Keys to a Well-Functioning Home

Posted by Jenni Barnett on Friday, June 10th, 2022 at 11:58am.

 

The interior design of your home will have a powerful impact on your day-to-day experience of living in it. Over time, a poor design can wear you down, making your dream home feel more like a tedious chore to work around. The good news is, there are practical steps you can take to overhaul your home’s interior design and help you fall in love with your home all over again. Today, we’re sharing our favorite keys to a well-functioning home.


Express Yourself Through Design

It’s easy to be influenced by the trends we see on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. While there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from designs we love, it’s also important that your final design express your own personality, interests, and preferences. Trends come and go, but anything you truly love will likely have lasting power to bring you joy within your home.

Art, furniture, flooring, kitchen and bathroom designs, fixtures, and color palettes are all aspects of design that should come straight from your heart. 


Think Long-Term

As you work through your design plan, consider how your needs may change in the future. Whether you’re currently child-free, raising young children, or trying to keep up with teenagers, it’s important not to get caught up with overhauling your home just to work for the next few years. Instead, choose features and floor plans that will remain useful for the duration of your time living there.


Revise Your Layout

For most of us, it’s difficult to perfect a layout until we’ve lived in a home for a while. If you’re having trouble relaxing in your home, or find yourself fighting to move around easily, it’s likely that your layout is the culprit. Until your layout is streamlined, changes to your home’s interior design aren’t going to have the desired impact. 

If shifting furniture around doesn’t improve the experience of your home, you may consider opening up the space by removing a wall, adding a window, or installing a door to enhance the flow between two rooms.

If you find this kind of strategizing overwhelming, it can be worth hiring an interior design architect. Their specialty is transforming the interior of a home to maximize both functionality and aesthetics. While their services can be costly, their ability to ensure that you fall in love with your home is unrivaled. 


Examine Awkward Spaces

The default for dealing with odd spaces within our homes is leaving them empty. Commonly, though, a complication arises when these strange, awkward spaces accumulate messy clutter. If an odd space in your home remains bare, it can function as purposeful negative space. On the other hand, if it’s become a magnet for messes, it’s time to get creative and figure out how to use it proactively.


Create Ambiance Through Lighting

An afterthought for many homeowners, we believe lighting may be the single most important design feature within a home. It has the power to add depth, adjust hue, and make a stark space cozy and inviting.

The key strategy should be striking the right balance between sources of natural and artificial light. Additionally, the temperature of the artificial lights you choose matters a great deal. With LED lighting, we have the ability to choose precisely the color of light we need. If your room needs an infusion of bright light, daylight LEDs are going to be your best bet. If your room is stark and clinical, lights with a subtly warm hue will do the trick.


Enhance Depth with Color

Color is often examined from a purely aesthetic perspective, yet like everything on our list, it has a significant impact on your experience of living in your home. A poor color choice will assault your eyes daily, while an excellent color choice will create an inviting, gorgeous, but ultimately nearly invisible effect—especially as time goes on.

If you’re having trouble choosing the best color for your walls, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sticking to a classic neutral palette. From there, you can introduce splashes and pops of color through art, furniture, rugs, and lighting fixtures. Whether you choose ivory, warm beige, soft gray, or golden sandy tones, this technique works equally well. The best part of choosing this approach is that it’s a breeze to change up small accessories and refresh the overall impact of the background color.


Sort Out Your Storage

When you moved into your home, you likely made the most of the storage as it was. The next step is creating “a place for everything and [putting] everything in its place.” Specialized storage will always be superior to generalized storage. To create the perfect storage solutions for your home, begin by taking an inventory of your belongings. Next, research storage ideas for these kinds of items. Finally, install your preferred storage system and put everything where it belongs. This one step will revolutionize your routine and greatly enhance your enjoyment of your home. 


Do Your Research on Materials

As you choose your materials for your kitchen, bathrooms, and floors throughout your home, spend a good deal of time researching the many options available. Consider your lifestyle and the time you want to spend on upkeep. Learn about durability and consider sustainability when sourcing each material.

While it’s tempting to install materials that appeal to us from a purely aesthetic perspective, it’s a universal truth that the joy derived from materials diminishes rapidly when they aren’t suitable for the lives we lead. 


Make Your Spaces Work for Your Routines

If you’re going to be your own interior design architect, it’s important that you examine how your rooms could be optimized for your day-to-day routines. Adding storage, increasing the functionality of a room, and replacing flooring are common steps to improve how a room works for you practically speaking.

Ideally, your home will make your life easier. This end goal means you’ll have to examine the nitty-gritty of your life; cooking, cleaning, laundry, home fitness (and much more) can all be enhanced by rethinking your interior design.

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