All too often, people will spend days cleaning out guest rooms and rooms where others live while neglecting the bedroom, the room they will perhaps spend the most time in. We all know that a good night’s sleep goes a long way towards transforming how the rest of our day goes, and so you want a bedroom which increases restfulness, relieves stress, and makes you feel relaxed and comfortable over a long day’s work.
Whether you plan to clean for an hour or launch a full-blown transformation of your bedroom, there are always ways to make your bedroom more livable. Here are four such methods.
1. Decorate with a Personal Touch
We often avoid decorating our bedrooms in favor of rooms where we will invite guests in, but your bedroom should have your own personal touch. Whether it is postcards from friends or art which you really like, your bedroom should have decoration which makes it feels like a room which is uniquely yours.
And while you can buy posters from Target or some craft stores, the best way to make your art feel like yours is to create your own art. Even if you have never held a brush, there are plenty of easy ways to be creative, with Buzzfeed providing quite a few examples.
Art does not have to be some fancy portraits of some dead famous person. Art is whatever we want it to be. The mere act of creating art and seeing it in your room can help remind of what you accomplished, and is a symbol of how you are in control of your own life.
2. Fight Clutter
But if you look around at the rest of your room and see food containers, clothes, and odds and ends strewn about, you will not feel in control. There are plenty of guides which talk about the importance of fighting clutter, but that just shows how important it is.
Clutter is unhealthy as it is a prime cause and spreader of dust and chemicals. It makes your room look disorganized and uncontrollable. And it can serve as an active discouragement towards making your room look better, as you are confronted with this massive clutter which you must organize first and decide to get started “tomorrow.”
What I would emphasize is that when you decide to get rid of clutter, you need to actually remove the clutter. Do not just stuff your clutter into another room or in your closet like a six-year old cleaning his room. Get rid of the things you do not need entirely, either by donating or throwing them out. And if you have not used an object or worn those clothes in the past three to six months, that is a good sign that you probably do not need that object.
3. Update your Lighting
Your bedroom is probably the only place in your house where you will spend time in both when it is completely dark and when the sun is shining through the windows. It is thus important to have lighting better than some cheap light bulbs in a ceiling fan in the middle of the room.
Bedroom lighting is a topic in and of itself, but the most important thing to understand is that you want different kinds of lighting with the same room. You need ambient or general lighting to set a strong foundation, and you should consider updating your ceiling fixture to something more stylish. You also need task lighting such as lamp to let you read at night, and accent lighting to emphasize art or decorations in your room.
Have at least three sources of light in your room, each with different shading so that light can spread to every corner of your room. Also let plenty of natural sunlight into your room by keeping your windows clean and your drapes open.
4. Get a Good Mattress
You may look at the cost of buying a good foam mattress and balk at the idea of getting another one. But we all spend much of our life in our bedroom, and by extension spend much of our bedroom time on the mattress.
So what is the best kind of mattress? It depends from person to person, though I would emphasize that the traditional spring mattress should not be overlooked and can be just as good as foam or latex mattresses. It is important to try out different mattresses over a long period of time until you can find the one which suits you the best.
Fortunately, many online mattress retailers exist which offer generous return policies if you sleep on your mattress before deciding that you do not like it. And while you should not skimp on your mattress given how much time you will spend on it, do not assume more expensive is better. A good price range to spend is somewhere between $500 to $1,000.