Nobody wishes to live in a not-so-spacious apartment. But sometimes, that’s what you get from life. And seeing as you can’t complain, the only thing you can do is to look for ways to maximize the little space you have.
Unfortunately, freeing up spaces in a tight and small home is not an easy task.
Many a time, homeowners rack their brains for ideas on how they can free up spaces in their homes. Yet, they still fail to come up with any reasonable path forward.
Are you also faced with this challenge?
Do not fret; this article wants to show you some eye-opening home remodeling ideas you can use to transform a small-spaced home into a spacious one.
Creating spaces by outright remodeling
1. Break down walls in your living room
The living room is always the biggest consumer of space in our homes. So, it makes sense to begin your space-creating home remodeling in this part of the house.
You can start the process by breaking down unnecessary walls between the kitchen, dining room, and living room. Usually, these three areas are often together. So, by taking out the walls demarcating them, you will be opening up a bigger space, which you can then remodel into a more commodious dwelling.
Think about how big the space your dining, living room, or kitchen is currently consuming. By opening up the floor plans separating them, you can adjust appropriately the size of any of the three areas in need of more spaces.
2. Eliminate your dining and introduce a kitchen peninsula
Be honest; how often do you use your dining room? Not so much, right. That’s what I thought.
Why not just completely remove it, and make better use of the space.
Don’t worry; you can always create a dining room-like feeling in your kitchen with a kitchen peninsula or island bench.
Look at how this house owner incorporated a peninsula into their kitchen.
3. See if you can resize your furniture
If your bedroom, living room, kitchen, or any other area in your house feels stuffy or too tight for comfort, the chances are you’ve got furniture that aren’t fitting for the space you have.
From chairs to tables, couch to sofas, and every other piece of furniture in between, these things are known to eat up space to great extents.
In order to create more spaces in your house, you may need to call in your upholsterer or a carpenter to help you resize the furniture therein.
By resizing all the furniture in your house, you can reduce the spaces they currently occupy, thus creating more valuable spaces that can serve other purposes.
4. Include loft in bedroom
Change the entire structure of your bedroom by removing beds from the ground and taking them closer to the roof.
This trick is particularly useful for people living in houses with excess spaces in the areas close to the roof. The idea here is to replace traditional floor-occupying beds with loft beds.
Loft beds, as we know them, can free up floor space for a desk, a sitting area, storage, or even another bed.
Creating space by adjusting storage facilities
5. Make the under of stairs your storage room
Storage facilities are another big consumer of spaces in our homes. By storage facilities, I mean items like drawers, cabinets, and shelves.
Many a time, these things take up huge spaces in our bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and other parts of the home.
To reduce the amount of spaces these facilities use up, all you have to do is change their locations.
For example, you can build drawers, cabinets, and shelves underneath stairs.
This storage can be where you store your kids’ toys, pet food, dirty boots, etc.
6. Install wall-hanging or built-in storage
Alternatively to the under of stairs, you can also use walls as storage areas. To do this, you just need to switch from standalone drawer or shelf designs to wall-hanging designs.
Or better still, you can build storage shelves directly into the walls surrounding the living room TV, entryway, window area, and fireplace.
This will create more valuable floor spaces, eliminating the need to store items like toys, jackets, books, and other everyday items in floor-standing shelves and drawers.
7. Convert tight corners into workstation/reading spot/storage benches
Irrespective of how tight your home is, there’s bound to be a corner you drop your shoes, hang your jackets, or place your bags when you return from work.
Why not clear this corner and transform it into your own personal reading spot, workstation, or storage bench?
Of course, that would create more valuable floor spaces in areas where these things probably occupy previously.
All you’ll need to do is build a bench-like spot in this corner. Inside this bench will be where you drop your shoes, purses, backpacks, and coats. And on top will be where you place your laptop, reading books, other work/reading items.
Creating spaces by using the illusion of lighting
8. Use half doors in strategic entrances
Is your kitchen feeling cramped? Is your garage so tight you can’t even breathe when you’re in? Whatever area of your house is making you feel so uncomfortable, you can improve the spacing, or at least make it appear as so, by using a half door design at the entryway.
Half doors are known to bring in fresh air and natural lights into a space, thus creating more connection to the outdoors, which ultimately increases the sense of space in any given area.
9. Use lighter paint colors
Look at this figure below; imagine how stuffy this living room would feel if the room was a little bit darker and more enclosed.
As you can see, using light-hued paints and opening the place up to the direct impact of natural light has helped to create a much better illusion of space.
Unless, of course, you make professional Instagram-worthy photography content in your home, I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t welcome the idea of bringing natural lights into your cramped spaces.
As you’ve seen, natural lights and light-hued paints are best friends of tight spaces.
Creating spaces by improvisation
10. Switch from traditional furniture style into folding-up styles
Sometimes, simply changing the style of your furniture can make the world of difference in the amount of spaces available in a house.
From dining room chairs to dining table, hallway chairs to living room furniture, kitchen chairs to kitchen tables, and every other piece of furniture in between, there’s always a way you can switch your home furniture from traditional furniture styles into folding-up furniture styles.
Here is an example of what I’m talking about:
If you take a look at the figure above, you’ll notice that the dining table folds onto the wall while folding chairs are hung above it. Without this improvisation, this kitchen would have felt more cramped.
11. Push out a wall into another room or a walkway
Another way to create more spaces in your house is to do something similar to what we recommend in tip #1 above for the living room. Except this time you’ll be focusing on rooms or areas in the house that appears cramped.
This could be your bedroom, laundry room, garage, or anywhere else. Usually, there’s always going to be a wall or a walkway that connects that room you’re looking to expand with other areas of the house. To make out more spaces, you can hack this wall down, or push the wall into the excess space in the walkway.
