen. The carpet should match the colour of the details in the room so as to tie the whole place together.  Every room will benefit from the addition of a carpet or mat, especially those with heavy traffic. Floors wear out more easily and quickly when they’re unprotected with people constantly walking there. Having a carpet or a mat could be a great way to protect the areas with high traffic and prolong the life of your floors.

6. Add new lights

Changing your lamps doesn’t seem like a big renovating project, but makes all the difference. You’re probably used to the lights you have at home and don’t realize how drab they make your environment look. Searching for new and better lighting is always an excellent idea. Lamps, regardless of if they’re standing, desk, or hanging, shape rooms more than you can imagine. This is especially true when you take the light bulbs into consideration.

The way you light up a room can change its aura and atmosphere. For a more romantic and fairytale setting, you can always introduce fairy lights. They’re a great fit for the bedroom. If you want a more luxurious and elegant atmosphere in the living room, all you have to do is introduce some swanky LED lights. Even LED strips are available, so you can create an even more luxurious and fancy atmosphere.

7. Change the colour

When you don’t have enough money to completely renovate the place, you can muster up enough to change the colour. This will completely refresh the home and give it a whole new look. As well as that, you’ll be doing your walls huge favour. The colour you have now may have looked awesome when it was first painted it, but over the years, the walls are likely to have got dirty and the colour to have faded.

You can just paint a fresh layer of the same colour, but where’s the fun in that? Experiment with different colours, find your perfect match and give the room a new life. You can choose your colour according to the way it affects your mood, or you can simply go with the one that goes best with the interior. Yellow inspires joy and happiness, green is associated with growth, and blue will provide you with a deep sense of calm. Whatever colour you decide to choose for your living room or bedroom, it’s bound to transform your home into something completely new and amazing.

8. Take out a loan

Renovating on a budget is fine if you don’t have a huge project you need to take care of. Sometimes, renovations happen because they simply need to if the home is going to remain functional. For example, if the roof is old and damaged, it will need restoration and there’s not a question about it. The same goes for urgent bathroom repairs and modifications to the kitchen. In these cases, budgeting isn’t really an option. It’s necessary to make the budget bigger so that you can afford high-quality services.

As you’re not the only person who suffers from such a fate, you’ll be happy to know that a lot of low rate personal online loans are available. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you’ll get the money you need to renovate your home and restore it to its old shine. You won’t have to fear about the roof leaking or collapsing, nor about the kitchen and bathroom malfunctioning further.

9. Don’t forget about the yard

Last but definitely not least, you can’t forget about the yard. This is the perfect place for your family to socialize, laugh together, bond, and just enjoy nature. You’ll want to make sure that your home is family and kid-friendly though.

The best way to do this is to introduce garden activities that the whole family will enjoy. Start growing vegetables together, make your own décor, or build a structure you’ll all get to enjoy. All of these ideas are budget-friendly and will involve the whole family. This way, everyone will have a personal and emotional connection to the yard, meaning they’ll all love spending time in it. You can even plant a family tree together as a symbol of togetherness, love, and stability. The tree will stand the tests of time and prove that a family stays together regardless of what life brings your way.

Final thoughts…

With these tips, you’ll get a much more appealing home that supports your family’s needs, wants, and preferences. Every family member will have their own space in the house, tailored specifically to them. With these tips, you’re bound to give your family the home it deserves. It may be a lot of hassle and you may need to put some extra time and effort into renovating, but you’ll love the final result.

About the Author

Stella Ryne is an art historian, traveller, conscious consumer and a proud mother. When she is not trying to improve the things around her (and herself, for that matter), she likes to lose herself in a good book. Stay in touch with Stella via Twitter and  Facebook.

Did you like this article? Then pin it!