How to Infuse Your Projects with Fresh Home Improvement Ideas
By Andrew Wilson
Sometimes you go into a living room and you cannot help but feeling that the place is more than pretty - there is something that brings it above the level of the ordinary. Usually, places that have that extra bit of charm are guided by an idea that is translated into an ambiance or a theme. If you are planning to do some home improvement of your own, you probably want to acquire that extra charm for your project and often it is easy to emulate whatever you found pleasing in the place you visited. However, if you explore available resources, you will probably be able to come up with fresh home improvement ideas that you can render into something tangible and uniquely yours.
Where to get your Ideas
The first source of your home improvement ideas should be none other than you and the people who live with you. Here is where a general sketch should present itself for you to build your ideas on. For example, if you and your family or housemates are informal people, that is the cue for you to visualize an easy living space free of clutter and restrictive lines. If you are the formal type, then a more structured and conventional approach should be the path to follow. Find out if single whole theme can be built to accommodate everyone. For example, if shabby chic is appealing, viable, and easy to achieve for you and your family then you can come up with unique ways to express this theme throughout your house.
It is good to decide from the onset what you and your family or the people with you cannot live with. If someone is allergic to ruffles, the ruffles are either excluded or confined to some space where they won’t be a nuisance. If some people dislike heavy wood fixtures then find an alternative way to make a room look solid.
Having settled all that, you can begin to look for sources to inspire you into coming up with new ideas. If you already have a general concept of what you want for your home improvement, you can go over journals and books or surf cyberspace. Magazines are a very popular and accessible source of inspiration when you want to put together a future project.
Starting Off from Basic Styles
Sometimes it is wise to pick a general style and proceed from there to create your own original touches. Among the styles that you might want to use as starting point are country, modern, Mediterranean, Mexican, Victorian and Mission. Each style will help provide you with a framework to experiment and to develop creative home improvement ideas.
Beginning with a certain style, you can carry your home improvement from room to room or from project to project with consistency. Bear in mind that keeping to a theme is no reason for your originality and special touches to be inhibited. Neither should it be a constraint when you plan to reroute traffic and reapportion spaces in your home. Themes can be brought to life through color and other details that are peculiar to a certain style. For example, newly installed modern refrigerators and ovens can coexist in a cottage style kitchen. You just have to look for some creative ways to blend them in or make their appearance melt into the background.
Again, after choosing a basic style from which you will begin to spin ideas, you can give some attention to color and either use this to project the theme more strongly or to create an interesting deviation. Picture this: a classic Cape Cod cottage, which has one solid periwinkle blue wall instead of the standard four white walls, or a ranch type house with a carefully selected deep red Oriental carpet instead of the usual braided rug. There are thousands of ways to let your creative ideas flow but for best results, you want to come up with a cohesive whole that genuinely meets your needs.
Home improvement is more fun and rewarding when you are able to add a little pizzazz through the clever use of themes and details like color. Don’t be afraid to play around with fresh ideas. Just make sure you try these out on paper before executing them on a larger scale. After all, you are going to invest time, money, and effort to remodel, renovate, or repair; you might as well get the full benefit and get something you will be happy to look at day after day in the years ahead.
Some Fresh Home Improvement Ideas:
Inexpensive Home Improvement Ideas
Sometimes it is wise to pick a general style and proceed from there to create your own original touches.
