Easy ways to give every room in your house a Spring refresh
After being cooped up during the bleak days of lockdown, a traditional spring clean may not feel like quite enough this year, says Jessica Salter
After a particularly dark, bleak winter, the arrival of spring is a welcome thought. It’s always been a time of year when we try to breathe new life into our homes with a traditional seasonal clean, but this year, having spent so much time looking at the same four walls, it feels like a good opportunity to give our homes a proper refresh.
Charlotte Rey, designer and cofounder of the design studio CampbellRey, says now is “a wonderful opportunity to change up the energy for something fun and playful – introduce more colour, more patterns, and more flowers and plants into a room. It’s a bit of a spring clean for the soul.”
After a winter hibernation, it’s time to tap into our love of DIY: Aviva research found five out of six households carried out home improvements during the first lockdown – and there’s still time to crack on with a project. For those who don’t have innate skills, there is always YouTube. As James Rands, the Instagrammer behind @theDIYdads, says: “I used to use YouTube to learn how to plait my daughters’ hair when they were littler. Now they hold the phone while I lie under the sink and guide me through installing a new kitchen tap.”
If the big DIY jobs seem too heavy duty, there is still immense satisfaction from smaller-scale renovations and refurbishments. A few little pops of newness will energise our, by now, very familiar four walls. “A home is a collection of favourite pieces and objects you have collected over time,” says Judith Harris, head of House & Home at TOAST. “We layer and refresh the old with new things that inspire us and give us renewed energy.” Which is something we could all tap into right now.