Here are 10 ways to keep warmer, cosier and more comfortable this winter.
1. Open up your home
This may sound counterintuitive but large windows that capture what winter sun is available help to warm your home during the day. Your flooring traps the heat and releases it gradually when the sun is gone.
2. Add fireplaces
Thanks to natural gas and self-contained technology, you can now experience the ambience, style and warmth of a fireplace anywhere in your home, even in your bathroom or bedroom or in between rooms. Because it is surrounded by full-length windows for the view, this bedroom has double-glazing and carpet for extra warmth.
3. Install underfloor heating
If you can’t see yourself sitting on your bathroom floor to file your nails, you clearly don’t have underfloor heating. The ambience of this kind of home heating can only be described as mmmmmm, and you can have underfloor heating fitted as part of your renovation or retro-fitted to existing spaces.
4. Lay carpet
If you don’t have underfloor heating, another way to avoid stepping out of bed on to an icy floor on those bitter winter mornings is to lay carpet, or at the very least to use rugs. As you can see from the picture above, the colour and texture of carpets and rugs can warm up any room.
5. Use warm colours to make your home seem warmer
White and pale, insipid colours are all the rage for interior décor. They may be cool and fresh in summer, but in winter they can make your home seem like a mausoleum. Using warmer colours such as peach, brown and red in your furnishings, floor covering and paint can warm your home in two ways – by creating a warm ambience, and by actually making rooms seem smaller and therefore more cosy.
6. Use furniture that makes you want to curl up
Much of the furniture you find in modern homes makes you feel about as comfortable as a fold-out stool. Enormous marshmellowy sofas and piles of fat cushions, on the other hand, make you feel like curling up and sipping tea – it doesn’t get cosier than that.
7. Use natural materials in your décor
Natural materials such as brick, stone or timber for walls and floors and wool for carpets and rugs make you feel warm just looking at them, and they add lots of lovely texture to your décor
8. Take a different approach to lighting
Too many homes treat lighting as a functional feature – which of course it is, but it can also be used to create wonderful effects and moods, adding a warm cosy feel to even the most modern and minimalistic rooms.
9. Bring in more natural light
Often rooms such as laundries and bathrooms are tucked away in places where it’s just not possible to put a window. Installing skylights or solar tubes are a neat way to bring natural light into these places, brightening them up while saving you money on energy bills.
10. Renovate now
It may seem to be too late to build all these warming ideas into your home before winter hits, but believe it or not, this is the best time of year to bring Pzazz Building in to transform the interior of your home. We’re normally busy during the warmer months completing exterior renovations and home additions, projects which just aren’t practical over winter. So talk to us now about designing and creating an interior that meets your family’s needs year-round.
