Winter is coming, to borrow a popular phrase. There isn’t much we can do but bemoan the eventual passing of our lovely long days, and the coming of shorter, colder and generally darker times. Or isn’t there?
If you feel your home gets darker and dingier as winter arrives, you may benefit from giving yourself some time to execute an autumn cleaning. Make some small changes to your home, and you could brighten things up for a more enjoyable winter period. Outside of buying more lamps, what can you do to brighten your home this winter?
A Fresh Coat Of Paint
If ever your home feels like it needs a refresher, the first and easiest core intervention you can make is to slap a fresh coat of paint up in your favoured living spaces. This is especially true for the winter months, where light is at a premium.
Where warm oranges and forest greens are amazing choices for a summery-feeling living room, these can darken your spaces in the lightless days of deep winter. Painting over darker feature walls with something a bit brighter, colder and more muted can work wonders for the general light levels of your home in the day time.
Bounce The Light Around
Brighter walls are fantastic for improving light levels throughout the home, not just for the colours they are but for the fact that they bounce light further into the home. Why not take this principle to its logical conclusion? Mirrors are, put simply, a godsend for darker days and darker homes; a well-placed wall-hanging mirror can bounce light straight into dark corners or hallways, and also help your ambient lighting penetrate further into your home.
Some mirrors are tech-friendly affairs too, which can help in especially dark rooms like many bathrooms. Some bathroom mirrors have built-in LED lighting, with adjustability for brightness and softness; use these not just to improve the practicality of your bathroom in dark mornings, but also to provide ambient lighting in your bathroom more generally.
Tidy Up Your Garden
Autumn and winter might not be the most thrilling of time periods to break out the secateurs – not to mention the fact that spending time cleaning outside your house seems counterintuitive to helping light levels inside. Still, if you’ve a few hours to spare, follow me on this one and set to clearing the shrubbery outside and around your home.
Whether you’ve got evergreen hedges that are growing out of control, or deciduous trees with branches that overlap your windows, you’re looking at foliage that’s blocking the precious light you should be receiving. A little goes a long way. While you’re out there, you could also spend a little time cleaning your windows for the best possible reception of light.