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How have you improved your living spaces?
We each shape our living spaces in our own ways, and I feel like sharing your own approach can often help inspire others.
This could be anything, small or large; from the kinds of furniture you prefer and how you arrange it, to the standard home improvement work, to how you decorate your spaces, and even how you choose to use them.
Desk setups/home offices/battlestations all count, and pictures are welcome!
Speaking about back when my life wasn’t a mess and more stable.
I was renting so couldn’t make major changes, but some things that helped:
Mounting the TV to the wall: less clutter, less dust, better ergonomics
Making a custom shelf that matches exactly the dimensions of the space it fit in. This was so satisfying. I paid the store to cut it to size as I don’t have a workshop, then did the oiling and fitting myself
Adding home automation for electronics to work together well (for instance turning on the PlayStation would adjust the lights in the room, set the proper input on the TV, pause music in the room, switch the receiver on)
3D printing! I designed and printed so many little things that made furniture and appliances nicer to use. In no particular order: custom holder for the ikea smart light switches (with built in magnets) that would fit over the existing light switches (we’d flip the light off by mistake sometimes and the smart switches don’t do anything anymore because the smart bulb is powered off), a golden 👍 thingy that would clip over the bench furniture thing to hold the shoehorn (diameter of the clip customized to fit that exact furniture’s tubing), herringbone mechanical hooks for towels, and other thugs I don’t remember but with the same custom made idea
An ebook holder for when I’m reading in bed. Kinda like these tablets and cellphone articulated arms but for my ebook reader. Paired with a wireless clicker, I could read in bed lying down without holder my arms up getting cold and ants
A smart master switch that would set the house to sleeping mode (switch any lights I forgot about off, turn music off, etc)
Sewed little drink cozies to keep the cups warm in the winter, a cover for the kitchen aid so it wouldn’t get dusty when not in use with this super cute fabric…
A big cork board so I could pin things to it. Premade ones were too rich for my taste so I just bought cork board, glued some foam core sheets to the back to make it more rigid and avoid the pins going through and I had the biggest, cheapest pin board I could wish for
Went paperless. I had a lot of paper (especially since I lived in different countries) that was a total pain to organize and drag around as I moved. So I bought a used, standalone document scanner, set paperless-ngx up on my home server, and scanned everything. I then shredded 99% of the documents. The scanner uploads via FTP directly to paperless where I can search (and find!!) almost anything I’m looking for. It’s backed up offsite so if there is ever a fire I should still recover everything.
There is so much more I wanted to do… maybe one day if I ever end up owning my place (haha, right)
Not sure if this makes me sound weird, but here goes...
In my kitchen all my pieces of tableware are identical and come from a restaurant supply company. My mugs are all the exact same thick white ceramic diner mug. My glasses are all standard bar pint glasses. My silverware all matches.
I hate the cognitive overhead of having to worry about whether my "favorite bowl" is clean or not. If something breaks, I have identical backups from the restaurant supply company. I find it liberating.
plants and colors. Everything is beige and clean these days. Live a little <3
Yes to the colors!! I hate the trend of beige and clean, it makes the world feel so sterile. I love seeing houses with actual colors, it can make a HUGE difference and feel so much more lived in. Heck, recently saw an old photo of our old kitchen back when the walls were orange, and I was struck by how warm that photo looked.
I can still accept beige/cream walls over white at least, just because easier to hang up art without it clashing. On that note, I'm in an eternal battle with my mom to add more artwork and decorations with bright colors to the common areas of our house.
Furniture arrangement can make a HUGE difference. At our old house we had our living room set up a certain way for years—TV on the long wall, couch in the middle of the room facing it in front of the door to our porch. We rearranged it at the advice of a decorator so the couch was against the wall, and the TV got put on this built-in cabinet. The room felt so much bigger that way (and no longer had the sun shining directly at the TV screen part of the day!).
You can also use furniture to make separate "spaces" and natural divides. Putting couches or chairs in the middle of a room rather than against a wall, the backs can serve as a sort of "wall" separating one part of the room from the rest. I admittedly use that trick in video games with house design a lot more than real life, but it did lead to me arguing against moving a chair last year. It would've sectioned off half the living room, and the remaining space is too high-traffic to add any furniture, but also pretty big.
And on that note: rugs. Rugs are good. They can also be expensive, but a rug can fill an empty space very well.
Other than that, we just pick up things as they catch our eye. We go to art and craft fairs when we can, and just grab whatever catches our eye and is a good price. Garage sales are also a good place to find some good deals. Our old neighborhood has an annual weekend for garage sales (this year they even had a digital map!), and some houses even had pieces of furniture for sale.
Other than all that, my personal take: don't worry about everything matching perfectly, or trying to fit a specific aesthetic. I personally prefer seeing houses full of eclectic things and "clutter" rather than carefully organized and designed. It just feels a lot more cozy and lived in to me. Just make sure you can identify the primary walking areas and keep them clear.
(And please, PLEASE have color. I swear that society would be a lot happier if we just had some dang color, it adds so much whimsy and brightness, and I feel like the current trend of beige and minimalist design is just adding to a population-wide ennui. I hate the trend of stark white walls with a passion.)
My reason for asking this is that I've somewhat recently moved into a small apartment, and it feels both cluttered and empty at the same time. Some of this is because I have relatively minimal furniture and likely insufficient lighting; it's an old building with no ceiling lights, and my two standing lamps aren't quite up for the job. While I was in college I was resistant to buying large furniture like couches, since they're a pain to move, but I'm realizing I'll likely be in this new place for a while.
So as a secondary question, do you have any advice or recommendations for people starting out on their own, to help make their spaces more livable?
My current apartment has a living room with no overhead lighting, so we got two floor lamps for uplighting (lightbulb screws in “down” basically at the bottom of a bowl on the top of the lamp) and put 1600 lumen bulbs in them.
We like warm light (it feels much more welcoming IMO), but it can sometimes feel dimmer, so we went for the higher lumen bulbs, and they definitely help and are an improvement over the 800 lumen bulbs we originally had in them.
Of course, only one outlet in the room is controllable via a light switch, so we got a smart bulb for the other lamp so we could still easily turn them on/off.
We also got an uplight we put behind the TV on our TV stand that splashes light up the wall behind it.
Read up on interior design. There's a handful of rules that will make your space drastically nicer. Here's a link with examples:
https://blog.designfiles.co/interior-design-rules/
Simone says home automation, and I’ll go a step further with smart lights… the colored ones that turn on when you get home, can be changed to purple, green, whatever, it just changed my whole attitude at home. So much more comfy with soft orange light, instead of white LED blasting my eyeballs. That and I have the Apple ecosystem, and have the HomePod play the ambient station when I get home too. It’s like walking into a new world every time.
Paintings, posters, tapestries. Lots of lighting options. In general stuff that gives me joy and comfort!
I make paintings and hang them up in my room. Sometimes I will stare at the them for a while and gain a new perspective. The best ones actually amaze me that I was the one to make them.
One issue I've noticed is that it's very easy to fall into a fixed design where you decorate once and stop. Move your art around.
Bidet.
Install a silent bathroom fan.
Puffing lock graphite on all the door hinges. No more squeaks.
Vacuum robot for each floor.
Lawn robot.
Giant music speakers.
Art on all the walls.
Black light bedroom with black walls (my kids idea)
whole home water filtration.