Showing Your Home? How To Make Your Rooms Feel Larger
If you're trying to sell your home, then you've probably thought quite a bit about how to help it look its best. When prospective buyers come to walk through, you want it to be clean and attractive. And while you can't change how big your house is, you can change how big it seems. With the right techniques, you can take almost any room and make it seem larger than it is – which is a definite plus when it comes to impressing buyers:
Decluttering
This is the most obvious method, but it's worth repeating. When you look at homes that have been professionally staged for sale or sample rooms in home decorating magazines, pay attention to how uncluttered they are. So even if you don't have tons of stuff, chances are, you could still have less.
Cut down to the minimum that you can, and the decor that you leave will also stand out more. With so much more empty space, you'll be surprised at how spacious your rooms can seem. And as an added advantage, getting rid of things means less stuff to move later when the house is sold!
Window Treatments
Another good way to make a room seem larger is to let in more of the outside through the windows. Changing curtains can make a big difference; even when they're open, heavy drapes feel more oppressive and let in less sunlight than simple sheer curtains.
You can also make the windows themselves feel larger. Try curtain rods that are wider than the window itself or hung higher than the top of the window to add the illusion of width or height, or combine them to make the window seem larger in both directions.
Furniture Positioning
Many people try to create space by putting furniture up against walls. But counter-intuitively, a good technique to create space is to move furniture away from walls if possible – sometimes called floating your furniture.
This works especially well in sitting rooms, living rooms, and dens, where the clear border around sofas and chairs helps divide the room into seating space and traffic space. Try it, and you'll see that unbroken traffic space around the outside edge of the room feels more spacious than pulling your furniture farther apart against the edges of the room.
Painting
For medium-sized rooms, the general rule of thumb is that light colors seem more spacious. They reflect more of the light in a room, and that brightness makes the room feel more open in turn. This is especially effective in rooms with windows that can let in a lot of natural light. So if repainting is in your budget, consider whether the wall color of any room is making it seem smaller. And even if you can't – or don't want to – repaint rooms, you can still "lighten" them a bit by, perhaps predictably, adding more lights.
If you need more help, you could always call a home staging expert to learn more.