What makes a home comfortable for one person isn’t always going to be an exact formula for the next person. Perhaps you love your best friend to the moon and back, but whenever you visit their home, you find their high-backed chairs, lack of ambient lighting and missing furnishings make you feel like you’re visiting a clinical environment. Perhaps you just don’t like the colour.
This is fine in others’ homes of course, they have the right to design how they most appreciate. But for your own? Perhaps you wouldn’t choose that option, to say the least.
The worst is when you come home, or move into a new place, and realize the place isn’t restoring you as it should. Maybe instead of a refuge your home feels a bit stiff and you’re not sure of the course. You may have decorated well, with nice curtain trimmings and plants nearby, but it’s still not enough. Where do you go from there?
In this post, we’ll discuss some options that most help:
Consider The “UX” Design Of Your House
UX – user experience – design is mostly a term used for product development. It’s basically a shorthand for how a customer might interact with a product, like a shampoo bottle for example. Is the top easy enough to open with wet hands? Does it stack well in a shower basket? That might sound completely out of left field with no resemblance to designing a home, but the truth is anything but.
After all, our houses are ergonomic and need to be interacted with, to an extent. It’s why you don’t use kitchen table chairs to watch a movie in your living room, but choose comfortable deep sofas instead. It’s more than that though – for example, if your coffee table is a pain to reach from the seated area, if the light fitting is stuck behind a door when it’s opened, and if the sun shines right into your eyes for four hours a day when sat down, those are UX problems. Shifting the layout of these issues could make the home feel much more livable and less constraining, and it’s worth your time to get it right.
Indulgent Trimmings & Fittings
If you’re a fan of home comforts, you know there’s probably little that a large blanket throw or candle can’t fix. These do cost money of course, but in outfitting a property or making a room feel nicer, there’s little that can help so well.
So, why not get a little indulgent with it? You might be surprised just how well an extra blanket on the bed, some fairy lights, or a tapestry on the wall can help. Indulgent trimmings can also be completely personalized to your own taste. Maybe the large new wooden table you placed in the kitchen feels a little bit workmanlike, but with a nice display cover on it, you’re happy to lay the table before tea. It’s a nice way to make a house feel a touch more like your home.
Consider The Flooring
You may have a preference for flooring. Some ideas are just good sense, like removing any and all carpet from your bathroom space and opting for tile or laminate instead. However, you may also find that poor flooring in some areas can make a room feel disconnected from its purpose.
If you have kids for example, then a tiled floor in a living room might not match their general preference for lying around in front of the TV. A nice rug could be a good substitute. Or, if the lino in the bathroom is old and stained thanks to the previous owner, maybe now is the time to change that. Sometimes a room just felt clinical because your feet aren’t happy with it.
However, remember that in winter, your feelings towards flooring can be pretty different. You may have gorgeous, well-kept rustic tiles as part of the kitchen floor, but in winter, your bare feet aren’t that happy with such a decision. Wait until the weather warms up, and you may find you like it after all. Until then, a good pair of slippers will help.
Personalize The Space!
When you’re moving into a new place or you’ve been rearranging the space (perhaps as per our above advice), it’s very easy to realize the house doesn’t represent you like it once did. For example, you may notice that all the pictures of your family are localised to your room alone, or that your entrance hall/corridor is pretty stark.
Sometimes you just need to fill the rest of the house with keepsakes and comforts. It’s hard not to be motivated for that tiresome morning commute when you walk out of the corridor in the morning with pictures of your wedding, children and relatives. The best part about this is that you don’t have to follow a strict style guide to get things right, it’s fine to have some kids drawings placed in little frames or to have noticed marks against a door frame when your children were measuring their height. Personalization is healthy, and so don’t ignore it!
Take Your Time
Even if you’re a pretty diligent homebody, you don’t have to make a home your perfect den in a matter of weeks. This is especially true if you’ve moved into a new home. It’s especially, especially true if you’ve moved into a new type of home, like going from a flat to a household or vice versa.
Maybe it’s been four months and work is so hectic that you just haven’t had the energy to remove everything from the boxes in your room. That’s perfectly normal. Just do twenty minutes here and there and do it slowly bit by bit. Also remember that just because you’ve decorated the first time, it won’t necessarily be your favorite way to do it a year from now. Take your time and let yourself unfurl in a place. Some people say they don’t feel fully settled until they’re years into their home living. In the meantime, we hope the advice above can help.
With this advice, we hope you can find some nourishment and comfort in the house you call home.