How to Make a Small Room Feel Huge Part 2
Living in a small space becomes a lifestyle. You will have to adapt to your surroundings or a more compact way of living (unless you have always lived in small spaces) in order to ensure lasting happiness during your time there.
Your daily habits will need to adjust to a smaller space in order to keep it clean, functional and practical and you will need to work a little bit harder at keeping your space well organised and clean.
Winston Churchill once famously said: ‘We shape our homes…then our homes shape us’
What he meant was that our surroundings influence our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not.
So here are the more habitual and practical tips on how to make your small space feel much larger than it is:
- Keep clutter off the floor, tables, desks and beds. Everything should have its place and you need to be meticulous about putting things back in their place.
- Use the backs of doors for hanging storage. (This only works if the door is open most of the time so that the storage is hidden behind the door).
- Organise your storage by using built-in storage walls, use the hollow areas inside existing furniture (such as beds, desks, coffee tables & poufs). Make every piece of furniture work hard for you.
- Utilise shelving and organise things in regular shaped boxes. This makes everything look coherent on the shelving and gives you a way to find things quickly.
- Develop habits that make life in the small space easy to live with. Don’t torture yourself by not changing your lifestyle to fit in with the room. If you want it to stay nice and feel nice, you will also need to work at it.
One of the most effective habits to help you live in a small space is to put things back in their place straight after you are finished using them.
You will need to acquire some good habits (I think) to live in a small room. That’s because anything left out (that wasn’t designed to be left out), will make the room feel cluttered and due to our perception of scale will also subconsciously let us know that the room is small. I am always amazed at how much bigger a room can feel when just a few of these ideas are used.
