In my opinion a home is more than a house. A house is a physical entity and a home is much more than that. Where you can feel at home there is your home.
Photo by Cornerstone Architects – More living room photos
What can cause that feeling? One big question and so many answers.
In fact what is the importance of a house? First of all a house is made for people.
Man is a microcosm which is living in perfect harmony with his surrounding environment. The people tend to form families which often live in a house together. This house offer accommodation for family or group. Usually someone lives in a house that others have built for him and maybe he is not happy in this house.
Because a house is not only just a few bricks, lumber and shingles.
A house should be an atmosphere of love and peace, a place where we can think properly, where we can feel good. We didn’t build our home and we wish that we had a bigger home. What can we do? We cannot afford to purchase a new home or make some house additions to upgrade to larger our living quarters.
While this might not be the right time for our family to move into a larger home, there are many things that we can do to make our home feel larger. Depending on our budget there are so many ways to make small house feel spacious.
1. Removing the non-load bearing walls. The first thing we can do is get rid of non-load bearing walls and avoid unnecessary excessive subdivision of the dwelling. Traditional walls can be replaced with one made of glass or we can make large openings in the walls, for example between the kitchen, dining area and living room. We can use, or not sliding doors. A trick we can use is the full “exploitation” of the room height. We can make shelves and storage space for items that do not use them daily. We can even use the “dead” space under stairs to create a storage space. →
2. Hidden Rooms. Some rooms in many houses are located behind staircases and if we can see a room, we tend not to use it. Leaving some rooms unused or underused can make the house feel smaller. Think about it. If we can open the view from the kitchen, dining, living area to that underutilized space we will start to use it. Again we need openings. We can create that building a framed opening into the wall that’s obstructing the view. We will make our house feel larger.
3. Perspective View. There is another way to making a house feel larger. By opening up a line of vision that extends from one corner of the house to another and we can do this if we can remove some objects or segments of wall that’s blocking the line of vision. Once again we might consider the openings and suddenly our home feels larger.
4. Combining rooms. Let’s face it! We have in our homes a dining and a living room. But we use them only occasionally. Maybe it isn’t a bad idea to combine one living area and dining area. We can create a space, where we can take our dinner and enjoy our leisure time and in the same time we can turn the free space into something useful for daily routine, such as a home office.
5. Height vs. Length and Width. We can change the proportions of the room, juggling between horizontally plane and height of the room, adjusting the height of the ceiling. A lower ceiling in the kitchen will give us the impression that room is larger and the most important thing, it is inexpensive and quite easy to do it. Add a skylight to create a sense of depth or install recessed lighting to bring a lot more light into the room without taking up a lot of space.
Using natural light, paint colors and adequate furniture we can have excellent results. Just due to the fact you may have limited space does not mean you need to have limited style. Try several of these designer tactics for decorating with furniture, lighting, color and house accessories to create the space feel larger.
1. Light. No problem with the rooms with big windows. Using adequate blinds and curtains we can adjust the amount of light. No curtains and blinds that block our sunlight.( Tip: Hanging curtains at edges of the window we can make a window appear larger with floor-length curtains)
There are so many types of blinds and curtains, one of them allow only a certain amount of light to get trough. Anytime a sunny room feels to be bigger. But what about darker rooms to small for our taste. No need to feel cramped – there are plenty of tactics we can use. Easily lit rooms will make our apartment look bigger.
We can choose accessories that emit and reflect light. It is not a good idea to use floor and table lamps that take up to much space, but mounted on the wall can provide the same or maybe more amount of light. A help could be the mirrors on the walls that are opposite windows to reflect light in the room.
And a great idea is to replace our old incandescent bulbs with a new one, the energy efficient fluorescent bulbs. These types of bulbs provide a similar light to the type of the sun light. In conclusion: using the light in our advantage we can feel our room larger and comfy.
Small Apartment Designs – Living Comfortable in Small Spaces (howtobuildahouseblog.com)
2. A Neat Room. Put things in order to avoid clutter. A cluttered home will look smaller. In fact keeping your home neat is the cheapest way to make a home feel larger. If you struggle with a small area first step is to be ordered. If we get rid of things that we know we do not need and we try to mount shelves and storage areas we can win more space and the room will look more spacious. After all we can realize that in a few hours. It is a quick and easy way with great results.
3. Color Paint. One of the most important thing and slightly more expensive is the paint color. Generally speaking, light walls make a room feel larger. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule; a dark accent wall can bring definition and scale to a small room. Make the room appear taller by painting the ceiling a very light shade of blue reminiscent of the sky or paint the ceiling with high gloss paint to provide the impression of height.
Light paint colors such as pastels reflect light, and reflection makes a room look more open. Dark colors absorb light and the room feels smaller. In fact is the same rule with lighting – when the room appears darker and without much light, it appears smaller. A good trick: If we can paint the floor white the room will appear larger.
4. Furniture. We can save space with multi – purpose furniture. We don’t have to fill the room with too much furniture or they are too big for that room. Letting free floor and placing furniture high on the wall opposite the access roads will create a feeling of a wider room. If we use low profile furniture or pieces with legs, and open space underneath the room seem larger.
And we don’t have to forget to hang the pictures a little lower to fit the scale of the room. Add materials such as mirrors, glass and metals that reflect light to give the illusion of much more space. Downsizing our furniture into more size appropriate pieces and find the furniture that also provides storage (Ex: a coffee table that acts a chest) the room will be for sure more spacious.
Making use of these designer secrets and we can make all the distinction between feeling cozy or feeling cramped in our space.
