Making Your House a Home

One of the biggest challenges for the modern homeowner is personalising their home in order to make it appropriately homely. To feel truly comfortable in our property, we need to put some items into it which appeal to our sensibilities – aesthetic and otherwise.

This typically involves filling it with items which we like and make us feel more at home. Fortunately, there exists a huge range of items which fit that description: from large items such as furniture, which make us comfortable in the quite physical sense; to smaller details like doormats and doorknobs, which give us a more emotional sense that the place where we spend so much of our time actually belongs to us.

With that in mind, let’s examine some of the ways in which we can make our houses into homes.

Painting and decorating

Undoubtedly the most obvious way of personalising your home is to spend some time decorating its walls. You might do this using a pot of paint, or you might do it using a roll of wallpaper. Either decision will be informed largely by your personal tastes and those of your co-habitants. Suffice to say, in either instance there are a huge number of options available, allowing you to alter the colour scheme of your home’s interior in virtually any way you see fit. Blues are popular in bathrooms, while yellows and reds are often employed in bedrooms – but everyone’s tastes are different; this is your home, after all and you may paint (or paper) it whatever colour you see fit!

Once you’ve gotten the walls to the desired colour, then you might begin to consider exactly what you’d like to hang on them. If you’re artistic, then you may already have something in mind. If, on the other hand, you’re not so much, then there are a great many artists and designers willing to sell you their expertise. The cost of original art is enough to dissuade many from investing in it – and this is where replica prints come into their own. With the help of a judiciously-judged frame, the right print can endow an austere room with a vibrant focal point and give you and your guests something to look at and talk about for years to come.

Get some accessories!

Now that the walls of your home are appropriately stimulating, it’s worth turning our attention beneath eye-level. Doormats are a relatively inexpensive way of lending your home a personal touch. A bold, striking doormat will let your guests know what sort of person owns the property – and it will do so before they’ve even gotten through the door!

Doormats are available cheaply and in a range of different styles. Some come bearing wisdom and witticisms; others are more austere. As well as being decorative, they also serve more practical uses. Whatever doormat your decide to go for, try to bear in mind that the purpose of the doormat is to stood upon and that it will therefore need to be rugged enough to stand up to a lot of punishment. There is, after all, little point buying a doormat which only lasts few a few months before disintegrating.

Moving smaller

As well as these larger items, a home can also benefit immensely from a few more minor touches, here and there. Doorstoppers are a rarely-noticed accessory which can be used to lend a little character to an otherwise sterile indoor environment. Many of us have a door somewhere in our home which periodically swings open and closed – why not address the problem with a doorstop which matches the rest of your homestead?

While installing a new set of doors can be a challenging undertaking, it is possible to add some personality to your interior by replacing just a small part of them, with only a fraction of the upheaval. Just replace your old door handles with some new ones of your choosing. You might choose a bold colour or a dull one, to either match or offset the rest of your interior.

The same, too, is true of the handles of the doors and drawers of your kitchen ensemble, which represent an easy and effective means through which to express yourself in the kitchen, before you’ve even started cooking! And whilst we’re in the kitchen, let’s consider the many containers which the room necessitates. Making a kitchen more homely is often a matter of having all of the biscuit jars, spice racks and sugar bowls complement one another - even the tea-towels and tea-cosies!

It is all about the finishing touches and that attention to detail. If you want to make your house a home then you need to follow your heart and create spaces that you wish to fall into at night. There is nothing better than knowing you have made it home and feeling at one with your surroundings.