3 Clever Ways to Maximize Small Spaces

Do you struggle with decorating common rooms or bedrooms in your home because they’re just not big enough? Do they always feel overcrowded or claustrophobic? While big, spacious rooms are lovely to have, the reality is that many homes are simply small, or are designed in a way that one or several rooms have less space than you might want.

But what you may not realize is that there are things you can do to make the smaller rooms in your home work better for you. You can have rooms that are more attractive, more functional, and feel less cramped and cluttered if you know a few simple strategies.

Stop Buying Smaller Furniture

You may instinctively opt for smaller furniture when you know that you’re trying to furnish a smaller room. It’s understandable, but it’s a mistake.

What actually happens is that small furniture makes the room look even smaller. And because it’s small furniture, you’re also liable to try to fit more into the room than it should really have. If you’re choosing full-size furniture, you’ll be more likely to limit yourself to a realistic number of pieces, and because the eye expects to see full-sized furniture in a full-sized room, the room will appear larger. A few well-chosen pieces will look considerably better than too many pieces that don’t really leave enough open space.

Lighten Things Up

The darker a room is, the smaller it will appear. Even a very spacious room will feel cramped if you paint it chocolate brown. But the reverse is true too – lighter colors will open up a room.

White walls are an obvious choice, but pale yellow is also a good color for small rooms. A very faint shade of pink might also work if you prefer that color. But that’s not all. You don’t just want light colors, you want actual light. Natural light is best – if the room has lots of windows, opt for sheer shades that allow the sunlight in or open them as often as you can. In some cases, adding a window might be a possibility, but depending on the home and the wall, that may be too major an undertaking.

Choose artificial lights that mimic natural light as much as possible. Instead of cluttering the room with standing or table lamps, choose lamps that attach to the walls or the ceiling. That will leave more floor space and surface space free.

Hang Artwork High

Because you’re trying to avoid making an already smaller room seem more cluttered, your impulse might be to leave the walls bare. Again, this is a reasonable intuition, but it’s incorrect. You actually can and should put appealing, interesting, eye-catching artworks on the walls.

The trick is to hang these pieces high. In an ordinary-sized room or a large room, you would typically hang pictures at eye level. But doing that in a small room may end up making you feel like the walls are closing in. Instead, hang the pictures a bit higher, so that you have to look up at them. This creates the illusion that the ceilings are higher – implying more open space in the room.

To simply make a room look and feel larger, you don’t need to knock out a wall. You just need some smart strategies to create the appearance that you’re looking for.