Hello World! Welcome Friends! There’s a lot to love about an older home. It can have some beautiful original features or an architectural style that really stands out among more modern properties. But the nature of an older home means that it often needs various updates and improvements to prevent problems. The dilemma may arrive when you want to enhance your old home but you also want to try and preserve it as much as you can. You want to modernize it in the right ways, but you don’t want to remove its character.
So how can you enhance your home while also preserving it in the right ways? It’s possible to get a good balance between the two goals so you can design the home of your dreams.
Be Practical About What to Keep
It’s important to take a practical approach to which elements of an older home are practical to keep. Would it be an undue burden to try and maintain and preserve any parts of your home? Maybe it would be very expensive or require a lot of attention to keep it in good condition. Maybe there are very few people who have the right skills to help you. Some features of your home might look good or feel authentic, but it might not make much sense to try and keep them. An update could still offer the right look if you do it carefully.
Make Sympathetic Updates
When you make updates to your older home, you can still do so in a way that’s sympathetic to the original style. Your changes and additions don’t have to look totally out of place. There are ways to restore certain features or even replace or install something new while maintaining the look and feel of the property. When you use a service like Replacement Windows by Lakeside, you can make sure you choose windows or doors that match the architectural style. Instead of inserting totally modern windows, you can look into traditional styles to get the look you want.
Prioritize Habitability
You might want to maintain some of the original elements of the property, but the most important thing to think about is whether you can actually live in it safely and happily. If there’s anything that could affect your ability to do that, you might have to prioritize health and habitability over anything else. For example, adding insulation to your home or improving the heating and cooling might be essential to making it a more efficient property. That could sometimes require removing less practical features or installing things that aren’t in keeping with the original building.
Research Historical Methods
When you do want to preserve and update some of the original features in an older building, you might want to do so in a way that’s accurate. This can often be the best way to maintain a feature, which could be ruined if you attempt to use more modern methods. In some cases, you might be able to find the people who have the right skills to do it for you. In others, you might need to learn the skills yourself if you want to get the right results. As well as studying which methods to use, it could be important to make sure you’re using the right materials to get the results you want.
Restore Key Features
Knowing where to focus your efforts when you want to restore an older home can be tough. You want to keep the overall charm of the original design, but you also want to modernize it to provide you with all the conveniences you need. One of the best ways to approach it is to identify the key features you really want to focus on. What do you really love about the property? It could be the original floors, the wooden beams, the crown moldings, or whatever else really catches your eye. Focusing on restoring these can allow you to be a bit more contemporary with other things.
Furnish and Decorate in Keeping
When it’s time to decorate and add furniture, you might choose to do this in keeping with the home’s original style too. You don’t necessarily have to go all-out with being true to the time period, but you could let it inspire your decor choices. You could look for some authentic furniture or art that lends itself to the time period you’re going for. Mixing and matching with contemporary style can help to create timeless interiors.
Getting the balance right for an older home can be tricky. But if you consider it carefully, you can both preserve it and update it.
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Click the links below for any posts you have missed:
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