At some point in time, we all find ourselves in tight spaces. Often, it is in our own home. Cramped living is undesirable, and it is even more uncomfortable in households with kids and pets. A bigger home is not the only way to make your rooms look and feel larger.
Make a room look and feel bigger by:
- Emptying spaces
- Sparsely filling the room with light-colored décor
- Keeping the floor visible
- Hanging mirrors to bring light in through the room and create depth
- Using multi-purpose furniture
- Mounting electronics and other room accessories on the wall
- Opening pathways between rooms as much as possible
It should be fairly understandable emptying spaces will inherently make rooms in your home appear more spacious. Clutter creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, so clean up as much as possible. Do not overfill bookshelves and tables with your belongings. Rather, keep top surfaces clear, except for key décor, and allow shelves and walls to have plenty of white space.
Visible floor space correlates to a feeling of openness in a room. One way to make more visible floor space, aside from removing extra furniture and clutter, is to decorate a room with raised furnishings. By doing so, an illusion of space is made. If you do not have raised furniture, fabricate this same illusion by moving furniture away from the wall, or angling it in a corner.
Keeping it light also visually enlarges a room. This is true for paint color and furnishing. Lighter paint colors have a dual effect of bringing in light to the room, therein adding more depth to a room. An additional way to create this effect is by hanging large mirrors on the walls, especially if hanging directly across from a window to pull natural light through the room.
For those willing and able to replace furniture in order to create more space, consider multi-purpose, or multi-functional, furniture. These pieces double as extra storage space. For example, a coffee table, although not raised, could also be used to store blankets, pillows, and family board games.