Home Renovation Ideas to Encourage Family Time
In today’s screen-saturated world, it can be difficult to find opportunities for quality family time. While regulating screen time and trying to schedule in family activities are great ways to encourage family bonding, it’s worth considering whether the layout and design of your home could be hindering your attempts to get your family together. With the right home design, you can create a space that all members of your family will want to spend time in, increasing the amount of time you spend together on a daily basis.
The optimum design for your family will depend on how many children you have and their ages, so it’s important to pay attention to this when considering a renovation. It’s essential that your family space be personalised for each individual member, so that they’ll want to spend time there and not in their own rooms. This can be especially challenging with teenagers, but with a few clever tricks it’s possible to lure even the grumpiest teenager into a family room. Check out the ideas below for making your home the ideal place to spend quality family time.
Create Flexible Spaces
If you have quite a large family, or one that is growing, your home renovation should be focused on creating a space that is big enough to accommodate everyone. While this might seem impossible without knocking the walls through, it can actually be done quite easily by using internal bifold doors. These doors work as a partition between two rooms, but they can also be opened up when you want to gather the whole family together. Combining this with some multi-purpose furniture means that you can transform a dining room into part of a sitting room with relative ease, or create a kitchen-dining area that’s big enough for everyone.
When it comes to creating flexible spaces, the most important thing to remember is that the transformation should be easy to make. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to summon the energy to do it very often. This renovation idea can be very useful for smaller homes, where having everyone gather in one room can feel a little cramped. Opening up a larger space will create an atmosphere that is instantly inviting, especially if you throw in a few bean bags for the kids to sit on.
Go Open Plan
If you’re serious about home renovation, then creating an open plan space could be really worth your while. If you find that your family tends to split off into the kitchen and living room, consider combining these rooms and creating a space in which everyone can be together while still doing what they want to do. Just being in each other’s company, even if you’re not engaged in the same activity, can really help family members to bond and form closer relationships.
Before you start knocking walls down, it’s essential to consider what your open plan space will look like and how you’ll create the illusion of different rooms or zones. This is important in order to avoid the feeling of one huge expanse of empty space. There are many different ways of doing this, and which one you choose will depend on the size of your home and the specific needs of your family. Researching some open plan design ideas will help you to consider lighting, air flow, heating and sound control, among other factors that will make your space an inviting and relaxing place to be.
Attention to Detail
To really encourage your family to all spend time in one specific space, it’s important that you include something that each of them will adore. This could be a special bookshelf for the bookworm in your family, an exciting chair or cushion with your child’s favourite character on, or a piece of personalised art that depicts your family in a unique way. Whatever personal touches you choose, it’s vital that all members of your family are included and feel right at home. Creating a space that looks like an Instagram post or magazine cover might make you happy, but it’s unlikely that everyone in your family will feel the same way. The only way to tempt them to spend time there is to make it really feel like home to them, so keep this in mind when furnishing your new space.
Quiet Zones
One final thing to remember when renovating a family home is that everyone needs their alone time. Finding a balance between this and family time can be tricky, but it’s really important if you want an environment that meets everyone’s needs. Creating quiet zones for your family to go and relax can work wonders when it comes to encouraging family time, as it allows everyone to recharge and get the space they need before coming back and enjoying time together. For children, this could be a small playroom, while for adults it could be a cosy snug with a sofa and lots of blankets. Spending time alone is vital for building strong family bonds, and having designated spaces for this means that everyone has the chance to take a break and relax when they need to.
