You love your family, much like everyone else. What you don’t love, of course, is the way in which they destroy your home or put themselves at risk in your home. The worst part is that you’re not just talking about the children. In fact, you too may be making life difficult for yourself around the house when you needn’t be. It’s easy to give up when everybody else is making the place a tip too.
It seems, then, that the task of redesigning your home into a eye-catching, cosy and minimalistic paradise seems insurmountable when you’re dealing with an entire family as residents. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and all that is required is a little extra thought and planning in your design process. There is a way to create a beautiful, family-proof home so that your house’s new look is preserved, and here are some top tips to help you achieve that.
Keeping the home organised
Babies, children, teenagers, their grandparents and even our significant others seem to turn the house into a landfill every day. We’re all guilty of it from time to time, but when you live in a family home, the dream of creating a clean, organised and relaxing space seems like a distant fantasy. The bigger your family becomes, the more creative you need to become with regards to storage. A great idea over at www.quickanddirtytips.com that piqued my interest involved hollow, box-shaped play chairs as storage space for kids. As long as you teach them to put things away after they’ve read them, you’ll definitely be conducting a little ‘damage control’ and keeping the mess contained with a small play area designated for the children. Depending on their age, you’ve likely created one of these already.
You should also be keeping the adults and teenagers of the house organised. Giving everyone a designated wardrobe or some form of closet space is one step of the procedure, but compartmentalising tops, jeans, socks, underwear and other things into different drawers or sections will help keep everything tidy. When people in the house know where things are, they might be less likely to chuck their clean clothes over the back of their chair or on the floor once it’s out of the washing machine. If you’re unfortunate enough to own a teenager, you know that they’re likely to do this. In fact, your partner might be guilty of it too.
Keeping the home quiet
If there’s one thing that drives you nuts, it’s probably the stomping, crashing doors and other noises which seem to resonate around your house when the entire family is home. Think about this when you’re conducting some home improvements. An article over at www.homeukmagazine.co.uk suggests some nifty solutions to improving your home for a family which has slowly chipped away at all its furnishings and elements.
You could look into sorting out squeaky doors around the house with a little WD-40, which will definitely make your kids a little quieter when they dart in and out of their rooms. Proper bathroom locks will stop all the arguments and commotion which seem to stem from a lack of privacy. All the while, you’ll not only be keeping the family happy, quieter and perhaps a little more respectful of the house, but you’ll be improving it on a practical level. It’s a great way to hit two birds with one stone.
Keeping the home safe
Jokes aside, one of the most important and pressing concerns on your mind likely involves the safety of your family. Thinking of all the potential hazards around your home and the seeming obliviousness of the many members of your family to these things is enough to give anyone a headache. When it comes to improving your home, you should be rounding off corners on tables to keep young children safe and maintaining a certain level of hygiene so as to look after everyone’s health. Remind your children, no matter how old they are, to air out their room now and then, so as to avoid mould building up on windowsills; this can lead to breathing problems, which is worse for kids than adults.
You also need to consider the needs of guests, especially if they’re family and they visit frequently. You could look into sites such as www.terrylifts.co.uk/lifts/home-wheelchair-elevators for home lifts if your elderly parents, or perhaps your partner’s elderly parents, struggle to walk up or down the staircase in your home. No matter how young or old the members of your family, you need to be thinking about the ways in which you can improve your house so as to keep everyone safe, healthy and happy on a practical level, rather than simply making the house look nice.
Keeping the home aesthetically-pleasing
Of course, interior design is still important for many home owners, and you may occasionally miss the days before your family got a little bigger; perhaps you and your partner were quite good at keeping the place looking sleek, stylish and clean once upon a time. Now, that may be a little more difficult, as your kids may not care about interior design quite as much as you do… At least, the mess they make seems to suggest that.
As suggested over at wantingwhatyouhave.com, the key is to be strict with yourself and the family. It’s tempting to hoard excess things, as families often end up with a collection of souvenirs, toys and other things over the years. You need to decide which things are sentimental and which things are clutter. Of course, even if you’ve achieved a minimalist home, it will still suffer wear and tear after years of dealing with a big family. Covering marks, stains or damage to walls with beautiful paintings or photographs could help to disguise the fact that you’re living in a wild, chaotic family home.
Keeping the home ship-shape by getting everyone on board
As mentioned over at www.cleanandscentsible.com, it’s a baffling concept, but the rest of the family could actually help you improve your home and redesign it so that everything looks nicer, functions more efficiently and is, quite simply, much safer or healthier for everyone living there. It should be within everyone’s interest to live in a better home. It isn’t just your job or the job of both parents to keep the home looking good; get the children involved.
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