5 Tips For Updating Your Home Without Renovating

As much as every homeowner would like to indulge in a course of dramatic renovations, there are some key problems with that prospect. Firstly, it’s expensive. Not just expensive in the way that a big TV is, but expensive in the “Oh no, we’ve ploughed through our savings and now teeter on the verge of being destitute” sort of way. And unless your business involves selling masks and hand sanitizer, you might not be unusually flush with funds these days.

Secondly, structural changes are legally complicated. Depending on your area, you may require various forms of planning permission to alter certain things, and acquiring that permission can be a frustrating process. You can throw money at it for months only to end up with a rejection and a heaping serving of disappointment.

And if you don’t want to make structural changes, there’s still our final problem to contend with: renovation takes a really long time. If you haven’t attempted it before, you might imagine that something like stripping and redoing a painted surface is a quick job. Not so. You can remove a layer of paint only to discover more layers beneath, with other irksome surprises (such as mold) lurking in wait. Are you prepared to spend weeks or even months with shambolic walls?

But never fear! You don’t need to do anything as drastic and complicated as renovating your home to update it. There are various other things you can do to cast it in a fresh light, and we’re going to look at five relevant tips in this article. Let’s get started, shall we?

Do some spring cleaning

Does this really count as updating your home? Yes. (As the writer, I get to decide these things.) Coats of dust and scads of spiderwebs are classic hallmarks of decrepit structures, so removing these unwelcome guests will yield a shocking truth: the spooky shack was actually a nice house all along. It would have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for your pesky feather duster.

Filth accrues far more quickly than you might think, and it inconveniently tends to settle in the places that are the hardest for you to reach, so you have much to do. It won’t be a glamorous job. Your knees will burn, your back will ache, and you’ll have more tissues caked in black muck than anyone could possibly deserve. But the results will make it all worthwhile.

Of course, you could hire someone to do this cleaning for you, but wouldn’t that ruin the feeling of accomplishment? It also isn’t the best time for that sort of thing. At most, rope friends and family members to help you out, and provide them with compensatory pizza. It’s your house, and you should have a hand in returning it to its former glory.

Swap out the furniture

I know, I know, your furniture feels… well, part of the furniture. Set in place, immovable, pristine within the context of your home. The pinnacle of what can be achieved using lengths of wood and wads of stuffing crammed into cases of varying materials. But that isn’t a reflection of reality. It’s a consequence of the interior design equivalent of Stockholm syndrome.

Whether you bought that furniture or inherited it, you knew when you took it in that you wouldn’t be changing it for a long while. What would be the point? So because you had no practical choice but to use it on a regular basis, you decided to focus on the positives and tell yourself that it’s the only furniture for the job. Nothing else could do better.

Deep down, though, you know that isn’t true — and if you really want to update your home, you can radically transform a room by getting in new furniture. Spend some time browsing Pinterest. Take a look at some furniture retailers (ideally those that have customer shots of their products in situ, such as Furniturebox, because you need some visual context). Set a budget, taking into account anything you could get from selling your existing furniture. Then get buying!

Tweak the room layouts

You could take out your old furniture and replace it all like-for-like. Goodbye old sofa, hello new sofa with identical dimensions and a similar hue. Meet the old boss, same as the old boss. But maybe that isn’t the best idea. How do you feel about your room layouts? Did you plan them carefully back when you first moved in, or did you just throw them together without thinking?

Regardless of how they came about, it’s possible that your current room layouts just aren’t working for you now, in which case you should think about tweaking them. Move your TV from one side of the room to the other. Take it off the TV unit and mount it to the wall. You could also do something that doesn’t treat the TV as the cornerstone, but that would be impractical.

You don’t need to believe in the value of feng shui to accept that changing your surroundings can affect everything from your mood to your wakefulness. Most importantly, have fun with it. It’s your home and you can do (almost) whatever you want, so forget conventional structures and get to work shaping the rooms of your dreams.

Install some new lighting

In the world of computer technology, everything’s gone RGB. There’s barely an enthusiast-level piece of hardware that doesn’t light up like a disco when you power it on. It can be tacky, and it can even be annoying when you need to leave a computer running overnight and the rainbow light cast through the transparent side panel ensures that anyone nearby won’t get any sleep — but it’s cool. Flashy lights are cool.

And while you don’t need to be overly flashy, you can do some really fun things with your home lighting. LED strips are cheap and easy to set up: just peel off the backing and deploy them wherever you want some adjustable mood lighting. If you feel like spending more, you can achieve much greater levels of adjustment (more on this next).

Don’t want lighting strips everywhere? Swap out your regular bulb for something with a different hue or power level. Buy some new lamps. Install a chandelier for the sheer decadence. Lighting makes a huge difference to how a room feels, so you’ll be amazed how much it matters.

Deploy some smart tech

You don’t need to update the architecture of your home to update its technology. These days, there are many great ways in which you can deploy smart tech to great effect. If you use LED strips, you can hook them up to systems that can automatically change the colors based on things like ambient sound or even what’s playing on your TV.

You can add a smart thermostat that can make your house more comfortable and save you money in the long run. You can pick up some smart speakers (usually from Google or Apple, but not always) to add respectable audio to your house without having to spend huge amounts of money on conventional speaker setups.

Regardless of whether your house is a recent build or a remnant of a simpler age, it can serve as a fine receptacle for a potent technological cocktail. And if you’re not particularly tech savvy, well, this is a great time to start learning. You have to move with the times eventually!

Your home deserves your time, effort, and investment — so don’t forget about it just because it’s a static presence in your life. Commit to making it better and you’ll reap the benefits, but remember that you don’t need to opt for large-scale renovation. You can focus on the contents of the rooms and still get excellent results. Give it a shot!