Here’s a quick question — is your home everything you ever dreamed it could be, or is it, instead, more like a complete catastrophe that brings you nothing but bad vibes and insecure feelings?

 

Alright, alright, so the truth is probably somewhere in between, all things considered. But, on balance, it’s probably more common for people to feel that their homes are falling short than it is for them to feel that everything within the domestic enclosure is great and uplifting.

Even if we’re naturally pretty orderly and good with keeping things tidy, life gets in the way, and things inevitably go off the rails from time to time. Plates accumulate in the kitchen sink, dust saturates the carpets and creates an allergenic coating on shelves, and stuff just seems a bit off, to say the least.

Then, there’s also the possibility that you’re not a very neat and organised person by nature, and as a result, your home has become something like a wild, untamed storage container, where all kinds of personal belongings, trinkets, old newspapers, food wrappers, and so on, are scattered around in a way that boggles the mind.

In any event, if your home is particularly chaotic, or even if it just seems like it’s had better days, the impact on your overall sense of wellbeing is likely to be sub-optimal.

Here are a few reasons how to breathe some life back into your home if things have somehow gone south, in addition to a few reasons why you should make an effort to do this.

How: Steam clean the carpets

On the one hand, carpets are great. They’re warm, they’re comfortable to stand on, they can look pretty good, and they just make the home in general feel like a fairly more luxurious kind of a place to be.

Not bad.

Oh, except for the fact that they trap dust and dirt like virtually nothing else ever created by mankind. And pet fur, too. Then, you also have to take into account the fact that any kind of food or drink you drop on a carpet is likely to stain in a big way, and become a pretty much constant visual addition to the floor of that room.

When your home seems to have become significantly more dreary, messy, and unpleasant than you remember it being in the past, looking for the best home carpet cleaner and steam cleaning your carpets can make a truly immense difference.

In fact, in just a short space of time, your carpets can look brand new, across the entire house. Half a dozen shades lighter. No more sporting proud wine stains. No longer a source of allergies from a profound amount of trapped dust.

Of course, you’ll likely have to commit a fair amount of time and effort to undertaking and completing this process, but by all accounts, it seems to be worth it.

How: Take a hint from Marie Kondo and get rid of everything that doesn’t hold some meaning for you

Marie Kondo is a Japanese cleaning guru who took the world by storm with her book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” in 2012. This year, she’s back in a new Netflix series, “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo”, in which she gets into the homes of ordinary people who are troubled by their tendency to hoard, clutter, and have their homes be unbelievably messy and chaotic in various ways.

One of the core ideas in Marie Kondo’s methodology, is that you should more or less get rid of everything in your home that doesn’t cause you to feel a “spark of joy”. Maybe it’s also worth holding onto things that you don’t have a strong feeling towards, but that are really functionally important. Like your asthma inhalers.

The fact that so many people have responded so strongly to Marie Kondo’s ideas, seem to be evidence that tons of people are just completely overwhelmed by the messy state of their homes, and are more or less desperate to de-clutter, pare down their belongings, and simplify things.

Similar ideas have been gaining traction for some time now, such as the minimalism craze which was represented by a popular documentary, and which encourages people to make do with as few material belongings as possible, for the sake of avoiding rampant consumerism and undue stress.

Without being unnecessarily reckless, there does seem to be some wisdom in all of this to pay attention to.

How: Optimise the lighting

Lighting makes an extraordinary difference to the basic “vibe” of any home.

A well-illuminated home automatically feels like a more lively, upbeat, and vital kind of place — and this is especially true when it’s natural light you’re emphasising.

On the other hand, no degree of fine furnishings, careful ornamental arrangement, and immaculate paintwork, is going to make your home feel very lively if it has lighting roughly equivalent to that found in a crypt.

In fact, light and dark have such significant symbolic value to us, that we use these terms in our everyday speech to describe how and others are feeling or behaving. If someone has a particularly upbeat disposition, we might say that they’re bright and sunny. If you’re feeling down, angry, and otherwise not-so-good, you might be accused of being in a dark or gloomy mood, or of casting a shadow over the room.

You can improve the lighting in your home in an easy and straightforward way by investing in lamps, higher lux bulbs, and so on. You could also go the more advanced route of having new lighting fixtures installed in your home. Or if you’re really ambitious, you could go for a complete remodelling operation which includes the installation of skylights, new windows, sliding doors, and so on.

Why: Your immediate environment naturally exerts a strong mirror effect on your mindset

The state of your environment is liable to have a pretty strong “mirror” effect on your mindset. You could easily argue that this is one of the core reasons why people care at all about the presentation of their homes, at all.

If your home looks like an industrial accident, it’s likely to inspire a different state of mind in you than if it looked like a replica Swiss Alpine log cabin from the inside.

Considering that we all want to feel our best, particularly in those moments when we’re in our own homes, taking reasonable steps to breathe some life back into your home is an excellent idea. The better you can make it look and feel, the better you are likely to feel, and the more uplifting your attitude and orientation towards life is likely to become.

Why: You spend too much time in your home for it to be a gloomy, despondent place

This follows on from the previous “why” point; but have you ever noticed that you spend a major chunk of your time at home? Well, at least you do unless you have a job that keeps you on the road constantly, or find yourself with such an active social life that you only come home to change clothes and sleep.

For the average person, though, their home marks one of the primary environments in their life. One of the places where they’re going to be spending huge chunks of their time, both waking and sleeping.

Now, does it make sense for you to allow an environment that you’re going to be spending a large chunk of your life in, to be gloomy, despondent, chaotic, and otherwise emotionally draining and undesirable, when it’s in your power to change things and avoid that fate?

Probably not.

By organising, tidying up, and breathing some life back into your home, you help to ensure that all the hours spent there have some positive function.

Why: Fixing your home up and can free up energy in all sorts of other areas of your life

Living in a messy home can cause you to feel quite helpless overall, and uninspired to take any significant action to organise or sort things out in other parts of your life.

Something about setting yourself annual goals, doubling down on your career aspirations, and staying consistent in your gym sessions, just seems a bit futile and maybe even silly when your bedroom is coated three feet deep in discarded laundry, old magazines, stray beauty products, books, and assorted trinkets.

On the other hand, finally taking the plunge and actually getting your home in order, can go a really long way towards freeing up the energy and motivation for getting other areas of your life in order, too.

In addition to a good home-makeover convincing you that you have what it takes to exert control over the other areas of your life, it will also just feel good and boost your confidence, in general.

One day you were in a pretty disappointing excuse for a home. Then you rolled your sleeves up and got down to work, and now it’s the kind of place you’re happy to be.