Tips for Taking on Your First Home

 Tips for Taking on Your First Home

After you've freed yourself of your college stuff  and your roommate's attempt at economy, it's time to plan for turning your empty and boring shell of a house into an inviting home. Moving into your first house is a kind of liberating in a way. Landmark life passage as it were. Here are some suggestions for achieving it:

Clean your house at the old place. Even before you decide to take on a new place, get ahead of the game by starting this. This censorious first step will not only make your current room  easier to pack up, but it will put you miles and miles ahead during move-in. Be strong and don’t dwell on every of your old stuff: wobbly furniture in the attic, faulty appliances in the garage, questionable accessories you received as social gifts. This is the right time to start over. Trim down your acquired possessions to the minimal amount. Have a garage sale, auction it off on eBay or donate it to charity-this way you’ll feel the light of everything.

Start with the bedroom. If you're on a tight budget, opt for new bedding first, but don't cut back on thread count!  It's where you'll be spending almost all of your time when you're at home, after all. Buy as well everything you can afford to spend in this area — it makes a really big difference. If you have an extra money tucked in somewhere, paint the bedroom walls to complement your new bedding. If you have more cash pocketed in somewhere, add coordinating window treatments. Early risers should opt for a lighter palette of colors and more translucent treatments. Night owls who like to sleep in will probably likely be more satisfied with deeper tones and more substantial coverings that block out the light. If you're really ready to spend your money extravagantly, buy that bed you've always dreamed and drooled about. And choose carefully. It should mirror your personality, fit your room comfortably and stay with you for so many years.

Fight the urge to match. Retail stores loves to keep the delusion that everything has to match alive. They would insist you on buying everything in sets, but don't do it! A few pieces with the same styling are fine, but any more than that and your home has the most lifeless, generic look of a furniture showroom. Top priority should be proportion, scale and balance of your furniture and accessories within each room.. It will look like a clown car. Conversely, putting only a low buffet and a delicate, round dining table. Make sure your own personal style shows through, which most likely isn't bland, beige and boring.

Tie everything together with color. The easiest, most economical way to fix the furniture that spans the 1960s to now  you brought with you is to integrate it through it’s color. Let's say you have a sofa that has only one thing in common with the furniture in the rest of your living room: a tiny bit of the color in the fabric is the same as the less dominant color in the rest of the room's upholstery. The solution is, play up that similarity and make it your living room's unifying wall color. If that's too much hard work for you, find curtains, rugs or accessories in this common hue and see how the pieces complement each other.

Don't buy everything all at once. Making sure is not a bad thing, but you have to think wisely on where each one of the things should be placed and not how many things should be placed. Live in your new house for at least two months before you make any important purchases. How you think you're going to use the house and how you actually live in the house are commonly two different things. Maybe that $3,000 you were going to spend on renovating the bathroom isn't quite as important as beefing up the living room for maximum entertaining purposes. And you may as well figure out that the living room loveseat would work much better in your master bedroom and the master bedroom's reclining chair will work better in the den. 

Solve practical problems inexpensively .Don't bother installing overly decorative (and very expensive) cabinet hardware on cheaply manufactured woodwork — it will only look out of place and the money can be put to better use elsewhere. If your kitchen cabinets are monotonous, for instance, revitalize them with paint and change out the hardware that was being used. In the bathroom, something as simple as replacing the lighting can immediately improve the room's appearance. If you find the typical incandescent R-type lamps in your new place, replace them with the less "yellow" PAR-type bulbs. Another inexpensive solution with a big payoff is installing dimmer switches to keep light levels low for a midnight bathroom break or to create a romantic mood with wine for bubble baths for two.