When you are focused on refining yourself — exercising more, eating better, advancing your career and investing in relationships — it’s common for responsibilities at home to fall to the wayside. You might be out meeting people, traveling the world and practicing to be a better man, but when you return home, you find the same dingy space you have always had.
It is possible that you need to shift your focus onto your home, so your living space can better reflect the refinement going on elsewhere in your life. Here are a few good (read: bad) signs to pay attention to in your home:
Your Appliances Don’t Work (or Don’t Exist)
It’s not enough for a home to look nice — it needs to function well, too. Major appliances around your home should be in good working order, which means they need to be maintained regularly to ensure efficiency. Unfortunately, many young men simply lack the time, energy and expertise to maintain their appliances, so important elements of your home might remain in ill-repair for weeks, months or even years. Then again, you might be living in a space that lacks certain critical appliances; for instance, if you live in a studio apartment, you might not have a full-sized refrigerator or range, or you might lack smaller, essential kitchen appliances like a microwave, blender or stand mixer.
You don’t have to set aside time to maintain or repair your appliances, but you should invest in keeping your appliances functioning as they should. You can use a service like this one, https://www.canduhome.com/, to gain access to experienced professionals at a discounted rate. Then, you should start investing in a suite of higher-quality appliances to outfit your kitchen and home.
Your Furniture Is From Your College Days
Rarely do college-age boys invest in quality furniture that will last them the decades to come. More likely, when you were a teen in your first apartment, you inherited well-used pieces from family members and friends, bought cheap and flimsy pieces from stores like IKEA and even picked up a few junky pieces off the street. At the time, this served you well — but now you need a home filled with high-quality furniture that better suits your mature, sophisticated lifestyle.
There’s something to be said for avoiding unnecessary waste. If your furniture is in good condition and matches your current décor style, you might be able to continue decorating your home with your old furnishings. More realistically, however, you should start replacing your hard-used furniture with fresh, clean pieces more likely to remain with you for the next decade or so. Here are some websites with stylish and durable furniture worthy of your investment:
Your Stuff Isn’t Stored How It Should Be
If you look in a magazine like Architectural Digest, you aren’t likely to see a home that has dishes and utensils scattered around kitchen counters, workout equipment littering the living room floor or books stacked carelessly on any horizontal surface. Organization is a key element of design, and living in an organized space will help you focus on elevating other aspects of your life.
Storage tends to be a significant concern when you live in a smaller space. Minimalism is trendy, but it isn’t always practical; if you can pare down your belongings, you should, but using organization tools or moving to a larger space with more built-in storage solutions tends to be more realistic. You might consider hiring professional organizers, like this company https://neatmethod.com/, or investing in a home organization system, which you can purchase from places like https://www.containerstore.com/.
Your Walls Are Bare (and Worse for It)
Décor isn’t just big stuff like furniture and appliances, and it isn’t only a matter of putting things where they belong, like in cupboards and closets. An attractive home exudes style and warmth, and that means you need to have smaller decorative items and embellishments to make the space seem inviting and fun. Yet, when you don’t spend much time at home — or if you don’t know better — you might be living with boring, beige walls that are utterly unadorned. Worse, you could have grimy white walls that demand a new coat of paint, or you could have an outdated and off-putting color on your walls with nothing to distract from it.
If you have the cash, you can hire an interior designer to help you cultivate a space that suits your lifestyle and tastes. Otherwise, you should take décor inspiration from sites like these:
Your home says more about you than you might think. By devoting some time to elevating your living situation — both by upgrading to a larger, classier space and investing in more mature décor — you will look and feel more sophisticated.
