How To Adapt Your Home For A Growing Household

As a growing household, it’s easy for your once spacious home, to become a cluttered and cramped environment. Even with a bigger home, the addition of household members can certainly make a difference in how it feels.

Adapting your home is something that can be easily done and doesn’t need to take a lot in order to make it a more spacious and manageable environment. After all, you don’t need to move out of your home simply because it’s gotten a little cramped recently. A few changes might all be that’s needed to bring that spacious feeling back into the home.

Whether it’s you, your partner, and a pet, or you’ve got a number of children now growing up in what was once a couple’s home, here are some tips for adapting your home for a growing household.

Do a regular declutter

Declutters are the best thing you can do when it comes to your home and a growing household in particular. Chances are, there’s a lot of clutter that’s gathered over time and that you’ve simply not gotten around to clearing up and out.

Clutter is something we all collect, whether you realise it or not. It’s like a silent invader of space and if you’ve got a habit of just shoving things into a drawer, you’ve likely got a lot of clutter.

It’s a good idea to try and declutter your surroundings as often as possible. Take a bin bag or two around each room and be ruthless with what you get rid of. Of course, it’s important to be aware of belongings that might be your partner’s or your children’s. 

With that in mind, why not make it a group effort where everyone is clearing their own spaces and helping sift through the communal areas of clutter? By having everyone involved, you’ll be able to clear away the clutter a lot quicker as a result.

Reconfigure your furniture

Who doesn’t like rearranging their furniture every so often? It’s one of those efforts that might take a little time to do but when you do it, it can make a huge difference to the look and feel of your space.

Remember when you first moved into the property? Chances are it was configured a certain way and therefore you’ve never attempted in trying to position it a different way. Start moving around some of the bigger items of furniture like the couch in your living room or the bed in your bedroom. 

You can then add or take away smaller items of furniture to make more room or position them to make the space more functional.

Reconfiguring your furniture is free to do and it’s a great way to help reset the space when you’re feeling a little overwhelmed. It might not always provide the results you want, but it’s worth trying it in order to maximise the space that you may have available.

Make use of hidden storage furniture

Hidden storage in furniture is a great way to make use of the space, especially when you feel like there’s a lot around the home that currently doesn’t have a place of origin for it. The more clutter that takes up your floor space, the more cramped your surroundings are going to feel.

With that being said, try to find ways in which you can make the most of this furniture type. For example, if you need a new bed, why not introduce a bed with storage underneath it? It’s a great way to maximise the floor space that a bed would typically take up and you simply need to lift up the bed in order to get everything out from underneath.

There are also sofa beds you can get with additional storage and armchairs that allow you to store stuff underneath the seat cushion itself.

Have your children share bedrooms

Unless your children are hitting their teenage years, there’s nothing wrong with your children sharing rooms. There may be no other choice than to have your children share a room if you’re limited in space.

Shared bedrooms can still be fun and a great way to teach your children about the importance of sharing. It’s something that some can forget to learn when they’ve been given a bedroom of their own for the entirety of their childhood.

While it’s a great way to maximise space, it might be just what you need to also educate your children and encourage them to grow up as more well-rounded individuals.

Keep any excess belongings in a storage unit

While decluttering can be productive for those who have a lot of clutter lying about that has no purpose, there are some who need the clutter they’ve collected.

Whether they hold sentimental value or you just have too many belongings for the size of home you have, it might be that you need to store these belongings in storage rooms off-site.

There are many advantages of using storage units as a homeowner, especially when it comes to the amount of clutter that currently resides in your home. Here are some of the benefits worth considering:

• Helps free up space
• Provides a secure space for safekeeping
• Great for seasonal household belongings
• Affordable
• Easily accessible depending on the location of the unit

Look at investing in home extensions

This might not be a possibility for everyone but if you’re someone who is limited on their surrounding space, it might be worth looking into a home extension.

Again, it’s a cost that not everyone might be able to budget for but if you have some savings available and don’t want to move anytime soon, then adding an extension on the home might be just what you need.

Consider what planning permissions you’ll need to get in order to get the work approved and aim to make more bedroom, living, and bathroom spaces where possible.

Assign everyone chores to keep the home clean

Keeping the home clean is definitely something to be proactive about, especially with a growing family. In order to keep on top of the cleaning, it’s worth assigning chores to everyone. That way, you’ll make a big difference to the state of the home on a daily basis.

Cleaning as you go is always a better way of tackling the household chores and cleaning, rather than letting them mount up over a period of time.

When it comes to giving your child life experience around the home, household chores such as cleaning their own room will hopefully encourage them to be clean and respectful as they get older.

After all, just because they’re young, doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from life lessons that they’ll need when they get older.

Make use of your outdoor spaces

Your outdoor space is just as important as the spaces you have available inside the home. It’s something that is worth utilising, especially if you have limited space indoors to work with. 

There are a lot of creative routes you can take in order to make the most out of your outdoor space. From outdoor living areas to temporary spaces, it’s worth seeing what potential your exterior space can provide.

Limit the amount of toys in the home

It’s important to limit the amount of toys you have in the home because chances are, this is going to be something that takes up a lot of your space.

It’s incredible the amount of toys that a small child would need to stay entertained and in reality, it’s often not something that’s needed to such a volume. It might be worth limiting the amount of toys in the home or at least looking to declutter and sell old toys when new toys are purchased.

It’s not something that a child will likely miss, especially as toy trends come and go throughout the years. To help keep on top of the clutter that comes with toys in the home, make sure you’ve got plenty of toy boxes for the toys themselves to go into. It’ll certainly make all of the difference!

Look at the attic or basement spaces if available

When it comes to your growing household, consider the attic or basement spaces to free up room but also add more living space within the home. These areas are often underutilised because they’ve not been renovated to make them liveable. However, as an existing space, they’re likely to be more affordable than investing in a renovation and adding on extra rooms.

Consider what attic or basement space is available and try to make plans to utilise this space eventually. Even if you’re not going to do anything now, it’s always a great place to put all of your extra storage in for the time being.,

Adapting your home for a growing household is something that’s useful to do and you might be surprised at how much of a difference freeing up space around your home will be. Use these tips to make the most out of your space this year.

By SarahW.