A person’s home is their castle, or so the saying goes. But there’s a reason most people don’t have moats and portcullises to stop people from coming in. Simply put, we want our homes to feel welcoming.
Whether you want to improve your curb appeal to make it more welcoming to potential buyers, or you just want to feel at ease when you get home, here are a few design features that should make your home feel, for lack of a better term, more homely.
Keeping The Entrance Tidy
Picture this: You walk through the front door, kick your shoes off, throw your coat or jacket down, and then get comfortable. Meanwhile, your kids, your spouse, and whoever else followed you inside all do exactly the same thing. What’s the result?
Well, you’ve all just created a minefield of trip hazards right at the entry of your home.
Keeping the entrance tidy takes another few seconds of effort, but it seems much easier to do it as you come in than to spend your life cleaning up a huge mess to tidy things up. The trick is to make it easy and convenient for you and everyone else to clean up after yourselves.
A shoe rack and nearby coat hooks, for example, give you a handy place to put your things. Some people even have a mudroom, designed for muddy boots and scruffy clothes, so if you often go on dog walks or other adventures, you don’t have to worry about messing up your nice, clean entryway or the rest of your home.
Letting Light In
Another way to make your home feel more welcoming is with light. This is easily achieved during the day and especially in the summer, because you’ve got loads of light really helpfully provided by a massive ball of gas in the sky. Unfortunately, you can’t rely on this all of the time.
If you come home in the dark, it can feel a bit unnerving to walk up to your home with no lighting. Worse, you might find yourself getting lost or having to use your phone torch to even find your front door.
Outdoor lights that are motion activated are amazing for this, because they make you feel safer and can even deter other, less welcomed people who might be skulking around in the dark. You can also set up smartlights so you can turn your hallway lights on before you get home, so you don’t have to fumble about in the darkness at home.
Flooring Options
A welcome mat is the most basic flooring option, which makes people feel welcomed and very unsubtly hints for them to wipe their shoes. But you should also consider rugs or easy-to-clean carpets for the entryway of your home, as this adds a nice decorative feature and makes the floor more comfortable.
Other options include tiles, which have the benefit of being very easy to clean if someone does bring muddy boots inside, or laminate floors, which are cheap and cheerful.
A penny for your thoughts?