Skip to main content

6 Ways to Make Your Home Feel Brighter Now

make your home feel brighter this spring

Some simple changes will make your home feel brighter immediately. Image: Tatum Brown

Spring is in full bloom! It’s a time of late sunsets and warm breezes, but you don’t need to step outside to soak up the season. Make your home feel brighter right now, and you can enjoy the freshness of the season indoors.

While “spring cleaning” is pretty standard, “spring redecorating” might sound like a whole different beast, but it can make all the difference in your home. Your redecorating doesn’t need to be major. With these six easy changes, you can make your home feel brighter and invite the spring season in.

make your home feel brighter with lighting

Recessed lighting replicates natural lighting. Image: Echelon Custom Homes

1. Start with the basics: light sources

You’re ready to make your home feel brighter, and you can probably guess the best place to start. Lighting makes a world of difference. The more natural light you can bring into your home this spring, the better, but, where natural light falls short, think through how you fill in the gaps.

The higher a light is hung, the more it’s able to simulate natural light. Recessed lighting is a huge help in adding brightness. You don’t have to limit that light to your ceilings, either. Build recessed lighting into cabinets to add even more warmth.

make your home brighter with window coverings

Light curtains hung high on the wall maximizes natural light. Image: Parkyn Design

2. Minimize your window coverings

Window coverings can trap much of the light you want to bring into your home. On the contrary, light-colored, lightweight curtains hung high will make your windows feel open and airy.

If you normally have heavy or dark curtains hanging, consider swapping them out seasonally. This relatively easy change makes your home feel refreshed and ready for the warm months ahead.

make your home feel brighter outdoors

Expand your living space to the outdoors. Image: Grandin Road

3. Explore outdoor living

Don’t limit yourself to the walls of your home. If you have outdoor space, use it. Setting out a few chairs where you can relax and enjoy the balmy spring evenings expands your living space to the outdoors, where you’ll find an abundance of brightness. You get extra points if you can set up your outdoor living area near an indoor one. Leaving the door open between the spaces connects the two, bringing that fresh feeling of the outdoors in.

Here are a handful of more ways you can help your home simulate the outdoors this spring.

make your home feel brighter with mirrors

Hanging mirrors reflect natural light, brightening the room. Image: Pegasus Builders

4. Hang mirrors to make your home feel brighter 

When you think about brightening your home, you think about adding light, right? Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the light you already have shining inside, and multiply it? There is: mirrors. Strategically place mirror art near windows and doors, where natural light is already abundant. The light will bounce off the mirror and into your home.

make your home feel brighter with furniture legs

Adding legs to furniture brings airiness to a room. Image: Lisa Petrole

5. Elevate your furniture

Heavy, squat furniture doesn’t do you any favors when you’re trying to make your home feel airier. You don’t have to buy a whole new set of furniture, either. You can add new legs to couches and dressers, lifting them off the ground to add more breathing room around your furniture. Swap out clunky desk, coffee table, and dining table legs for something that can carry the weight of your furniture without adding visual weight to the room, like hairpin legs.

make your home feel brighter with plants

Plants add vibrancy to any room. Image: Kim Rodger Design

6. Decorate with plants

Spring is a season for new life. You want to make your home feel brighter to carry some of that newness of spring into your living spaces. What better way to do that than by actually bringing living things into your home? Decorating with plants adds vibrancy to any room. A simple orchid on the dining table or a small tree in the corner can be enough to make a room feel alive and energized.

Spring is here, bringing a perfect time to refresh and energize your home. Use these tips to make each room in your house feel bright and airy.

Have a favorite tip for bringing spring indoors? Leave a comment and let us know!

The post 6 Ways to Make Your Home Feel Brighter Now appeared first on Freshome.com.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SKÅDIS: 5 ways to make the IKEA pegboard even better

IKEA introduced its own pegboard system, SKÅDIS, two years ago and I’d say it’s one of the best systems IKEA launched in recent years. I love how super customisable it is, with a growing range of accessories that help keep things organized. It works everywhere, in your wardrobe to bathroom . Probably anywhere you have a flat surface to hang it up. Photo: IKEA.com SKÅDIS pegboard system See it on IKEA.com But no matter how perfect a system, you can trust IKEA hackers to improve on the SKÅDIS. And they’ve settle these 5 issues you may have faced with the handy IKEA pegboard. Read on for their fixes. 5 IKEA SKÅDIS issues and fixes #1 Expensive hooks? You’ll need quite a number of hooks and accessories to fill up the SKÅDIS pegboard, and Kenyer was shocked at how quickly they all added up. So he figured he could make his own hooks to save cost. Photo: Kenyer Over at Instructables , he shows us how to twist copper wires into the SKÅDIS hook shape. It works s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hackers Help: How to remake cam lock holes?

I want to put a 78.5” wide PAX configuration in a 77” space for a kids room . My plan is to eliminate the drawer on the right unit, then cut the shelves and rails to be 1.5” narrower. My question is, how do people attach two laminated pressboard IKEA pieces after they’ve cut off the cam lock holes? Related: See more Hackers Help questions and answers . Are they using drills bits and/or tiny hole saws to remake the cam lock holes? Or screws drilled in from the outside with wood glue? The outside pieces won’t be visible in my completed setup so I could go either way. I’m curious what other people are doing, either I haven’t seen this detail in past hacks or I haven’t been paying attention. ~ by Jenny *** Hi Jenny The best and tidiest method is to use the cut-off portion as a template to reproduce the same cam lock holes in the correct positions. The right sized drill bits and a  Forstner bit should do the trick. A Forstner bit will drill a flat-bottomed hole (...
Post a Comment
Read more

A beautiful design idea for the IVAR cabinet with doors

A wall of IVAR cabinets with doors engraved is astonishingly captivating. Because IVAR is real solid wood (unlike a lot of flat-pack cupboards), it makes a great blank canvas for CNC machining work and engraving. IKEA items used: IKEA IVAR cabinets in 30mm (12″) and 50mm (20″) depths. IVAR cabinet | IKEA.com Other materials and tools: CNC Router How to engrave the IVAR cabinet with doors: Build a wall of IVAR cabinets to your preference. It’s not too difficult to shorten some in order to fill a wall exactly. I shortened the top row to 695mm and reduced the depth of the middle column to 40mm to create a 50/40/30 sequence so that I didn’t block the window but maximised storage capacity. Take a drawing, trace it in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator into a black-only flat design. You can simplify the path at this point to reduce the time needed to engrave. Chop up the drawing in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator into door-sized sections. Save as an SVG. Import the ...
Post a Comment
Read more