Dull. Bland. Flavorless. Uninspired. If you use any of these words to describe your home, then it might be time to revamp your home décor. You don’t need to spend a lot of money doing it, most households only need one or two additional elements to feel more comfortable, compelling, and visually-inspired. Here are a few ways you can spice up your home on a budget.
Use Lights to Create Atmosphere
Lighting can dramatically affect the atmosphere of your home. During the daytime, your home is probably flooded with natural light so it’ll feel pleasantly ambient. But in the evening, your home is dependent upon all the interior light fixtures. In addition to ceiling lights and lamps, there are some more dazzling ways you can illuminate your home after dark.
Don’t you love how Christmas lights make your home sparkle in the wintertime? You can give your home an equally-cozy lighting aesthetic throughout the whole year – just use string lights or strip lights instead of Christmas lights. You can hang up string lights the same way you hang up your Christmas lights. Strip lights are also easy to apply. They typically come with adhesive material on the back that you can stick them onto the wall.
There are lots of different ways you can use strip lights to make your home pop. The best way to use them is to place them under, behind, or around an object to give it an illuminated halo. For instance, you could place strip lights behind your TV to make it stand out, or you could place them underneath your bar counter to give it a colorful accent. You can also use strip lights to highlight the perimeter of your walls. Have a tapestry hanging in your home? Place strip lights behind it to make it glow.
There are other types of lights you can add, as well. Candles, Himalayan salt lamps, and decorative lamps can add visual flourish to your home in small or large quantities. None of these light sources are very expensive, and they’ll provide you with an added benefit: when you’re getting ready for bed, you can turn off the rest of your ceiling lights and use your atmospheric lights to lull you into sleepiness.
Cast Your Own Home Décor
There are so many different kinds of decorative items you can use to add character to your home, but sometimes you may have difficulty finding pieces that are wholly original. Or, you might just not have the money to buy the most jaw-dropping decorative pieces, which can cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Here’s an idea for the real do-it-yourselfers: create your own home décor using casting resin.
Find a lovely object that you want to make a cast of and create a mold of it using pourable rubber.
Then you just pour casting resin into the mold and let it dry—it’s an arts and crafts project for adults. But here’s the icing on the cake: you can add a bronze, silver, or gold powder to the casting resin and use it to make a decorative item that’s literally made of authentic bronze, silver, or gold.
Basically, you can turn a standard piece of home décor into something that looks far more glamorous.
Here are things you can make with casting resin:
- Pottery
- Wall hangings
- Bookends
- Countertop decorations
You can even use casting resin to create far more elaborate pieces, like river tables, for just a fraction of what it would cost to buy in a store. Have a beat-up piece of vintage furniture? Use casting resin to fill in the holes with color and style. You can do some spectacular things with your home if you’re feeling up to getting your hands a little messy.
Create Organic Vibes
Does your home feel a little too closed-up? Then you might benefit by adding a few indoor house plants here and there to give your home a more organic feel. Ultimately, our home is supposed to shield us from the environment and keep us comfortable no matter what our local weather conditions and nature elements. But sometimes they shield us too much and we feel totally isolated from the enjoyable things about nature, like natural colors and fragrances. You can make your living space so much cozier by bringing just a little bit of the environment into your home.
House plants will make your home more breathable, but even artificial house plants are nice to have because they add a great aesthetic to your living space. You can also use incense or an essential oil diffuser to imbue your home with delightful, natural scents.
Not so difficult or expensive, is it? Try one of these techniques and see how dramatically it makes a difference in your home.
