Two ways to spruce up your home without renovating it

Whilst renovating your home is certainly one of the most effective ways to improve its appearance, it can also be costly, stressful and time-consuming. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to spruce up your home without renovating it. Read on to find out what they are.

Get the carpets professionally cleaned

One of the simplest and fastest ways to spruce up your home is to get one of your local carpet cleaning specialists to deep-clean your carpets. Having your carpets professionally cleaned will achieve two things. Firstly, it will eliminate all of the residual odours that your own hoover and household fabric deodorisers cannot. 

Things like your pet's accidents, drink spillages and cigarette smoke can permeate the fibres of a carpet and give it a pungent, sour smell. Whilst you may have grown accustomed to this odour to the point where you are hardly even aware of it anymore, the guests who visit your home will certainly notice it as soon as they walk through your front door and are likely to find it very off-putting.

A professional deep-cleaning (which includes steaming the carpet and then hoovering it with a commercial-grade hoover) will get rid of all of the residues in the carpet fibres that are creating this smell. Secondly, a professional cleaning will freshen up the colour of your home's carpets. Over time, the dirt, dust and stains that accumulate on a carpet can dull its colours. This usually happens so slowly that you don't even notice it.

Getting the carpets cleaned will remove all of this dirt and dust, and in doing so, will make the carpets' colours look as vibrant as they did when you first had them fitted.  

Use soft furnishings to disguise your home's flaws

If there are areas of your home which look a bit worse for wear, you may want to invest in a few inexpensive soft furnishings so that you can disguise the flaws in these parts of your property.

For example, if the laminate floor in your hallway is badly scratched and covered in permanent stains, you may want to place a rug over this patch of flooring. This will not only hide the unsightly laminate but will also help to add texture and colour to this area of your home. Likewise, if your sofas and armchairs are faded and threadbare, placing a brightly-coloured or patterned throw over them is a great way to disguise their imperfections.

Additionally, if the paint or the wallpaper in a certain room looks a bit discoloured or dated, hanging some curtains that have a very bold pattern or colour on the window in that room is a good way to draw attention away from the walls.