If you haven’t decorated in a long time, you may start to feel like your home is becoming old. If you don’t enjoy the atmosphere in your home, this is likely to make you feel sad, unhappy, and generally dissatisfied.
Image by Linda Dafnerot from Pixabay
Although you may feel this way, it isn’t always possible to completely redecorate even one room in your house – this could be due to cost or time constraints.
However, there are always ways to make the rooms in your home feel brand new and give them a new lease of life. The best part is that you don’t have to break the bank to achieve this.
In this article, we will cover three different cost-effective ideas but make a big difference to the look and feel of your home.
Painting a feature wall in your home
Painting a feature wall in your home is a compromise rather than painting an entire room. The latter is likely to be expensive, time-consuming, and challenging. Instead of repainting the whole room, you can pick one of the walls in your home and turn it into a feature wall.
First of all, you should clear everything from the wall you are working on to ensure you don’t damage or tarnish the furniture. Once you have done this, you can prepare the wall for painting. Before painting, prepping the wall will involve either stripping the wallpaper off the wall or removing the existing layer of paint from the surface using medium-grade sandpaper.
Once you have prepared the surface, you can use a small tin of paint and a paintbrush to give the wall a fresh coating in your desired color. Don’t be afraid of using a bold color on the wall; although it might feel outlandish as you are applying the coat, that is the point of a feature wall. It is supposed to stand out, and although it will seem drastic at first, the finished product will be a talking point for guests and will draw the eye as soon as anyone enters the room.
Not only does this give the room a new lease of life, it also distracts from any other signs of wear in the room that was previously discomforting.
Replacing door and cupboard handles
Replacing the handles on doors and cupboards is an excellent tip for rejuvenating your home and is especially effective for your kitchen. Rather than replacing doors, or even entire storage units, you can replace the handles with new ones – perhaps even looking for a unique style of alternative color at the same time.
If you search online, you can pick up a complete set of door and cupboard handles for next to nothing, and fitting them on is also a breeze; you will need to unscrew the old ones and screw in the new ones. One tip is to remove one handle beforehand, check the measurement between the screw holes, and then make sure you order new handles with the same size gap between fittings.
Once you replace all the handles in your room – especially your kitchen – you will be pleasantly surprised with how much of a different feel the room will have. This can even give the illusion of the cupboards being entirely new. Once again, the new sparkly handles will draw the eye and detract from any other imperfections in the units themselves.
Repainting your internal doors
Giving your internal doors a fresh coat of paint is slightly more complex but highly effective in sprucing up your home and can be done with minimal effort but have a positive effect throughout the entire house.
There are a few skills required to carry this out, namely that you need to remove the doors from their hinges and need somewhere to sand down and repaint the doors. If you have a garage with plenty of free space in it, that is the ideal location to carry out this work.
The good news is you can take off one door at a time to minimize the disruption, and you will find that as you repaint each door, the task gradually becomes more manageable.
You will need to prepare the surface of the door for painting – sanding down the door first, removing the existing coat of paint, and creating a smooth surface. Take your time with that stage as you will need to remove all of the current coating from the door; otherwise, you will see lumps and imperfections after applying the new coat of paint.
You can then apply the new paint to the door. You may need to use several coats of paint, allowing each one to dry thoroughly before applying the next coat.
Allow the door to fully dry over 24 hours before re-hanging the door on its original hinges. If you feel confident in doing so, you can also remove the door handles before painting, but if you don’t want to do this, you can alternatively cover up the handles and other fixtures using masking tape.
The result should be doors that look brand new and completely change the look and feel throughout the house. Repainting all of the inside doors is much cheaper than replacing them, which would come with the cost of new doors and the cost of a professional fitter. As long as you take your time to do the job properly, it can produce just as good results as, if not better.
There are plenty of other things you can do around your home – from tidying up and clearing away old clutter to hanging new picture frames or purchasing throws for your tables and chairs. All you have to do is think outside of the box and remember, you don’t have to spend lots of money to make significant improvements to your house; more often, it is that little bit of creativity that produces the best results.