Four Simple Ways to Keep Your Decor Fresh

If you are looking for some simple ways to quickly freshen up your home decor, I have just the post for you. As parents we rarely have time to put aside a whole weekend to decorate, it’s all snatched time during naps and after bedtime. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to keep things looking good even if you only have a few hours a week to do so. Here are a few of my favourites…

Update your lighting

Lighting makes a huge difference to how a room looks and feels. Simple changes like putting stylish LED filament bulbs into either your lamps and wall-lights can be as effective as changing the actual fixtures themselves. They add a touch of class to any room (in my humble opinion, given that we have them in every room that doesn’t have downlighters!). They typically use 85% less power than bulbs do so switching to LEDs not only gives you instant cool points, it also saves you a lot of money.

New wall hangings

If you’re anything like me, you’ll like to adorn your walls with photos, pictures and ALL other forms of wall art. Periodically updating them is a great way to bring a room up to date and give it a completely new feel with minimal effort. I’m an addict for looking online to find new bits and pieces (hello Instagram!) and then just switching what’s hanging on our existing nails – minimal effort required!

Alternatively, if you like doing crafts while watching the TV with your family, you can easily make your own wall art. You can use this article to get a few ideas of what you could make.

Re-decorating your walls

Often, simply updating your pictures and photos is all you need to do. But, every now and again, you will want to go a bit further and change the finish of your walls, whether it’s just a freshen up or a complete change of colour, it can transform a space. To make this task more manageable, break it down into one or two hour blocks of time. You don’t necessarily have to paint an entire room in one go. Painting one wall today and another tomorrow can get the job done by the end of the week, plus then it means you don’t have to move everything out… great if you’ve got a busy household and want minimal disruption!

If you want an even faster way to change your walls it is worth investigating wall stickers. They come in a huge range of designs, from small shapes through to large murals. I actually had my first experience of wall stickers when we decorated the playroom – in less then fifteen minutes I’d taken our plain off-white wall to something a little more fun just by randomly applying triangle stickers. They stick on in seconds and can be removed using a hairdryer should you wish to change them later!

Finally, why not consider putting in a feature wall in a brick effect? I’m a particular fan of the white painted brick effect wall which instantly gives a room an ‘urban loft’ style to it – they’re easy to apply and incredibly realistic!

Freshen up your soft furnishings

Replacing the rugs, cushions and throws in a room can also make a huge difference (and gives you permission to scour the internet for soft furnishings until your heart is content!). My tip would be to keep wall colours fairly neutral which allows you to entirely change a colour scheme in a room with a few new cushion covers and throws.

It is also (apparently) quite easy to do things like re-cover your dining room chairs. All you need is fabric, a tape measure, and an upholstery stapler. Once you get the hang of things, each chair will take about half an hour to re-cover which means you can work on ‘one a day’ and hopefully get through them in a week. Put everything you are using in a large bag ready to grab as soon as you’ve got the time. Keeping everything together like this will save you wasting time searching around for the items you need – trust me, I’ve learnt that from experience! Most of my time is spent finding things!!

And there we have it! If you each put aside a couple of hours every week for DIY projects, it is surprisingly easy to keep your home decor up to date. Just don’t be like me and leave things so long that they build up into a huge and overwhelming jobs list…