Make Your Living Room More Sociable
Living rooms are sometimes overlooked, but nothing beats being able to sit comfortably with friends and family, to talk, enjoy a drink or watch a movie.
Comfort is key to creating a relaxed, sociable living space, so concentrate on getting the style and position of the seating right, then build up from there, adding fun touches, handy side tables and just the right lighting.
Different Types of Seating
If sociable means entertaining friends and family of all ages, work in more than one seating type. While squishy sofas may suit those who want to kick off their shoes and snuggle down, older visitors may prefer the support of an upright chair. Children may prefer floor cushions.
Light a Fire
Humans have gathered around fires for millennia, to eat, talk, warm up and feel safe. Lighting one in your living room produces the same sense of sociability and comfort.
Face Each Other
Sofas that face each other, rather than the TV, promote conversation. Make sure they’re positioned close enough together that you and your guest aren’t shouting at each other across the divide. Just because you’re squeezing in two sofas doesn’t mean you need to scrimp on size.
Provide Several Surfaces
Tables on which you can pop a mug, glass or bowl of snacks are essential to a sociable living space. Choose small tables rather than a larger central surface, helps to maintain a light, airy feel to a room and are easy to move around.
Consider a Corner Sofa
Nothing says sociable like a corner couch. This flexible, space-efficient form of seating works particularly well for big families with modest living rooms. It provides a large expanse of comfy seating, which encourages teens to lounge and toddlers to get cozy.
To make this type of seating even more functional, consider a coffee table that doubles as a footstool. The extra surface will provide even more opportunities for everyone to stretch out.
Get the Lighting Right
A sociable living room needs lighting that creates a warm atmosphere, but without being too dim. You want to be able to see your guests. Weave in a flexible mix of lamps and ceiling lights to create a soft, layered look.
If you like a calm, uncluttered aesthetic, go for wall lights, as they give a more diffused light than a central pendant without the need to add lamps to other surfaces in the room.
Install Sliding Doors
If you’re considering completely remodeling your home, how about this for an idea. Sliding doors between the kitchen and living space. When closed, the living room feels cozy and intimate. When the doors are open, the living room flows into the kitchen, making it part of a larger, flexible and super-sociable space.
Styling Tips To Help Sell Your Home
If you want to make a swift sale of your home — and at the right price — it pays to show it off to its maximum potential. The goal is not only to prompt an offer, but also to ensure that house hunters don’t have any reason to haggle on the list price. Here are some tips for styling a property to make a great first impression.
Take a Step Back
A good place to start when beginning the process of selling your home is to imagine how potential buyers will see it.
When you’re selling, you need to step back, take a deep breath and start looking at it with fresh eyes — potential-buyers’ eyes.
Grab a pen and notepad and walk around each space, making a note of all the potential snagging points and areas that could be improved.
To help you see your home in a new light, take photos. Grab a camera and take a wide-angled landscape shot from each corner of every room. Look at the photos carefully and see what stands out. Do you need to replace pillows, buy new bed linens, add a few plants or declutter surfaces? Looking at your property through a picture will help you refine your spaces.
Repair and Retouch
Before you put your home on the market, it’s a good idea to do any maintenance or repairs that could put buyers off or prompt them to offer a lower price.
Remember, most new homeowners will want to move in right away, so the idea of having to replace, repair or redecorate can be off-putting.
Potential buyers can also accidentally make massively inflated valuations based on what they believe certain repair and replenishment works will cost. By getting these jobs done in advance, you’ll make the property more saleable and give buyers less wiggle room when it comes to making an offer.
Badly done work can also have a negative impact. Use reliable tradespeople and professionals as much as possible.
Neutralize the Decor
To encourage buyers to imagine the potential of your home, avoid decor that can be distracting. Try to keep the wall colors neutral.
Instead of buying new furniture, make it work with the rest of the room. Bring in some modern pieces to help pull the scheme together in an eclectic style. It will have a great effect without a major price tag.
Declutter
Allow potential buyers to see the space available in your property by keeping the rooms as decluttered as possible. Potential buyers will find it hard to look beyond the clutter. They’ll want to see the space available and how their furniture will work in your house. A messy and chaotic home detracts from the property itself and causes some buyers to walk away, as they can’t see what’s behind the clutter.
A good way to declutter is to classify items as either ‘practical,’ ‘beautiful’ or ‘sentimental’ and assign to each a value from 1 to 10 to decide whether to keep it. Anything under 5 can be donated or recycled.
Don’t hang on to things you don’t need. Starting this process early will also give you an advantage when you move into your new home. Organization is also key for buyers.
Make It Look Lived-In
While a light, neutral scheme allows viewers to see the bones of your home, an empty property won’t have quite the same effect.
If you’re planning to sell a vacant property, staging makes a huge difference. It allows buyers to visualize the space and, if done well, can transform an empty shell into a home.
Eliminate Odors
It’s not just the appearance of your home that will influence viewers — the scent is also important. An unpleasant smell will immediately put off potential buyers. So address any smells, such as dog, dampness or cigarette smoke.
Remove any evidence of pets, such as a smelly bed, and clean the carpet and upholstery to refresh the space.
If necessary, call in an expert to find out where water is seeping into the house and fix the problem of mildew and mold. It could be broken gutters or poor drainage outside the house. These should not be excessively costly to fix, but will certainly be harder to deal with as the problem gets worse.
Brighten It Up
Both natural and artificial light can be used to show your property at its best. Your house needs to be bright and well lit for viewings to demonstrate the true size of the space. Therefore, consider how your lighting looks in each room.
Pull back curtains and open blinds to make the most of the natural light, but also think about creating an ambiance by positioning additional lamps on side tables around the room.
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How To Store Kitchen Tools And Flatware
They say the key to organization is a place for everything and everything in its place. This is true for even your kitchen utensils. These include your everyday flatware as well as the many small but mighty cooking tools a serious cook requires. Here are some options for storing your utensils, in any space and on any budget.
Step One: Eliminating
Before you can organize any part of your home properly, you need to do some culling, and this is especially true in the kitchen. Drawers can quickly become filled with unused tools and gadgets, so take a hard look at the items you own and find as many as possible to give away or box up.
You may never get your collection of utensils down to the perfectly minimal arrangements, but the more items you can eliminate, the easier it will be to store and find the truly useful ones. Never use the little dessert spoons that came with your cutlery set? Only used that special spatula the one time? Stash these items away in less reachable spaces such as upper cabinets to free up more prime cabinet real estate.
If Renovating, Make a Plan for Success
If you’re renovating or building a kitchen, you shouldn’t put off the organizational considerations until all the construction is complete. Thinking in advance about how to hold your collection of tools will produce a much better result. Planning to include a few drawers specifically sized for utensils will save a lot of potentially wasted space.
Typical cutlery trays aren’t very wide. Your basic eating utensils get used every day, but they don’t need that much space. A drawer just 10 to 12 inches wide will provide the right amount of space for those items without the need to have them share space with whisks and ladles.
Give Depth Some Thought
Besides considering the width of the drawers, don’t forget to think about the depth. Drawers are often 6 to 8 inches deep because the cabinet has been split evenly into three to four drawers. However, a 4- to 5-inch-deep drawer is all you need to store well-organized utensils. Using more and shallower drawers keeps items from getting piled on top of each other and lost in the mix.
Ideally, you should look at the collection of utensils you have or plan to have and map out exactly how much space they will need. This takes some extra effort upfront, but you will end up with a much better allocation of space than by simply choosing drawers in an arbitrary width. You can try laying out your utensils on a dining table to get a visual picture and some measurements of how much space they ideally would get.
Mix Drawers and Doors
Often people think of drawer cabinets and basic shelf cabinets as being two separate things, but they definitely can be mixed to meet your needs more efficiently.
Cabinets with a drawer at the top and doors and shelves below allow smaller, often-used items to be placed at a more reachable height, with the shelf storage left for more occasional items and oversized pieces. If you use lots of small chef’s tools when you cook, consider including many utensil drawers at the top level. It will save you a lot of bending down over time.
Consider Going Vertical
Want to tidy up your cutlery drawer without having to assign each piece an individual place? Try a drawer with vertical cutlery bins that let you simply drop in pieces with long handles such as spatulas and slotted spoons and pull them out easily. You’ll be able to see each piece, and you won’t have to remember exactly where you got it later.
This style of cabinet can make a great use of skinny spaces left over in your cabinet plans, such as the small spaces next to a range or sink.
You can store flatware vertically too. Cleverly retrofit a deeper drawer into a cutlery drawer by dividing it into small, deep compartments. Just be sure you don’t store sharp items this way, or you may dull the blades (and risk accidents as well).
Create Layers
Another way to make the best use of deep drawers is to break them up internally into layers. You can either use a built-in drawer divider system or find a layered drop-in unit.
A tiered organizer can create compartments smaller than an individual drawer to gain maximum space efficiency. Just keep in mind that the upper layer will partially cover the lower layer or will need to be slid individually, so you should put the most-used items on the most reachable tier.
Retrofitting: What Are the Options?
Built-in, custom-fitted trays may not always be an option, especially when working with existing cabinetry. However, there are many alternatives available.
Single Trays
A classic single cutlery tray is sometimes all you need, but keep in mind that these trays are not truly one-size-fits-all. Finding one that comes close to filling your drawer width will provide more structure versus a small tray that shifts around with use. Measure the interior of your drawer and look for a tray that fills it. Online shops will usually have more size options than a small local kitchen supply store.
Configurable Trays
A step above the prefabricated single trays is a divider system made up of single compartments that can be mixed and matched like Tetris pieces to create spaces for all your items. If you can’t perfectly fill the full width, use the open space for a sturdy item such as a rolling pin or box of foil that will keep the other pieces from shifting.
Resizable Dividers
Another step closer to a custom built-in is a resizable divider system that lets you snap together pieces to create any size compartments you like. An advantage of this sort of system is that you can change the configuration later to fit a different mix of items, or even fit a new drawer if you move or renovate.
Open Storage Vessels
For those who don’t mind having some of their utensils on display, simple open vessels or jars make a great place to hold your often-used items.
This can look especially great in a kitchen that makes use of open shelving already, with the utensil jars becoming part of the overall chef’s kitchen appeal.
Hanging Rails
Another form of open storage is a rail that can be used to either hang utensils and tools directly via a curved handle or a hook or hang containers and holders to keep your utensils within easy reach but off the counter.
A wall-mounted system can be great for stealing a little storage space behind the range or elsewhere on the backsplash, which can be a lifesaver in a compact kitchen where every inch of storage space counts.
Pegboards
Like a rail, a pegboard can give you lots of flexible storage space on the wall. Whether this look is charmingly relaxed or too busy is a matter of personal taste, but if you like this aesthetic, it offers lots of practical options for arranging and rearranging your tools.