If you’re tired of living in the same old house and looking at the same dull walls, then maybe it’s time that you give your old home a modern makeover. You don’t have to do major work or spend thousands of dollars to freshen up your place. There are plenty of simple things you can do to update and modernize your aged house.
Freshen Up Your Walls
Time, heat, humidity, and human error can damage and dull your walls. You’d be surprised at how much difference a fresh coat of paint can make on your interior. It can instantly brighten the space and restore a bit of its old beauty.
When choosing the color for your walls, neutrals tones or pale colors are the usual choices for a modern vibe as they embody simplicity, calmness, and cleanliness. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t add a pop of color.
Modern design often incorporates bright colors to add accent and fun to the otherwise-stark walls. Popular colors for modern interiors include beige, ivory, taupe, black, gray, and shades of white.
Although walls decorations are few and far between in modern design, that doesn’t mean that you can’t be free to express yourself. Lots of modern decor ideas incorporate a wall gallery, using favorite artworks, digital prints of personal photos, and original work to add character to their home.
Create Open Spaces
Contrary to old styles, modern design favors seamless spaces, so there are little to no boundary to separate common areas, like the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Typically, only furniture or visual distractions are used to distinguish the spaces.
This means that you may have to remove dividers or obstructions that separate certain areas in your house. But an open-space concept will allow more freedom of movement and better flow of light, air, and traffic in the house.
Update Your Decor
The decor is one of the biggest factors that make a house look dated. Old designs tend to overload with decoration, but the modern style embodies simplicity. To modernize your home, you need to get rid of a huge chunk of trinkets, figures, and picture frames that are taking up most of the space in your house. If there’s no reason for an item to be there, then it needs to go.
When one says modern, people think of sleek, chic, and metal and glass everything. That’s partially right. Modern design does favor sleek and chic, as well as integrating a lot of metal and glass, but the style is also about using natural materials. In a modern home, nature is represented in everything, from the wooden flooring and furniture to the organic decor and color palette reminiscent of natural tones.
Thematic decorations, like beach-inspired accessories, rustic pieces, and recycled materials, add warmth and character to the otherwise-clear-cut modern interior.
Reupholster Your Furniture
Like your decor, your furniture also affects the overall feel of the interior. Old designs tend to favor bright and elaborately designed furniture, which is almost the opposite of modern furniture. Your old furniture may not fit modern aesthetics, but it doesn’t mean you have to get rid of them. You can have them reupholstered instead.
Modern design primarily uses a neutral color scheme for walls and floor, but there’s an exception for furniture. Furniture is an opportunity to add a pop of color in the otherwise-neutral interior. If you look at modern homes, you’ll see bright-red settees, royal-blue coaches, or sunshine-yellow sofas against a neutral backdrop, sometimes coupled with patterned throw pillows and wool throws and rugs to soften the sharpness of the design.
Check out this helpful guide to modernizing your dated furniture so you don’t have to get new ones.
Upgrade Your Fixtures
Replacing your fixtures is an inexpensive upgrade you can do to modernize your old house. Old lighting and water fixtures tend to run inefficiently, wasting a lot of energy and water. For example, an old incandescent light bulb uses 60 watts to produce 800 lumens, which is the average amount for a bedroom main ceiling light, but 90 percent of the energy it uses is emitted as heat.
On the other hand, light emitting diode, or LED, lamps emit very little heat, so they use about 75 percent less energy. In addition, LED lamps can last up to 25,000 hours while most old incandescent lights can run for only 1,000 hours.
Faucets, showerheads, and toilets can also be upgraded to be water-efficient. Install low-flow aerators on faucets, and save as much as 2 gallons per minute. Old showerheads use 2.5 to 4 gallons of water per minute, but water-efficient models only use 2 gallons.
One of the home fixtures that use the most water, old toilets should be modified and switched for new, water-efficient models. There are many modern toilets with advanced technology to choose from, such as the macerating Saniflo toilets, which have a powerful grinding motor that breaks down wastewater for efficient drainage.
Wrapping Up
Modernizing your house is not just about updating the aesthetics of your abode, but it’s also about creating a better home environment for yourself and your family. Your physical surroundings influence you—how you think, feel, and act. If you want to live a stress-free and peaceful life, you should start by creating an environment that is conducive for those things.
