by R. Renee Bembry

Created on: July 01, 2009

Accomplishing the first step in making your house seem bigger and more spacious can occur within minutes. Simply begin by reducing the amount of unnecessary items you have laying about your home. Unnecessary belongings can cause households to appear cluttered and drown out the personality of the home.

Unnecessary clutter producing items that make homes look smaller often consist of mail pilings on desks, telephone tables, dinner tables, coffee tables and other "open" areas daily mail is collected. These types of unnecessary items may also consist of newspapers, books, and magazines that pile up in the same sort of way as collections of mail.

Simply throwing out unneeded mail, giving away or storing read magazines, and putting books on bookshelves will make your house seem bigger - and as stated above can be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

Your house, however, can seem a lot bigger still! So let us move on to reducing the number of "useful" items that can make a home feel cluttered and seem smaller.

Making a house seem bigger and more spacious sometimes means reducing amounts of useful belongings you keep out in the open. These items are things we do not often categorize as clutter. Examples of this include six or eight pillows on sofas that could do with three or four; more chairs in kitchens or other eating areas than can fit at tables, and condiments like mustard, ketchup, sugar, salt and pepper setting on tables and breakfast bars even when days or weeks pass with no one using them.

Reduce the number of pillows on your sitting furniture. Pick out your favorites and put the rest away. Put extra chairs in the garage or other storage areas and take them out only when you actually need them. Reduce the amount of condiments you keep in your eating areas. People do not use most condiments on daily bases.

Now... Speaking of furniture - sometimes too many chairs is not the only problem involving overabundance of furniture in a home. Pushing pieces of furniture close together in order to squeeze other pieces in could suggest there are too many pieces of furniture in a room. Removing one or two pieces of furniture from rooms with too much furniture can make rooms look bigger and feel more spacious.

Let us move on to the walls. Walls that have busy patterns often reduce the size a room looks and feels. Rooms that are small from the get go often do better with plain light colored walls. Making a house bigger may require removing busy wallpaper or covering dark colored wallpaper or paint.

Curtains also play rolls as far as how big a house seems. Some curtains keep out a lot of light and other curtains allow light to flow through windows. Making a house seem bigger and more spacious calls for providing the house plenty of light. Replace curtains that keep out the light with light friendly curtains or add glass curtains between windows and darkening curtains so you can pull the dark curtains back in the daytime to let the light through.

These tips on how to make a house seem bigger and more spacious should give interior home decorators starting points in maintaining beauty in homes. Once the gist of the technique is understood, the rest will be a piece of cake.

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