Easy Ways to Renovate Your Home This Year
The possibility of renovating your home can be quite a daunting task, particularly if you have a small budget. Shelling out for decorator, new furniture and new fittings can total up to an eye-watering amount. However, there are a few tip and tricks to do this affordable, or pace your budget throughout the year.
Giving your home a face lift traditionally happens in the spring, when the longer days bring people a greater sense of optimism and motivation. Plus, the idea of heading out into the garden to cut down ailing bushes and throw out tattered features seems like less of an unpleasant idea as the days and evenings get warmer. However, pacing yourself throughout the year can mean that within the space of a few months, your home will have undergone some significant changes.
Upcycling furniture
Although hunting round furniture stores for any on-sale items is a great place to start, there are also bargains to be found outside of conventional furniture stores. Taking time on the weekends to visit second-hand stores and yard sales can uncover some hidden gems. Anything from an antique wardrobe, beautifully crafted vintage chairs to a new dining room table can be found. Someone’s trash can truly be someone’s treasure when it comes to rooting around recycled furniture. Looking through home styling websites is an ideal place to start when looking for ideas.
Wooden furniture is usually a good go-to as it’s less of a headache to upcycle. Just a sand down of the surface and an application of stain, varnish, and paint will have it looking as good as new.
Update the color scheme
The feeling of a freshly painted room can bring a whole new lease of life to a house. It can make a kitchen feel bigger, a study feel less cluttered, and a bedroom seems somehow more luxurious.
At some point, the rooms you painted beforehand had a sparkly new feel to them, and it’s always good to have the end in sight with painting, particularly if you’re doing it yourself. Getting friends round to help can be hugely helpful for those who are time constrained. The promise of a cooked dinner and a bottle of wine is sometimes enough to convince a few friends to spend a day getting active with a paintbrush. Besides, the workout you’ll get from painting the back bedroom from walls to ceiling means you can feel virtuous all week.
Spruce up the backyard
If your backyard has the common problem of huge, overgrown plants, it’s easy to just let them grow into a huge thicket and not do anything with them. If buying telescopic sheers and spending hours pruning them doesn’t sound appealing, then taking the bold move of just tearing them out could be hugely beneficial. Realistically, they may just overgrow again, and replacing them with more manageable plants is a safer option. Small shrubs and stone features will keep your backyard looking contemporary and will leave you feeling like you have twice the space you did before.
If your lawn is dying, going over it with some fertilizer can be the first step to replenishing its original color. However, if the weather is the culprit for a yellowing lawn, it’s recommended that you deploy a sprinkler to keep it alive during the hotter months.
Improve the curb appeal
Realistically, if you have trash cans spilled out of the front of your home, or a car that won’t fit inside a junk-filled garage, then your home will be losing curb appeal fast. Simple things like finding a space to hide your trash cans can immediately make your house look better. If your front yard is looking a little bare, then going to a garden center and picking out some plants to place in a flower bed will immediately liven up the outward appearance. If you live somewhere more urban and don’t have access to a front yard, adding hanging baskets or LED lights to the front of your house will keep it looking perky and modern.
Take out old fixtures
A lot of renovating involves gutting and removing unneeded appliances. Moreover, sometimes this also means taking out outdated fixtures. Removing an old clunky extractor fan from the kitchen, replacing old wooden window frames with modern plastic ones and giving bulky cupboards that aren’t being used the heave-ho. Replacing patio doors and windows also has the result of flooding your home with much more natural light. The costs of big jobs like this can seem like a huge obstacle; however, credit cards for bad credit are an option for those who wish to stagger the cost of the job throughout the year.
Do a spring clean and remove clutter
This option is perhaps the cheapest and the easiest and has surprisingly impressive results. If your spare room is piled high full of boxes, or if the bedroom has an unused exercise bike the obvious eyesores are the best place to start. Crucially, you could even make money off some of these if you have a yard sale full of your unwanted junk.
Throughout the rest of the house, giving polished wooden surfaces a thorough dusting, re-folding linen in the airing cupboard and sorting out shelves full of jumbled items can collectively make your home look and feel far better. Vacuum cleaning unloved rooms and even color-coordinating bookshelves can make some parts of your house look brand new. Even smaller touches like giving your washing machine a rinse-through can improve the performance of appliances.
When it comes to renovating your home, there’s no time like the present. Recruiting help when it’s needed, being realistic and critical about what needs to be chucked and having a deep clean can all have a remarkable effect. If you’re planning to sell your house in the future, peeling back the old features of a home can make it much more appealing to anyone viewing it in the future. Regardless of what potential buyers may think, however, renovating your home will have the biggest effect on you. Enjoying underappreciated rooms again can make it feel like you’re in a brand new home.
