Apartment Therapy Los Angeles 20 Ways To Love Your Home20 Ways To Love Your HomeWhile the weather turns a bit colder (only 72 today!) our thoughts turn to the Fall. We're looking forward to more time spent indoors hosting and hanging out. But there are some things we'd like to get to to make our home feel that much more comfortable. Here are 20 ways to love your home (so it loves you back):
1. Choose 10 things and donate them, throw them away or repurpose them. It's easy for stuff to pile up but if you grab a bag and walk through the house it's almost guranteed that you'll be able to find 10 things that you either don't love, don't use, or is broken (and not worth fixing). Get these things out.
2. Rearrange. You choose big or small. Rearrange the living room or rearrange the bottles you have out on the counter in the bathroom. When we rearrange our homes they look new and fresh.
3. Take some advice from Benita. She
rotates her accessories so that she can change the palette of each room. She cleverly stores the accessories she's not using and is able to refresh her home without buying anything.
4. Add some yellow. Yellow is
bright, fun and full of cheer. It's modern and there are a lot of ways to incporporate it into your home.
5. Add a plant or flowers. Fresh flowers might be too expensive an indulgence to do all the time, but a nice little mint plant growing in the kitchen or some beautiful succulents out on the porch can breath some life into your abode. Check out some
foolproof house plants.
6. Clean. Choose a room and
really clean it: mop the floors, dust the shelves, the doorjambs and everyhing in between. See how different you feel afterwards.
7. Light it up. Do you have
three points of light in the living room or just a torch lamp in the corner. Rooms feel bigger, more grown up and have better ambience if you use at least 3 light sources in a room.
8. Eat Meals at home. We've talked about it often, but
eating meals at home instantly makes home feel like a place you want to be (in fact, sometimes for us it's just knowing the fridge is full of food).
9. Privacy. Do your curtains give you privacy at night? Could they do a better job? You want to feel comfortable at home and having privacy is a big part of that. On our list is replacing the vertical blinds that came with the rental with some nice sheers (we're on the 3rd floor so don't need to worry about peeping toms).
10.Zone your space. Now is a good time to reevaluate how you're using your space. Do you often have people over to watch movies and yet your desk takes up half the living room? Or the opposite: do you rarely have people over and you work from home and your desk is shoved into a tight little corner? Make sure your home is supporting the activities you do inside of it.
11.Good Rest. Is it time to change the sheets or clean off the nightstands?
The bedroom is uber important for helping us get good rest so we feel good in our lives. Do you have ratty old sheets or just a color you can't stand? Start saving up for some sheets that are amazing. If we ever get our gumption up, we're buying linen sheets.
12. Frequent a local thrift store. You never know what you'll find and when you find something you love, it's normally pretty affordable. We stop at the Salvation Army once a week and look for paintings, pottery, lamps and small accessories. We've started to build a collection and when we make a mistake, we just donate it right back.
13. Put that collection on display. Do you love cakestands? Have a closet full of vintage scarves? break your collection out and put it on display. A friend of ours tied vintage scarved to her headboard, we use cakestands for plants and catch alls by the door.
14. Add Art. If you've been afraid to hang art, now's the time. A space becomes a home when there is stuff on the walls. We love pairing family photos with vintage postcards and funny paintings. You can also rearrange your artwork to create a new feeling in the house.
15. Get a good book. Let yourself read in bed (in your cleaned out bedroom). This helps slow down your day and let's you drift off into sleep. Quality of life skyrockets.
16. Scents. Is the only smell in the apartment the smell of the litter box or the dishes that haven't been done yet? Use nice smelling cleaners like Methos Lavender all purpose spray and burn candles or diffuser sticks in smells that you like (and that aren't overpowering). Ever tried a linen spray on your sheets? It's nice, trust us. Pay attention to what you smell when you walk in the door. Is it stuffy? Do you need a fan? Does the garbage need to be taken out every morning instead of once a week?
17. Indulge. Is there a
bathsoap you really like? Flowers you really like? Love having fresh rasberries in the fridge? Choose something you love having around and, if you can afford it, splurge. If you can't afford it, find something you can afford to splurge on and get it.
18. Invite people over. Sometimes just looking at our home with the perspective of what others see when they come in helps us to edit, rearrange or finally get to the project that's laid out in the living room. And when people come over, you better believe we've spent some time cleaning, and that's never a bad thing.
19. Slow Down. We've had moments when we're so busy we've barely even been at home, let alone enjoyed it. So when we can we try to make a point of slowing down and just being at home. Drinking our coffee while sitting on the couch instead of multitasking. Taking the time to take a bath instead of checking our email again. Spending time with the family when everyone is home instead of just putting a video on.
20. Make Decisions. 90% of clutter is the result of delayed decisions. You can't decide about that old sweater so you keep it. You don't know if it's worth it to keep that broken chair because some day you might be able to fix it, etc. Make
some decisions, move forward in your home and get the energy moving in there again. When we get our home in order, it empowers us in every other part of our lives.
How do you love your home?
