How do you start with decorating your new home? Naturally, this depends on where you come from. Did you have your own house before? How much bigger is your new place? If you need to start from scratch, you have more freedom than someone who brings two lorries filled with stuff.
Budget is another important cornerstone when looking to furnish your new home. In this article, we will dive into multiple ways to make your home one of your dreams.
Define a strategy to furnish your home
Before you move into your new home, you need to think about your priorities. You can define this in a strategy for how you will furnish your home. For example, you could come up with five important pillars that are important for you. This could be the kitchen if you are a big fan of cooking, or the TV corner if you like to sit back and relax on the couch. By defining and prioritizing what is important for you, the allocation of the budget can start.
High priority
The items you find important to your home should have priority. To allocate funds and furnish your home in the best way possible, you could consider the 80/20 rule. This means you can spend 80% of your budget on 20% of the most important items. Do make sure that you exclude some of the necessities in your home if they are not already a high priority (e.g., toilet, kitchen, bathroom). You could allocate fewer funds to this, but there needs to be a foundation to enjoy the quality of life.
Low priority
When you have areas that are of less relevance to you, this can be approached from a different angle. For example, you do not care much about a home office but need it. In that case, you could set a lower budget and decide to move forward with IKEA to furnish your home instead of design items.
This also holds for accessoires that fill up your room. Savings can be very significant. A high-quality design bookshelf easily costs thousands of pounds, whereas you can buy a bookshelf for as little as 100 pounds from IKEA.
The kitchen in your new home
Depending on the priority set you can start designing your kitchen. Want to move ahead with the kitchen of your dreams? Consider visiting several kitchen stores and design a kitchen together that best fits with how you’ll furnish your home. This will help you define the optimal layout of the kitchen. Next to that, it helps with the selection of the materials and the kitchen equipment.
Another tip and tricks to furnish your home I wish to give you is that when it comes to equipment, investments can be quite significant. Therefore, consider how important you think this is. Do you want to spend hundreds of pounds on a steam oven or a digital clock on the floor for your dishwasher? Try to create a list of all these items, across rooms, to have a complete overview of fund allocation and possibilities.
An existing kitchen present?
In most cases, you will enter a house that already possesses a kitchen. What do you think about the style? If it is still (partly) aligned with your likings, you could consider not to furnish it. To upgrade the kitchen, you could consider adding new equipment to it. You could think of a new stove or a new sink. This is especially great if the kitchen contains elements that have been part of the house for decades.
Floors can make a big difference
It does not matter if you move in a furnished home or not: floors are essential to creating ambiance in your room. Nowadays, there are many options to consider. For example, you do not only have wooden floors but you can also decide to select concrete or PVC floors.
The latter is especially convenient, as it can mimic the design of wood but comes with little maintenance. You can decide on different floors per room or create a different feel per room. This is dependent on the layout and furnishing of the house. If you want to create an industrial look in the living room, concrete is a good option. Do you have a romantic interior in mind for the master bedroom? There are plenty of options with PVC, such as herringbone or laminate PVC.
Fragrances to make your new home smell like home
Another tip and trick to furnish your home is that not only objects matter when it comes to a feeling of home. A nice fragrance can make a huge difference. By purchasing home fragrances, you create a nice scent that spreads across your room. With many scents out there, you can find one that suits your taste and styling. You could also consider different types of fragrances. For example, a luxurious and premium scent for the living room and a hammam-style scent for the bathroom.
Combine your existing furniture with new accessoires
Another tip and trick to properly furnish your home is that you’ll need to make choices. It is hard to get rid of all your existing furniture. Maybe there are a few items you do not like, but that cannot hold for all of the items you have. By simply moving the items from one home to the next, you reduce the feeling of moving in “clean”.
To do so, you can consider mixing it up a bit. Try placing furniture in different settings across rooms. Another option is to add new accessoires to your furniture. This could range from a new carpet to blankets and paintings that blend well into the new house.
Upholster your furniture
If you want to start fresh with furnishing your existing furniture, another tip and trick to furnish your home is upholstering the items that you have. Ranging from your favourite reading chair to the couch, all items can be upholstered in new colours that suit the new setting of your home.
What to do with the walls?
Sometimes a new colour on the walls does not do the trick. You could consider re-plaster your walls to make them even again before painting. Another increasingly popular option is glass fiber wallpaper. This is relatively cheap and can still provide you with a smooth and equal wall to paint.
Smart home technologies
You are probably already bombarded by these items through websites such as Amazon. There are many items available to furnish your home. For example, there are smart doorbells that allow you to receive a push notification and see who is standing in front of the door.
Smart lighting
Next to that, you can select smart lighting that allows being controlled through a single application. A good example is the light system Hue offered by Philips. Another option is the smart lighting system from IKEA, which comes at a lower price.
Both of the systems make use of the Zigbee frequency, which is similar to Bluetooth to send signals from and to the lamp. This means that you can also connect IKEA smart lighting to the Hue Bridge. Good to know if you want to save on lighting for your new house.
Automate your house!
As a last example of our tips and tricks to furnish your home, we want to talk about automation. Who does not like automation? With smart technology comes automation potential. One of the convenient additions to smart lighting is the use of infrared sensors. They can pick up movement and can automatically light up a room. This is especially helpful when you come through the front door. The light simply turns on without any hassle.
You could also make more complex automation rules. For example, you can create a “movie setting” in your smartphone application (e.g., Apple Home) and let it automatically dim the lights, start the TV, and put phones to ‘do not disturb’. Another example is the scenario when you have friends over. You can simply dim the lights and start playing some nice music in the background that sets the scene.
