Design is something that guides our daily lives, even if we don’t realize it. It can change how we feel about a space and inform us if someone wants to buy a home or not. When you’re updating your home’s interior and exterior design, you want to make sure to update these elements!
1. Physical and Visual Texture
Texture isn’t just for your hands! Soft rugs visually contrast against the hardwood floor, and they make complete sense. You can carry this out of your home and into the exterior through a welded wire deck railing above a polished deck! Not only does this make it more visually interesting, but it’s tactile and gives a safety point to help keep people from slipping or falling from your deck.
2. Increased Natural Light
Natural light has become so important in interior design that it’s almost a joke within channels like HGTV when it’s mentioned. The importance doesn’t just lay on the windows, though. When you’re upgrading your property, you can pull that natural light through your home further by opening up spaces and adding more clear or sheer surfaces.
Instead of a solid door leading from your kitchen to your dining room, you can remove that door altogether or replace it with one that has windows in it. Instead of full solid curtains, step back towards sheer ones that allow some sunlight through.
3. Adding a Rain Garden
One in six homes in the United States is at risk of flooding within the next ten years. This is a scary number, but you can help protect your property through design that nobody will ever realize the purpose of.
Rain gardens are small patches of plants that are native to your area and have deep roots that can bring water down into the soil instead of allowing it to sit on the surface. Not only are these visually incredible, but they protect your home.
4. Clean Surfaces Throughout
Although it’s vital for your home to be hygienic, clean surfaces describe the make and look of the surfaces themselves. This means fewer complications like unnecessary curves on a counter. Keep your surfaces as simple and straightforward as possible, showing off the quality of whatever it’s made of instead of the shape.
When maintaining these spaces, make sure to use the correct cleaners. If you improperly clean a surface, you’ll kill the finish on it and may have to deal with having to replace or refinish it sooner because of this.
5. Matching Wood Stains
Limit how many wood stains you use in your home to no more than two or three. More shouldn’t be used unless it’s in order to execute a planned piece of decor or design. Instead, you can use a stain remover, sand the surface, and then stain the fresh wood to get your furniture and finishes to match.
If you’re getting a new piece of furniture and aren’t sure if the stain matches, and you still have a container of the original stain at home, you can make a swatch for yourself. Staining a small piece of wood you can carry with you will allow you to hold up the swatch against the new in-store piece to see if it’ll work. Remember, light in a store may look entirely different from lighting in your home.
6. Bathrooms With Small Luxuries
Your bathrooms should feel like an escape away from the world. These are the spaces where we strip away the stress of the day and enjoy a bath or shower to relax. It’s okay to invest in luxury here. This could be a heater floor, updated walls, and floor, a larger tub, or steam-proof mirrors to allow you to check your reflection even after a hot shower.
7. Patterns to Lead the eyes
Patterns are an important part of visual language. These can guide eyes to the most important part of the room or can fill a space that generally felt empty before. Recently larger patterns have been popular on furniture and walls, and people are getting more daring with them.
If a room is already busy and almost cluttered, avoid a patterned wall since this can make matters worse.
8. Playful Color Use
Color is everything in decor! We all know they can drive how we feel about ourselves and the world around us, but they’re also great for making an area feel larger or cleaner. For instance, in the last year, kitchen decor has been moving away from all-white and is instead implementing a lot of natural wood tones and muted greens along with white.
This creates a natural and green feeling space, even though it’s just decor. Color can make a huge difference depending on how you use it.
Every Property Can Look Incredible
Whether this is your first time updating a property or you’re trying to find some new ideas to try, you can make your property shine if you use these. Every property can look fantastic if you upgrade with some of these tips.
Lisa Thompkins is a freelance writer living in Dallas, Texas. She works closely in the Home Improvement and Real Estate fields and has a background in Interior Design. When not writing, Lisa enjoys spending her time out on the lake with her friends and family. Lisa’s work as a freelance writer can be found on Building Product Advisor, a new construction industry resource launching in Fall 2022.