If you're unhappy with the appearance of your home, but can't afford to have it renovated, don't worry! There are a number of low-cost ways to make it look better. Read on to find out more.
Rearrange the furniture
The way in which the furniture in a room is arranged can have a dramatic impact on its appearance. As such, one very simple (and free) way to alter and improve the look of your home it to move the furniture around.
To begin, select one piece of furniture which will be used as the focal point of the room. In the living room, this might be either your sofa or the entertainment unit which houses your television. Once you have made your selection, you should position this item somewhere towards the middle of the room. Then, you can use other pieces of furniture to guide the eye towards this focal point.
For example, let's say that you have a beautiful sofa that you want to use as the centrepiece in your living room. After moving this into the centre of the space, you could then direct attention to it by placing a decorative rug in front of it and by positioning two small side tables on either side of it. If you have armchairs, you could also angle these so that they are pointing towards the sofa. These small, simple adjustments can make a world of difference to the room's overall aesthetic.
It's also possible to rearrange your furniture in such a way that it makes the room appear more spacious. The key thing to bear in mind when doing this is to focus on making it easy for people to get from one end of the room to the other. If there are lots of furniture items which they have to squeeze past, or even move out of the way to continue walking forward, the space can end up feeling very cramped and claustrophobic. As such, make sure that there is a clear walkway. To achieve this, you might need to push the sofa back a few inches towards the wall, remove a footstool or reposition your armchairs. In some cases, it might be necessary to remove an excessively large piece of furniture from the room.
Have the carpets cleaned
Having the carpets in your property professionally cleaned is nowhere near as expensive as you might think, and can have a hugely positive impact on the appearance of your home.
The debris from the soles of your shoes, as well as pet dander, dust and spillages, can spoil the look of your carpeting. Over time, these contaminants can roughen up the texture of a carpet and cause patches of discolouration, which can make it look old and shabby. Hoovering can only do so much, particularly when it comes deep-pile carpeting, as the dirt will eventually make its way down to the deepest layers of the carpet, where your hoover cannot reach.
A typical carpet cleaning service will involve the cleaner using heavy-duty commercial equipment to both steam clean and hoover your floors. Steam cleaners can help to loosen dried-on dirt from deep inside the carpeting, kill dust mites and bacteria, and remove stains. The hoover can then be used to extract this debris.
