Congratulations, you finally have your first home! Moving into your first home is indeed an exciting and significant rite of passage in your life! Once the excitement has died down, you realise it’s now time to furnish your new home. How do you get started on filling up all those bare spaces? Here are the tips for furnishing your first home.
Pare down your belongings
All of us come with a lot of baggage from the past (pun intended!). This is especially the case if you are moving into your new home with your significant other, who will also be coming with his or her own set of baggage! By paring down your belongings, you will be able to reduce clutter in your new home. Give away old clothes, kitchen utensils, books that you will never read, broken furniture and appliances that have outlived their use. If there is anything that you haven’t seen or used in a year, it’s probably something you will never miss. Give it away to a charity or hold a garage sale.
Decide what’s on top of your priority list!
If you are on a tight budget (and you may very well be, since you’ve just shelled out a lot of money to buy your first home), then you need to prioritise! What’s most important? A bed, since you will be spending a lot of time lazing around? A TV set and a couch, for those times when you transform into a couch potato? A dining table and a fully furnished kitchen for entertaining? Make a list with items and schedules, and spend your money wisely. The rest can be bought over time. It’s perfectly fine to furnish your home in bits and pieces. And trust us when we say that collecting things over the years and completing your home will add lots of personality and character to your space.
Do not skimp on the essentials when Furnishing your Home
Every home needs the basics—a working kitchen, beds and wardrobes in the bedrooms, an entertainment centre and seating in the living, dining table and chairs, and bathroom cabinetry. Never skimp on these essentials, and do not compromise by opting for cheaper materials as you will also be compromising on durability while furnishing your first home. It is worth paying a little more to get the furniture of good quality that will not start falling apart in a couple of years. If your budget is tight, then you could put off decorating one of the bedrooms for a while. You can also consider buying some second-hand items that are structurally sound and sparingly used. A new coat of paint or whiff of polish and they can easily pass off as new.
Take a good look at your current stock of furniture
As much as you would love to start with a clean slate, that’s rarely something that happens in real life. You may already be having a few prized possessions….your grandfather’s antique desk, for instance, or a sofa that’s valuable for sentimental reasons. Start with larger items, and then work your way down to accessories and textiles. Plan your rooms around these must-have pieces of furniture or furnishings. It’s perfectly fine if they don’t really match, you can still try creating harmony around a common color or unified design theme. Always work with a sense of proportion and scale and do not try to cram oversized furniture into tiny rooms.
Take stock of the plumbing and electrical work
This is especially important if you are moving into a home that is not brand new. The plumbing and electrical lines in older houses can get temperamental, to say the least, so you should get a qualified expert to take a look at all the fittings and fixtures and determine if anything needs to be replaced or re-routed. Are there any leaks anywhere, or dripping taps that need to be fixed? Are any of the light points not working, or do you need to install new points where they are missing? Take care of all this work before you move in as it could prove to be messy.
Plan your budget for your new home
You will already be having a good idea of how much you can afford to spend upfront. Chalk out the items you absolutely cannot do without. If you are getting your kitchen and wardrobes done up by professionals, they may have a payment plan that would work for you, or you can take out a loan for furnishing essentials. Do not splurge more than you can afford right now. You could set aside some money every month to repay your loan, or to shop for more furnishings. It’s a good idea to live in your new home for a while before you make large purchases; you could find, for instance, that the bathroom pipes need to be urgently replaced. Something like that can put you out of pocket if it’s unplanned while furnishing your first home.
Call in the professionals!
You may have all the right ideas, but not the practical know-how to do up your own home interior. Be mindful of the fact that Do-It-Yourself projects often end up costing more than you would expect. You may also end up spending more time, effort and resources than you would like. Spend some time online and with interior décor magazines, and put together your idea book. It’s now time to call in the professionals!
The interior design team at HomeLane can help you make the right decisions, work out your design specs and budgets and give you a home that’s drool-worthy in record time.
