4 Tips To Breathe New Life Into Your Home

If you're walking around your house and wondering how to breathe new life into it, there are a lot of simple project ideas that are worth exploring. Let's look at four that make great excuses to swing by the hardware store to get some supplies.

1. Revitalizing Coffee Tables and End Tables

The small tables in your living room are bound to suffer some degradation over time due to everything from UV exposure to coffee cup stains. Their corners get nicked, and scratches happen, too.

Even if you don't see yourself as a hardcore woodworker or crafter, you have all the skills needed to refresh a coffee table. Set up a spot in a well-ventilated area where you can also clear away debris. Sand down the table and then give it a fresh coat of varnish. Before you do, make sure the table is solid wood the whole way through. If it's not, you can still grab some paint to give it a new look.

2. Repaint the Steps

Another simple project to tackle is giving the steps at your house a fresh coat of paint. Since the steps are something you see every day, they're a good choice if you're looking to brighten your mood by making your home a little different. You also will have fun at the paint store checking out all the potential options. As in the previous example, the job boils down to sanding, painting, and then putting down a second coat of paint.

3. Installing New Trim and Molding

Fresh trim and molding can be used to change the entire design of a room, such as removing existing traditional trim and replacing it with something sleeker and more modernist. This calls for a little more skill than the previous two cases, as you will need to make a few angled corner cuts to ensure that it all comes together. It is common nowadays, though, for a hardware store to offer to handle some of the cuts for you, but you'll still need to get all your measurements right.

4. Tweak the Lighting

The drabness of a room often gets blamed on the paint, but sometimes the paint is an innocent bystander. You may also want to try out different lighting fixtures and configurations to see what makes a room pop. Something as simple as moving to bulbs that have cooler color temperatures might change the mood there completely.