If you’re a property owner with your sights on curating gorgeous interiors – whether that be to your minimalist leanings or a shabby chic style – you may not know where to start. After all, from the floors, walls, and windows right through to the kitchen surfaces, upholstery, and even the garden, there are so many components that you’ll be able to restyle in order to bring your home round to the style you envisage. Here’s a breakdown of the areas of your home that you’ll be able to take a look at in order to manage a complete interior revamp of your place.
Floors
Starting with what’s beneath your feet, the floors of a house are an understated, underappreciated element of style crea-tion. There are practical elements to consider even before you start thinking about the style you’d like to go for: would you like under-floor heating installed, which makes hard floors a joy in bare feet? Perhaps you’d like to increase the heat in the home without spending on heating – in which case a thick, colorful carpet would do the business. Even rugs and throws across the floor can add or detract from your style, so there’s lots to consider.
Minimalist homes tend to opt for hard floors, with set concrete one of the trendiest options for those industrial-design abodes that ooze a bare-bones aura. Wooden floors can be bought in a myriad of colors, from light through to dark wood, which will directly affect how the colors on your walls appear, as well as the general lightness of your home. Rugs are a wonderful addition to a living room or bedroom, especially as they further soften footfall, though whether you go for a Persian design or something more modern is up to you.
Walls
Depending on the amount of work you’re willing to undergo in your property, you could do everything from knocking walls in to simply repapering, repainting, or simply hanging up a few more pictures and paintings to adorn the interior of your home. If you do have the wherewithal and the ambition to take a wall or two down – perhaps you’ve always wanted an open-plan living room – download a free interior-planning app before calling the developers in, just to see roughly how things would end up looking.
Other than getting the sledgehammers out, you’ll, of course, have a whole world of color and design to slap on your walls. A big decision is consistency: would you like your whole home to have the same wall color and style? If so, many modern and minimalist homeowners tend to favor white – a bright, simple, clean surface color that has its benefits when bathed in sun and its drawbacks when it enhances shivering cold. Don’t forget; there’s plenty of jazzy or kooky wallpapers from different eras you could consider to make your living room or kitchen warmer and more characterful.
Windows
Seemingly, there’s not much you can change about the windows of your house without removing them and replacing them with a different style of glass. But that would be to forget the blinds, curtains, sills, glazing, shutters and opening systems that homeowners have control over. Principally, editing the windows of your house will be undertaken in order to further curate the amount of light you let in to your home: do you want to be able to attain utter darkness for movie nights, in which case a thick curtain is a must? Or a Mediterranean feel, in which case Venetian blinds are the go-to.
The products offered by this company will give you some ‘smart’ remote control of window features you decide to add to your home, which will be useful in large airy and bright living rooms that you’d like to cut the light in to log in to Netflix. Shutters, which can be fitted externally to decorate the outside of your home, or internally to add another layer of light blockage, are a lovely option for those attempting to recapture an old-time feel in their home, while repurposing window sills could provide some dearly-needed ornamental space or enough room to place a jungle of houseplants.
Furniture
If you’ve embarked on a total home revamp, the decision over whether the furniture will dictate the style or the style the furniture can cause an argument in your own head; the answer will largely depend on what you’ve got in mind and what you’re able to do with your walls, windows, and floors in order to bring in a different theme of furniture for your home. Of course, furniture is expensive and a large, important part of any home that you’ll love with for many years so it pays to do the thinking work here, from color swab comparison right through to thinking about the curves and straight lines, the dimensions, and the pattern clashes you might have to consider.
This is not to reduce the fun that you’ll have bringing in new furniture in what will feel like a total revamp of your interior; it should be an enjoyable process that realizes your dreams for whatever style you elect to draw up for your home. The physical objects in your home – the couches, beds, wardrobes, cupboards, chairs, and tables – bring the whole interior together around your chosen style, whether you’re bringing in a four-poster bed to give your bedroom a ‘bedchamber’ feel, or an ultra-sleek and modern kitchen table to complement white walls and grey granite surfaces.
Lighting
Perhaps even more understated as a feature that affects the feel of your home that floors and walls, the lighting can really alter the mood and ambience of a room, giving it a more clinical, clean cut feel, as with bright white strip lights, or a cozy, warm feel, as with the yellow-orange dimmer-switch options that burn dim in living rooms across the country. That’s not to mention the wall-hanging options available to enthusiastic home re-designers, or the addition of lamps and spotlights – especially favored in minimalist and industrial-themed homes – that you’ll be able to rig up to the same power switch to really make your walls explode with light, shadow and character depending on the mood you’re in.
When it comes to the color and brightness of light you’d like in your home, there are more options out there than you may realize. Nothing can beat heading to your local lighting provider for tips on the best, most-efficient, most delicate lighting options, though you should also consider the balance of white to yellow you’d like for each room – too yellow is too sickly in some rooms and come across as too sterile. There’s also the ability to change the color of your home’s light by remote control, though this can often be seen as tacky in most rooms, suiting best the bedroom, bathroom or living room. Fixtures and trappings are entirely down to your style – there’s rough exposed-wire lights and full-on chandeliers out there – but ensure that you’re not clashing too violently with the furniture, wall and floor features you’ve already decid-ed upon.
Exterior
You exterior of your home may or may not change how you feel when inside your home, but is nonetheless an important part of the whole entity that is your property. Your exterior could include plants and lawns, driveways and gravel pits, fences and hedges, all to consider changing or sprucing up if you are embarking on a complete and utter home revamp. This is an especially exciting prospect if you’ve just bought or inherited a property. With the help of talented landscape designers, you’ll be able to completely change the front and back gardens of your property, to suit flowerbeds, tomato patches, or a children’s paradise of grass and bushes.
If you’ve got shutters or any painted wood on the exterior surfaces of your home, it’s a smart move to slap a new layer of paint on – white and black are the most common, but do consider an ‘out-there’ alternative – and save some to paint on any fences, or simply your letterbox, on the fringes of your property’s estate. The color coordination will not go unnoticed and will bring the whole home and its surrounding land into sharp and clear relief. Whether you’ve got green fingers or you prefer a large patio in your garden, ask for some assistance from some garden specialists, or look up your options online, to curate the perfect place to relax outside your home but on your property.
Revamping a home is a thoroughly exciting process of imagination, pragmatism, and guile that can end in your curation of a wonderful and characterful new space in hiccup to relax in the comfort of loved ones, and entertain your friends in the environment that you’re proud to have put together. From carpets, wallpaper and blinds through to sofas, lights, and hedges, you’ll have control over what you change and what vibe you’re looking to hit, so begin drawing up some grand redesign plans today in order to create a home you’re truly proud and comfortable in.
Alec Neufeld is a retired builder, now freelance writer and part-time general fix it man. He has strong opinions on the use of alternate energy and is also an avid sports enthusiast.