How to Hide Household Eyesores without Renovation
Unless you’ve built your home from the ground up with your own design plans, there might be some aspects of your home you find unsightly.
Even unforeseen problems, like water damage and broken fixtures can also happen as well. Whether its the big gray water heater sticking out like a sore thumb in the corner of your bathroom, the cracked flooring in your kitchen or the room with the tacky wood paneled interior walls from when the house was built ages ago, they all need to go!
You might hate the way it looks, but you don’t have the time, money or resources to break the bank fixing or replacing it through full-on renovations. Don’t fret! There are clever ways to hide ugly parts of your home. With a few tricks, you can go from shouting “ICK!” to saying “Ahhh…”
Partitions and Screens
If you’ve ever stepped into a luxurious spa or even a night out at your favorite sushi bar, chances are you’ve seen one! Partitions, also called room dividers or simply screens, can beautifully disguise tasteless fixtures (like that obnoxious water heater!)
Extremely versatile because of their lightweight mobility, you can place a partition in front of practically anything that you’d rather not see on a regular basis. They also serve other useful purposes, such as separating space and adding scale to a specific room.
Fresh Coats of Paint
Remember that wood paneled wall you hate? It could be a real pain to strip it off or to rebuild over it. It could even take several weeks for the room to be suitable enough to spend time in. Not all is lost! There is nothing like a fresh coat of paint in one of the years most popular color choices to spruce things up!
For this 2020 year, try Pantone’s Color of the Year: Classic Blue or the newly trending hue, sage green. Accent walls have slowed down in popularity but Padstyle continues to love that POP of color accent walls provide in a space. Just because it is wood, does not mean it has to look like it!
Play with Lights
Lighting can make or break a room. Use lighting to the hide parts of your home you despise. You might be thinking, “how can lighting up an eyesore keep it hidden?” Lighting can deflect the eye from the source of your woes. By refocusing attention on the highlights of your space, while covering up the parts you wish weren’t there, lighting can play a key role in making the place look a whole lot better!
Wall Art and Home Decor
Seems obvious, right?! Sometimes you can become so fixated on what you do not like, you can forget about the obvious solutions to transform it into something you DO like! The cracked tile on your dining room floor isn’t going anywhere, try placing a colorful area rug over it. The window with the paint chipping around its trim, try hanging elegant draping curtains to cover up its weathered look.
Even that fracture running diagonally across your wall, try adding a series of canvas art prints atop of and following along the cracks course. There are tons of options in the world of home decor and accents to cover up even the ugliest of home unexpected inclusions.
Textiles and Fabrics
Textiles, fabrics and tapestries can add texture, balance, symmetry and color to your home. We are not suggesting you turn your home into the inside of a Arabian tent or even a bohemian oasis, but consider the possibilities! Imagine the home you live in has a strangely placed window on an adjacent wall in your living room. It throws the entire symmetry off. Adding another window to the opposing wall would really make a difference in improving the design. Unfortunately, you aren’t making any renovations! So what do you do? Make the illusion of another “window” by creating a layered fabric textile or placing a hanging macrame woven accent in the same spot you know another actual window would look great in. Use the same fabrics for your faux window as curtains on the real window. Voila!
How about your trestled ceiling with one or two beams that have nasty watermarks running across them? Twist fabrics around the beams in a delightful display of pattern and color to cover the discoloration.
Fabrics are relatively inexpensive to acquire and there is an abundance at fabric and some craft stores. You can measure out the size needed beforehand. In the long run, it beats replacing the whole beam, wall or window!
A little imagination and the right decor goes a long way. You don’t have to spend weeks looking for contractors to renovate the entire space. You might find your made-to-disguise design became your favorite room in the whole house!