Ten Ways to Know That Your Home Needs a Makeover
- You wake up and can’t see the floor because clothing, books, and debris are everywhere.
- You can’t open the door of the closet because you’ve shoved so many things into it.
- You’re using plastic storage bins as dresser drawers and milk crates as furniture.
- You’ve made shelving out of cinder blocks and 1 x 12s.
- Your clothes are in garbage bags or in boxes still labeled “Closet.
- You’re sleeping on the floor with the moving blanket that you still have from when you first moved in.
- There’s absolutely no artwork up except pizza boxes.
- There are no blinds on your window, and the first thing that hits you in the morning is the bright sun, shining like a laser.
- You’re lying in bed, a bus goes by, and your whole house rattles and rolls, then a little bit of drywall falls off the ceiling and hits you on the head. (I speak from experience.)
- It’s the holidays, the family is coming to visit, and your mother-in-law or step- mom or grandparents walk in and the first thing they say is, “You know, we think we’ll get a hotel room.
I’ve done many things in life without planning ahead and with little forethought. I used to get plans for home makeovers written on napkins and then try to wing it. Sometimes it would all work out. Sometimes-well, let’s just say, better luck next time. Having done it both ways, I highly recommend going the premeditated game-plan route, even if you’re just doing a small design renovation. It may seem like we’re flying by the seat of our pants on EMHE, but we actually go in with a pretty well thought-out plan. And not with just an architectural plan, but with a design plan for each room.
Not every idea ends up working, and sometimes-make that a lot of times-we have to improvise at the last minute. But we wouldn’t get the results we do if we didn’t map out everything beforehand.
Prepping for a makeover can be boiled down to twelve steps (not those twelve steps, though sometimes they can help, too). A lot of what’s involved is simply looking at a room in a way that you’ve never looked at it before. Where are the windows? How high are the ceilings? What shape is the floor in? Make sure you’ve got a tape measure because you’re going to write down the room’s dimensions and draw up a floor plan. You’ve got to take some kind of measure of yourself: your passions, your personality, your memories, your fantasies, your sense of style, what makes you feel comfortable, what kind of mood you want to set-those things will all play a role in determining what the room is going to look like.