One thing that commonly happens in the lives of young parents, is that they reach a point where remodelling their home becomes both quite desirable, and also manageable, financially and logistically. A home can be remodelled in many different ways. Extensions can be put in to allow for games rooms, walls can be added or knocked down to rearrange the balance of space in the home, and more. A family home will, of course, require certain considerations that a bachelor pad or young couple’s home, alone, might not. Bearing that in mind, here are a few tips for remodelling your family home.
Improve The ‘Energy’
Every home has its own “energy”, or “aura”, in the sense that the various design features of the home will tend to elicit certain emotions. A home that is dimly lit, small, with cramped rooms and a mould problem, is all but guaranteed to create feelings of claustrophobia and melancholy. On the other hand, a large, expansive home with white walls and excellent lighting is much more likely to come across as uplifting, and to improve the mood of those who live within it, and even those who visit it.
It goes without saying that you should make alterations that improve the “energy” of your home in this way, and make it a better place for you and your family to be. You want your home to improve the net harmony and happiness of its inhabitants, and so you should give some careful attention to just what design features promote that “feel-good” sense for you, in practice.
Lighting tends to be a major issue here. Homes with bright lighting that can be employed during the day, and dimmer, warmer lights or lamps that can be activated in the evening, are quite routinely more “positive” than dimly lit homes.
Of course, these home modifications are even better if they not only improve the “energy” of the home but are also directly useful, too. Bathrooms can be a great example here. Getting a local bathroom installer to put in a larger, more luxurious bathroom will naturally mean that everyone in the home benefits from that added dimension of luxury. Additionally, installing a second bathroom could directly make the home more hospitable and convenient for guests and visitors.
Maximise Large, Communal Spaces
There’s an element of personal taste to this, but as a general rule, large communal spaces in a home can be considered a strong “plus” for a family, as they help to draw the family closer together by ensuring that everyone is, literally, closer together during the course of the day.
If you have a living room cut off from the kitchen, for example, that naturally means that whoever is cooking will be separated from whoever is relaxing in the living room. Often this means that one or both parents won’t be very near their children during meal preparation, and in the case of wider social gatherings, it can mean that the cook is quite isolated from the rest of the group.
Something as simple as having an open-plan kitchen and living room can radically transform this situation, bringing everyone into the same “domain” and allowing everyone to communicate, joke, and interact far more easily. Of course, the home shouldn’t be made up solely of large, communal spaces. Everyone needs a bit of privacy and bedrooms are an “inner sanctum” of sorts. Nonetheless, you should do what you can to ensure that the more communal areas of the home are as large and open as possible. In practice, this can mean having the builders bring a wall down, and join two previously separate rooms with one another.
Consider the ‘investment value’
An important concern of any homeowner is, of course, the financial value of their home. Your home is an investment, after all, and you may well have plans of moving one day — or at the very least, you likely enjoy having the hypothetical option of selling your home on at a profit.
The property market isn’t always predictable, but you can generally get a decent sense of how various home modifications and remodelling jobs will affect the value of your property, by doing a bit of Googling and speaking to some relevant experts. Think about longer term changes that could add value prior to selling your property as well, such as utilising solar energy San Diego CA from solar panels.
Consider All Users
If you have very young children, their opinion on the home remodelling project won’t really be a factor — they likely won’t really notice or understand what’s going on. If your children are a bit older, however, and especially if you’ve got teenage children who still live at home and who have strong opinions about everything, it’s a good idea to take the feelings of the various members of your family into consideration. Happy family, happy home.
Don’t be too quick to rush through with a change that seems great in your own mind, but which might disrupt the entire dynamic of the home. If everyone seems generally settled and happy with things the way they are, have a discussion with your kids in order to see how they would feel if things changed along the lines of your grand home vision. Of course, it should go without saying that you and your partner need to be in agreement on any changes to the home, too.
Stick With Builders You Know
Sometimes, the experience of getting work done on your home can be frustrating, because the companies you employ to do the work aren’t all going to be of equal value, either in their ethics, or in their skill. When you get a company to do some work for you, and find that you’re very happy with the quality of the job; stick with them. If they’ve proven trustworthy and talented on one job, there’s good reason to think that they will be able to match that standard going forward.
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