Your décor looks good — but for a reason you can’t quite put your finger on, it isn’t great. Many homeowners stop decorating when their homes look “good enough,” but if you want people to gasp upon entering your home, you need to push yourself to do a little bit more to your interior design.
It’s not hard to make your home look expensive, and you don’t even have to waste much money doing it.
Here are the fast and easy ways to give your home a winning interior without breaking the bank.
Get Everything Working Well
While home decoration television shows focus on choosing the best countertops and paint colors, the secret to an appealing home is truly functionality. If your home looks good but lacks the ability to function as it should — i.e. the roof leaks, the floor is uneven, the water pressure is low, the doors squeak, etc. — visitors will be able to tell, and the charm of your home will evaporate almost instantly. Thus, well before you start considering drapery fabrics or ordering cabinet hardware, you need to make sure the systems in your home are working well.
The good news is that this isn’t difficult. If you aren’t handy yourself, you can hire professionals in your area to come to your home to service various systems periodically. However, not many homeowners have the spare cash to afford this; better advice is to learn how to provide routine maintenance around your home and only hire professionals for more major projects. For instance, if you live in Florida, you can crawl in to the attic and walk your own roof to look for leaks for most of the year, but if a hurricane hits your home, you should probably call a Tampa handyman to fix any broken or missing shingles and perform other repairs. You can also hire a handyman for odd jobs like installing lights, tiling bathrooms, fixing garage doors and more.
If your home is older and has many systems on the verge of failure, it might be wise to invest in a home warranty to supplement your homeowners’ insurance. Unlike insurance, warranties help you pay for damage incurred due to regular wear and tear, so you can save more of your budget for the fun stuff.
Build in Your Design
Anything built into your home looks expensive and thus elevates your design. To that end, you should devote much of your decorating budget to adding, improving or highlighting architectural details. Elements like crown molding, wooden beams, hardwood floors, built-in bookshelves and mosaic tile aren’t typically featured the average home, so making them a prominent part of your home design is a smart, easy, albeit expensive way to raise the look and feel of your spaces.
Consider Your Color Scheme
As appealing as it might be to slather your walls in eye-catching paint, that much bright color can overwhelm a room. Instead, it is much more chic to decorate primarily with neutral tones, like white, beige, gray, navy and black — then you can add pops of color in details as accents. Right now, minimalism is in vogue, which means the less you have going on in your design, the better. You should try to avoid introducing too many colors into your room’s palette, so the individual pieces have more space to make an impact.
Make Illusions
They aren’t tricks; they’re a way to make a smaller room seem bigger without actually knocking down walls and adding more space. Here are some illusions to make your rooms appear grander on the cheap:
- Natural light. Avoid covering windows, and think about adding a skylight or a sun tube to bring in more daylight.
- Vertical space. Hang shelves or artwork close to the ceiling to draw the eye upwards. Use taller window coverings or vertical stripes to achieve the same effect.
- Clutter. Keep decorative accents larger than a cantaloupe, and reduce their quantity.
- Mirrors. Large reflective surfaces essentially double the visible space.
- Proportions. Include oversize decorative accents, like a large hanging light fixture and large artwork, to make the room feel grander.
Spending money is easily the best way to put your interior design over the top, but you have to spend money on the right details if you want to achieve a cohesive and attractive look. By focusing on bigger-ticket design features and minimizing your design to create a clean slate, you will wow your guests and achieve the chic look you crave.
