Would you like to fall in love with your home all over again?
Instead of thinking you need a new home or a big remodel, try focusing on a refresh.
Doing a home refresh, or even a room refresh, makes a sad house look and feel happy again.
My Story
This is someone else’s story that had an enormous impact on my life.
I have forgotten the name of the friends, but I have never forgotten the story.
Friends of ours were offered the opportunity to purchase their grandparents’ home.
As part of the deal, they had to help their grandparents prepare to move.
They spent weeks doing intensive decluttering and cleaning.
Decades worth of stuff was hauled away, followed by a whole house deep cleaning.
Since they assumed they would soon be moving in, they painted the walls and did minor repairs and upgrades.
They did such a great job that their grandparents fell in love with the old/new home all over again. They had truly forgotten that underneath the clutter and dirt, a lovely home existed.
The result was that they decided they weren’t quite ready to move after all.
I don’t know the outcome of the relationship, but I do remember the disappointment and frustration.
What stuck with me was the fact that it was possible to make an old home feel new, and fall in love with your home all over again, simply by doing a bit of refreshing.
If you want to continue to live in your existing home but still feel like you moved into a new home, start with a serious room by room refresh.
(I’m currently in the middle of my own room by room refresh. You can read about the wild years that led up to that on my Facebook page.)
Start a room refresh by doing an intense decluttering of the room you want to refresh.
Take your normal decluttering session up a notch, or ten.
Be ruthless. Keep only the things you would keep if you were indeed moving.
This part can quickly become overwhelming so break it into sections.
Anything you keep has to have a home.
Do not allow random stuff to be stuck in random places.
That will defeat the purpose of giving an old space a new feel.
Do a deep clean.
Back in the day, women spring cleaned their homes.
Spring cleaning was an intense cleaning session where literally everything was cleaned. Typically, spring cleaning lasted at least a week, and cleaning was ongoing from morning to night.
Most of us don’t have time, or desire, to spring clean.
But that’s the level of clean you’re aiming for if you want a true home refresh.
Clean everything, from top to bottom, right down to the baseboards of the room.
Make necessary repairs.
Think as though you really were selling your house. What would need repaired?
The longer we live in a home, the more we overlook all the minor repairs that are needed.
After a few years, the home starts having an overall look of disrepair and neglect.
Look at the room through the eyes of a stranger.
What would you see?
A ceiling fan that hasn’t worked in a decade? Light switches with missing switch plates?
To the best of your ability, fix it all.
Replace things as necessary.
Replace worn out or outdated items. After a certain amount of time of living with a worn-out rug, it’s easy to overlook it.
Work on replacing and updating all those things that have been neglected for years.
This is one area that takes time. Unless your budget allows for it, don’t try to do it all at once.
Consider painting your rooms.
Nothing makes a room feel fresh like a new coat of paint.
Believe it or not, painting doesn’t require a professional. I have done all the painting for years, and if I can do it, you can do it!
Undertaking a room refresh is not easy and it’s not fast.
Doing a true room or home refresh is not easy, and it’s a lot of hard work.
Unless you are fortunate enough to have a large block of time to dedicate to this project, work on it a little at a time.
Keep a room-by-room list of everything you want to do in a room.
Cross it off as it’s finished.
Don’t get discouraged.
Would you like to fall in love with your home all over again?
Start with a refresh.
You might just find that under the clutter and dirt, the home you first fell in love with still exists!
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