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It often doesn’t take too long for a home to start to show signs of wear and tear. Whether or not you have a family living with you, your place will no doubt see a lot of traffic, and this puts stress on the visual elements of your home. Paint dulls and wallpaper peals, cushions lose their shape and wood can discolor over time. While having a home that looks a little lived in can be nice, most people feel happier with their place when it looks fresh. To help you out with this, this article is going to be exploring some of the best ways to freshen up your home without having to splash out on a renovation.
A Clean & Fresh Coat
While you probably already spend a lot of your time cleaning your home, most people rarely give their place a deep clean. Taking the time to scrub all of the little nooks and crannies you tend to miss when you’re cleaning will be an excellent way to improve the look of your place. This process can take some time, and everyone will want to take their own approach. There are a lot of companies out there that can handle this work for you, but this will always come at a cost.
Alongside giving your home a good clean, a fresh coat of paint can also bring new life to aged decor. Making this sort of change can make the other elements of your room look fresher, especially with light colors like cream and beige. Painting your doors, skirting boards, coving, and ceilings can also aid in this process. Painting is a tricky job, and it can be worth spending some time learning about this before you dive right in. YouTube has loads of excellent videos that can show you how to paint at home.
Making Repairs
It’s all too easy for damage to be done to your home during normal daily life. Accidentally catching a loose piece of skirting board with your shoe, for example, could leave a piece of the wall looking very unsightly. This sort of damage is often left for a very long time before people decide to fix it, with the idea of performing DIY being quite daunting for some. There are loads of modern products on the market that can help with this, with adhesives and power tools coming a long way over the last few years.
Some repairs won’t be possible with off the shelf products, and you may need to develop some skills before you can approach them. Cracked walls, cloudy windows, and rusted radiators are all examples of jobs that you may want to hire someone to help you with, as you can easily cause more damage if you don’t know what you’re doing. Social media websites like Facebook make it nice and easy to find reliable tradespeople to help you with jobs like this.
Revitalizing Your Furniture
This next area can be split into categories depending on the material that your furniture is made from. These different substances will need to have their own treatments to look their best, and this makes it well worth doing some research if you have a piece of furniture you’d like to revive. Making repairs can form part of this process, but it will be easier to aim to get rid of wear and tear than to make something look good after it’s been broken.
Metal
Metal is very hardwearing, but many of the metals that are used for furniture are also very reactive. This means that their surfaces can change when they are exposed to the air. There are ways to treat this, with paint being the most popular. Of course, though, if this gets dented or scratched, you could easily find rust or a patina forming on your furniture. You can buy chemicals that are designed to remove this sort of build-up, though you can also find guides that will show you how to fix it with items from the kitchen cupboard.
Wood
Wood has been one of the most popular materials for furniture since the early days of this craft, but it is still quite soft when compared to things like metal. It’s easy to end and scratch the surface of wood, and the treatments that are used on materials like this aren’t always permanent. Going through the process of cabinet refinishing in your kitchen can make the whole room look new again, and this is just a single example of how you can revitalize wood. Getting professional help with this side of your efforts will make it a lot easier.
Fabric
Much of the furniture found in modern homes feature fabrics of some kind. Sofas, beds, and even things like wardrobes use a range of fabrics to make them more comfortable. Getting these pieces reupholstered can be an excellent way to make them look better. This will let you add new fabrics to them, changing the way they look and repairing anything that looks worn out. It can be hard to find the exact fabrics your furniture was made with, but this doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to get your hands on something that looks good.
Plastic & Other Materials
There are loads of other materials that are commonly found in modern homes. Plastic is a great example of this, with many people having pieces of plastic furniture. Repairing pieces that use unconventional materials can be difficult, and you may have to look for creative ways to repurpose your furniture rather than making it look like it did when you first bought it. This will depend on the material you’re working with, with things like concrete and plaster being relatively easy to repair.
Adding Art & New Decor
Artwork is one of the best tools at your disposal when you’re decorating a home. There are loads of different options to choose from, giving you the chance to change the look and feel of a room with dramatic effect. Websites like Etsy give you loads of choices when you’re shopping for items like this, but you could also consider looking around in your local area for galleries or second-hand shops that sell artwork.
Other types of decor can also be added to your rooms to make them look fresh. New rugs can change the way your floors look, while lamp shapes can alter your ceilings and the way that light is spread through your space. There are loads of sites that give you access to resources like this, making it incredibly easy to start changing your home for the better. It will always make sense to spend some time looking for inspiration on sites like Instagram and Pinterest before you get started with this.
Why Avoid Renovation?
Many people enjoy the process of renovating their home, and it can be hard to understand why you’d want to take smaller steps when you’re trying to make the place look better. There are plenty of good reasons to take an approach like this, making it worth taking the time to understand why you would want to do it.
Cost
Changing small elements of your home will always be cheaper than replacing entire rooms. This makes this effort worth it for those on tight budgets, giving the chance to improve your home a little bit at a time.
Time & Effort
People often have to put days and days into renovations, especially if they decide to change more than one room. Your project could easily overrun, leaving you having to finish your DIY work in your free time. Of course, most will want to avoid this, and changing your home piece by piece can be a good way to long delays.
Waste
It’s no secret that a lot of materials get wasted when people renovate their homes. The way that many types of home decorations are installed means that they can’t be used again once they’ve been removed, leaving them to go into the trash. Refreshing your home gives you the chance to give new life to the parts of your place that have started to show the signs of age, rather than simply getting rid of them.
Value
While you’ve already thought about cost, value is another area to consider. With a renovation wasting a lot of old materials, you could easily be throwing money away that you’ve spent in the past. Choosing to refresh elements of your home will enable you to get more out of your old furniture, and may enable you to keep higher quality furniture and decor.
It doesn’t take too long for a home to start to look a little worse for wear. Even if you’re good at keeping on top of your home maintenance, there will almost certainly be some room for improvement. Taking on these tasks can be a challenge when you’re doing it alone, but there are plenty of professionals out there to help with the process, and this will make the whole thing much easier.
