Making a house seem larger than it actually is.
With home values falling and job losses mounting, Americans are putting
their spending habits under the microscope. For would-be home buyers, that
might mean purchasing a smaller house that fits more comfortably into your
budget. For homeowners, it could mean putting off plans for that family-room
addition. But even if your home has limited space, it doesn't have to feel
cramped.
Five simple ways that homeowners can make their houses feel bigger without
expanding the size of the structure:
1. See it, use it: Often, rooms in homes are located
behind staircases or are otherwise hidden from main thoroughfares. If you
can't see a room, you tend not to use it. Leaving one or more rooms unused can
make the house feel cramped, since activity is concentrated in a smaller area.
If you can open up the view from the kitchen or the family area to that
underutilized space, you will start to use it merely because you can see it. To open sight build a "framed opening,"
which is usually a foot or two wider than a doorway, into the wall that's
obstructing the view. If you can't open the wall completely, you can make an
interior window instead. That little strategy by itself will make your house
both feel and live bigger.
2. Diagonal view: Another secret to making a house feel
larger is opening up a diagonal view, or a line of vision that extends from
one corner of the house to another. To do this, homeowners may need to remove
some segments of the wall that's blocking the line of vision. Once again, you
might consider installing a framed opening or an interior window. It can be a
fairly narrow split that allows you to see from one corner to the other. A lot
of people over the years tell us that that little trick has served them
extremely well. Their house instantly feels larger because they are able to
look along the longest vista that's available.
3. Double duty: The floor plans of many of today's homes
have failed to keep pace with changes in lifestyle. For example, many homes
still have formal dining and living rooms. Approximately 85 percent the
homeowners literally never used their formal living room and only occasionally
used their formal dining rooms. When remodeling or building a home, combine
one living area and a dining area so that the new space can serve both formal
and informal functions (double duty). Consolidating will free up space that
can be used for something else, such as a home office or a media room. If you
are really attached to your formal dining room, consider lining it with
bookshelves so it can also serve as a library. Plenty of people have too many
books and no place to put them. Books are a type of interior décor that can't
be beat. If you convert a rarely used room into one that's more suited to
everyday use, the entire house will feel more spacious, she says.
4. Get comfortable: Along the same lines, homes are
decorated with visually appealing but uncomfortable furniture, especially in
formal dining or living rooms. Nobody is going to sit on that furniture.
That's one reason rooms with such furnishings often remain empty, which in
turn drives a greater share of household activity into a smaller area of the
house. Simply find furniture that's both comfortable and functional, if you
don't like sitting in it, nobody else is going to like it either.
5. Vary ceiling heights: Many houses built in the past few
decades include a great room which is an open space that contains an informal
living room, an informal dining room, and a kitchen. Although such spaces
often are expansive, they don't have anything that distinguishes one activity
area from another, so the whole space ends up feeling awkward and ill-fitting.
If there is no contrast between spaces, we end up seeing it all as one large,
amorphous nothing. In order to establish some contrast, adjust and vary the
height of the ceilings. Maybe a lower ceiling over the kitchen, a
medium-height ceiling over the dining area, and the tall ceiling over the
living space will give the contrast you need to make the area really begin to
work together. It often comes as a surprise that by lowering some ceilings to
create a hierarchy of activity places, the whole space actually ends up living
larger. Raising a ceiling can be an expensive proposition because it requires
changes to the support structure of the house, but when you lower a ceiling,
you are not affecting the structure so it is usually quite easy to do.
