Do you have a small home and feel very confined in some of the rooms? Even when you’re working with limited space, your home doesn’t have to feel constricting. Here are a few ways to take small spaces and make them feel much larger.
Add Mirrors
This is a trick you’ve probably seen done inside small shops where there is very limited space to work with. An entire wall may be covered with mirrors, and what this does is reflect your space in the mirrors to make it seem more open. A single mirror may not add a lot of visual space to a room, but covering most or all of a wall with mirrors can really open up the room. This may not be a good fit for every room in your house, but consider adding extra mirrors in your bedroom, living room, and the bathroom to make these spaces roomier.
Brighten the Room
A trick of visual design that you need to know is that darkness makes rooms look small while brightness opens them up. The more light you can bring into a room, the more shadows you’ll get rid of, creating a lighter, more open feeling space. Natural lighting has a great way of increasing the perceived space in a room, but even adding some extra lighting fixtures can be a great way to open up confined areas.
Brightening up a room isn’t all about the lighting. You can also use light colored furniture and decor and paint the walls in a lighter color. The lighter the color of the walls, the more they will reflect light. That reflected light creates a more open and brighter space, chasing away feelings of confinement and restriction. While lighter paint on the walls isn’t the only type of paint to open up a space, it’s one of the simplest and most effective ways to achieve that effect.
Tidy It Up
Cluttered spaces can feel tight and constricting, but removing the clutter and making the room look tidy can be a great way to increase the visual space. Clutter simply takes up room, so removing unnecessary items from a room can give you more space to work with. If you’re having trouble keeping your home tidy, you can always try hiring professional maids.
Regularly cleaning and frequently decluttering each room of the house can make them appear more open. If you’re feeling claustrophobic in any room in your house, see if there are some items you can move to another room, put in storage, get rid of, or rearrange in a way so that the space doesn’t look cluttered. This reduces stress, makes it easier to navigate the room, reduces trips and falls, and gives you more visual space in the room. It’s also one of the most inexpensive and simplest ways to make a room seem more spacious.
As you’re trying to make a room look cleaner and less cluttered, consider moving some of the furniture around. Creating a good flow in the room makes it easier to access and pass through, and it can also decrease the feelings of constriction in the room. Moving furniture to the back walls gives you a lot of space in the middle of the room, making it feel more open and spacious. If you have arranged your furniture so that you are not always bumping into things in the room, that can help it to feel more open as well.
Use Different Textures
Variety in texture creates visual interest in the room. It gives your eyes something to be drawn to, making the room look more visually appealing. Very drab and plain rooms can seem small because your eyes get bored of looking at them very quickly. When there’s lots of visual appeal, it makes the room seem bigger since your eyes are moving all around. Your eyes are naturally drawn to variety and texture, and using different textures like wood, fabric, and plastic in a room can create interesting things for your eyes to look at and open up the room a bit.
Hang What You Can
Making small rooms look bigger isn’t just about playing tricks on your eyes. You also need to create more space, if possible. Instead of putting the TV on a stand that takes up a lot of space, why not hang it on the wall? Instead of a bookcase that rests on the floor, why not set up shelves that run along the walls? These kinds of changes will give you a lot more floor space, especially if you’re putting these items above your head height. Look for ways to take things off the floor and hang them up high so that you create a lot more room in your room.
Hide Things Away
You can also use hidden storage to move things out of sight so that you have more space in the room. Use the storage space under your coffee table or bed and create pull-out drawers underneath furniture for easy access. Cupboards do a great job of storing things away so that they’re out of sight and aren’t taking up as much space. Shelving, racks, and hooks can move things off the floor and out of the way so that they take up less space as well. If you’re working with confined space throughout your house, try putting hooks on the backs of all your doors to create some additional space.
Create Negative Space
When arranging a room and trying to make it feel more spacious, don’t just think about the items that are in it. Also consider the negative space or the area that has nothing in it. Creating plenty of negative space does a great job of opening up the room and making it more visually appealing and welcoming. The way you arrange furniture and determine what goes in a room and what stays out will help create the negative space that can make rooms feel very open.
