When people walk into your home, you want them to feel happy and at ease. When people are truly welcomed in a space, they relax and feel joyful almost instantly. Describing the feelings of home may be difficult, but it’s easier to list a few things we can do to promote such feelings.
Let’s take a look at a few ways people can warm their homes this winter.
Clean and Pest-Free
There’s a difference between tidiness and cleanliness. A home should look well lived in. Indeed, it should be well lived in! It’s natural for kids to leave toys behind them. Adults aren’t always meticulous about cleaning up behind them, either.
But a warm home should be fundamentally clean. Rooms like the kitchen and washroom need to be free of bacteria to promote good health and, in a very basic sense, not be icky.
Along the same lines, nothing can undo a home’s sense of warmth and refuge faster than spotting a pest inside. Whether you want to get rid of carpenter ants or more problematic pests like bedbugs, rats, mice, or roaches, call for professional assistance.
The pros use custom sprays you can’t find in the corner store, which gets the job done. If you buy the commercially available sprays on the shelf, you’ll kill a handful of pests but won’t eliminate the infestation altogether.
Leading pest control companies also offer home protection plans which proactively prevent pests from entering the premises. They’ll inspect your home for any existing pests, kill whatever pests they find, remove any pest attractants on your property, then issue a preventative spray.
Look for a local business where the owners know the friendly, expert technicians they hire. Ideally, their custom sprays should use ingredients approved by Health Canada, so you know they’re friendly to pets and the environment.
Lighting Matters
Creating a sense of ambiance in your home is important. It doesn’t need to be dramatic or intense, but you should be mindful of the natural and artificial lighting in your home and how it works in every room.
For example, an eat-in kitchen is perhaps the best room to be flooded in sunlight since it’s where the family spends a lot of time together, and nothing is warmer than natural light. However, a basement rec room or TV room has different needs, and you may consider a different lighting strategy too.
Track lights for the ceiling in rooms without sunlight can be great, as are other décor and lighting that makes your home feel more like a real movie theatre or at least heightens the atmosphere.
Blend your usage of natural light, artificial lighting, and things like candles to create warm glows and mirrors to re-direct the lighting where you want it. Lighting can be a powerful and inexpensive way to transform a room.
Inviting Furniture
Have you ever seen those old-fashioned antique couches which look great in pictures but you wouldn’t exactly want to curl up in and binge-watch TV or movies? Warm homes are inviting, and the furniture itself should come calling to you!
When you see a wide couch that’s soft and firm in the right ways, you’ll never want to leave. There’s a lesson in this. Furnish your home around comfort rather than just looks. In any case, when the furniture in a home calls to be sat in, that can become its own type of aesthetic.
Aromas
One of the most powerful senses doesn’t always get its due: sense. You may love it when your kitchen smells like fresh bread, cookies, or other warm foods. If you control how your home smells, you can create a more welcoming environment that feels distinct.
Use electric or candle diffusers to give the room a wide range of smells. Just mix whatever essential oil you want with some water, and the space will feel very different. Aromatic candles can have the same effect.
The sense of smell has an extremely strong hold on the brain, yet people don’t often think about it because it’s perceived more subtly than things we see or hear. People can be instantly thrust into another time or place without even quite realizing why when they encounter a distinct smell associated with a distant memory — some legendary works of literature use this exact dynamic as a motif.
Nobody Lacks Food or Drinks
Finally, home is where people eat and drink their fill. Nobody should be hungry or thirsty under your roof. You don’t need to serve deluxe or expensive food, but the supply should be ample.
From early Western myths that emphasized serving guests food and drinks in its code of hospitality, laying out a spread has always been a defining trait of a warm and welcoming home.
Everybody’s home has the unique fingerprints of its owners. Let your tastes and preferences dictate what you do, but use the above points as a general guideline, and your home will be more welcoming this winter.
