The Creative Home Podcast | Episode #164
This episode is brought to you by 5 Things To Unpack First In Your New Home. If you are moving and you want to get started off on the right foot in your new home, check out my free download, 5 Things to Unpack First In Your New Home. After moving 7 times in 16 years, I learned a thing or two when it comes to unpacking. And I want to share this checklist that explains why you should unpack these 5 things first so that you can settled in quickly!
There are a number of things that make a house feel smaller. The Family Handyman previously published an article where I was featured (and you can find that here where we discuss home staging turnoffs). The writer reached out to me by email directly and had another decorating question to answer. This time I shared five things that make your house feel smaller. If you need more tips, you can read the whole article here for all 10 items that make your house feel smaller.
Listen to the episode:
Five things that make your house feel smaller
Five things that make your house feel smaller
1| Too much furniture makes your house feel smaller
The living room always seems to have too much stuff. I will walk into living rooms with couches, loveseats and chairs and a Peloton or exercise bike. That bike doesn’t go in the living room, especially when you are selling your home, but even so, there has got to be another room. Consider putting that exercise equipment in a loft area. A loft is not very big anyway and if you have a small space that you don’t know what to do with, this may be an option for you. So too much furniture clutters up the room and makes it feel smaller. Consider removing an extra chair or two.
2| Heavy furniture
What I mean by heavy furniture has to do with how much space it visually takes up. If you have an armoire that goes from to the ceiling to the floor and there is no space underneath the armoire, that is heavy furniture. If you can see underneath the furniture legs, that is considered lighter furniture. A heavy trunk that you use as a coffee table is considered “heavy”. You can replace it with a coffee table that you can see through that has a shelf. Lighter colored fabric will help lighten the furniture as well.
3| Dark walls will make your house feel smaller
Dark wall colors tend to make the house feel smaller because they absorb the light and doesn’t make it feel bright. In one of my homes, we had a room that had 17 feet of red brick. I had seven lamps in there but it still felt so dark because the light was absorbed by the dark color. It wasn’t reflected around the room which made it feel smaller.
4| Small tiles in the bathroom
If you have those small floor ceramic tiles in the bathroom like the penny tiles, those will make the house feel smaller. The penny tiles are so small and there are so many of them that it looks cluttered in the bathroom. And clutter always make the room feel smaller too. But if you had big tiles on the floor like a 12 inch by 24 inch tile or even 18 inches by 18 inches, those make the room feel bigger. I had a typical hall bathroom (6 feet by 8 feet) and they had small floor tiles. We replaced those with 18 inch by 18 inch floor tiles and then installed 12 by 24 inch tiles on the shower wall. Laying the 12 by 24 inch horizontally made the room feel wider and it takes less tile than if you used smaller subway tile on the wall.
5| Furniture arrangement will make your house feel smaller
If you have furniture blocking the entrance to a room like in a living room or bedroom, that can make the house feel smaller. If your bed blocks the walkway into the room, you can’t see beyond it because the bed visually cut off the space. My daughter had her bed set up that way so that the bed was the first thing you saw when you walked in. But we ended up moving the bed to the far corner on the opposite wall. This opened up the space when you walked in the room and now it looked bigger. So not only does too much furniture make a room feel smaller, but the way it’s arranged can make a house feel smaller.
So those are the five things that I suggested to the Family Handyman for the article. Check out the rest of the article to see other tips that can help you make your house feel bigger with just a few changes.
