Upgrading your home – whether you rent or own – doesn’t have to be as big as knocking out a wall or redoing the bathrooms.
There are lots of little ways you can make a space feel different that cost little to nothing to do.
My two criteria for changing things up are: What will improve the function of the space? And what’s going to make living in the house feel better?
With that in mind, here are five easy and affordable ways you can make a big difference in your home.
A welcome entry
I’m a big fan of a small design moment, including looking at the entry to your home.
Often these days, a house will have a door that opens straight into a room – there’s no pause as you come in, and there’s no space to rest and reset.
I think it’s important to find a moment to transition between the public world outside and your private life inside.
Marking that transition might be as simple as putting a hat rack on the wall. Or it might be much more elaborate and become a small space of some sort, like a porch or landing.
You can also use furniture cleverly to block off the entry from, say, a living room that you might enter straight into. This is an old trick used most effectively by mid-century modern architects.
If you can put a sideboard or some kind of floating furniture at the door, something to walk around and separate the entry zone from the rest of the room, it’ll change the dynamic of the space.
What we’re trying to do is create a moment of pause to soften the entry into a room by creating a small welcome space.
Suddenly, your house is now a place where you can step out off the street and be in a different frame of mind.
Clever shading
This one requires a little bit more commitment but I wanted to include something that touches on how to make your house more sustainable – both for the environment and for your comfort.
One thing you can do is look at the windows in your house and, especially in summer, identify where that sun is beating in.
Yes, double-glazing windows are one (relatively expensive) way of cutting out how much passive heat is coming in. Another cheaper version is something clever like a shading hood on the outside of a window.
Instead of just having a blank window in a wall, you can create a way of moderating and controlling the sun as it comes through. And, done right, it’ll help save you energy and money on your bills.
What you want is to keep the sun out in summer and let it in in winter, which means calculating the depth of the hood to allow for the angle of the sun, which changes through the year to work to best effect for that season.
Hoods are actually really old-fashioned. We used them in the 1800s and built large verandah overhangs, back in the day, to do just this. And you can get as fancy, or keep it as basic, as you like.
If you want to do some elaborate scrollwork in timber, go for it. Or if you want to do something that’s much more contemporary, there’s a lot of folded plate-type hoods that are used to create the same effect.
Done well, it gives depth to the facade, especially if your house is fairly flat, which is a bit of a design trick.
And with a bit of thought and creativity, you can make a big difference to the way your house appears on the street and how it performs thermally.
Crafting a small retreat
Another really important thing to have in a house, which a lot of people don’t have, is a small retreat.
This is super simple because you don’t necessarily have to build something to do it.
It might be as easy as getting a cushion and putting it on a step or a bench in the backyard near a favourite plant or tree, or near a window in a quiet part of the house, and essentially marking that space in your mind as your retreat.
A spot where you feel like you can step into that space and the whole world can just kind of stop for a second; a go-to place for when you just need to have a break.
It’s like a micro sanctuary or refuge, or some version of that.
That’s the simplest change I can think of – it’s no cost and no fuss.
Bring your garden inside
We all know that we’re great at living outdoors, or at least we think we are.
These days we tend to close the doors, put the air conditioning or the heating on, and just kind of make do.
But the outdoors is often where we feel best.
So, what’s a simple way to connect the inside to the outside of a house?
Without changing windows and doors and all of that stuff (because that’s expensive), a simple idea is just to bring the garden inside.
That could mean bringing some of the plants you have outside your backdoor – particularly if you have glass sliding doors – right up into the house so there’s a seamless continuum from outdoors to indoors.
It’s a bit of clever indoor pot planting and, if you like, a bit of indoor gardening to mirror and match.
It blurs that boundary between indoor and outdoor in a way that is simple and very effective.
Light up your garden
This one is the other way around, and while it might require a little more cash, it can still definitely be done on a budget.
I’m a huge fan of the need to consider the garden as a part of the house, not as something separate.
You can use the lighting strategy you have inside your house, and find a way to light the garden or your outdoor area beyond your patio and take the lights outside.
The aim is to make it appear as if the light sources from inside the house naturally continue out deep into the garden.
Then when you’re in the house in the evening, you don’t just look through the window and see blackness, you can let your house extend into that space.
It expands the feeling of the space you have without increasing your building footprint, even if the doors are closed and the heating is on.
– With Anthony Burke host of ABC iview’s Grand Designs Australia, premiering on Thursday 10 October.
