CREATIVE REMODELLING WILL REFRESH THE ENERGY OF YOUR HOME
<< Continue from 10 Strategic Renovation Ideas (Part 1)
6. UPGRADE YOUR SURFACES
When you look over your home, make a list of all the ugly unattractive parts of the home you feel need improvements. It is not necessary to demolish every ugly wall or cabinet area. Often, just upgrading the surfaces of walls, table tops and cabinets will transform the energy instantly. The easiest to use is paint. Nothing works more quickly or more easily than a fresh coat of new color paint and this can also do wonders to instantly revive your feng shui and to brighten up dull faded walls. You could also resurface with a new layer of marble or formica.
Use the Pa Kua of eight directions and five elements to help you decide on colours and shades. Strip out outdated wallpapers and revarnish ugly, old wood surfaces. You can even add new style tiles and decorative new materials to jazz up a feature wall or corner.
In fact, by changing the surfaces of your tabletops, floors and walls, you will be seriously enhancing and refreshing the chi energy of your home. This will have a dramatic effect on your luck. As we have only just moved into the new Period of 8 which many of you are already familiar with, undertaking this kind of cosmetic job to your home is exactly what the feng shui doctor orders if you are to emerge from the next few years with a much higher net worth. This is to make sure that you will become richer not poorer after the current doom and gloom blows over!
7. MAKE THE OPENINGS BETWEEN ROOMS WIDER AND BIGGER
Create an open floor plan to your living and public areas. Many modern homes are now designed this way as it makes the home feel and look better. Houses that have walls separating every room tend to feel more confined and are no longer reflective of contemporary lifestyles. When the kitchen, dining area and living room are all separate rooms accessed by just a small door, the whole effect is very confining.
Instead, if all the walls separating the rooms were to come down, and three rooms became one room, the effect will be instantaneously more harmonious. It is also more conducive to the family feeling more connected with each other. This natural flow of chi from one area to the next also means that whatever daylight comes in can be shared, so hallways and corners become brighter. There will probably also be more views to the outdoors.
The one big room will create a feeling of greater depth thereby encouraging chi energy to accumulate. Good fortune lasts longer and benefits all the generations living within.
Here are some important ways to go about breaking down the “barriers” within your home:
- Study the connecting walls carefully. Look out for structural beams and ceiling levels to see if you can do away with the wall or consider if it is better to keep the wall and make the opening into the next room larger. Differences in ceiling levels or the presence of beams can sometimes make it inadvisable to demolish the wall.
- Is there a special reason for maintaining some private space? Sometimes you may want to keep at least one room private because it might be a place for some member of the family to enjoy some intimate moments with some special visitor. Much depends on the lifestyle of the residents, and if there is a need for a private area, this should be rolled into the decision to have more openings in your interior spaces.
- Open up hallways, corridors and stairwells. Let the space get freed up. Thus removing walls that embrace staircases is always advisable. Such walls, even when partially removed, not only bring better ventilation all round but also creates greater interest to the interiors of the home and definitely enhances the feeling of size. Rooms get expanded visually and actually.
8. MAKE YOUR HOUSE FEEL MORE SPACIOUS
You can make the house feel more spacious by visually bringing the outdoors indoors. If you make access to your gardens broader and wider by creating sliding glass doors, the house will instantly feel bigger. This is really effective for adding square footage without doing any extra building.
If you do not like the idea of doors for whatever reason, you can consider creating bigger windows that start from lower down, say about a foot or 18 inches from the floor. This idea of opening access to the garden is especially effective when done to the living and dining areas of your house, or where the family spends a lot of time. Even if your garden area is not that big, just having access to it adds to your feeling of spaciousness.
9. BE CLEVER ABOUT STORAGE SPACE 
All homes need storage space, but when store rooms are created in parts of the house that correspond to your lucky direction, this symbolically ‘locks’ up your luck making it difficult for you to develop and expand. At the same time, you need to make sure the home does not ever get too cluttered, as this is sure to cause blocks and obstacles. Clutter spilling into living areas cause bad feng shui and is also visually not attractive. It is therefore necessary to be clever about storage space. You need to give this great thought and be clever about it.
Most important is to ensure that you have adequate space, cupboards or shelves to take care of old newspapers, shoes, coats, umbrellas, spare boxes and so forth. These should ideally not be at the entrance area or foyer of the home, as you really do not want to block the benevolent chi that enters your home.
You also need a small cupboard to store your brooms and vacuum cleaners, so perhaps creating little storage corners are a better idea than having big large store rooms. This merely causes energy to stagnate and that is definitely not good.
Alternatively you might want to create a sort of work area somewhere near the back of the house which serves as a place to put all the things you generally need or want to keep, but which you do not want publicly displayed.
10. GIVE YOUR HOUSE A COSMETIC FACE LIFT
Not all of us like the front façade of our house too much, so if you are considering a major remodeling job, it makes sense to incorporate a dramatic improvement to the “look” of the house. After all, the look of your house does evoke all kinds of different feelings and the more positive you feel about your house, the luckier it will be.
The energy of the home depends as much on the way its residents feel about it as on the house itself. If you love your home, it will nurture you and look after you. So if you are planning a renovation, think seriously about how you can make its “face” look better. Really the appeal of your house should make you want to improve it. Whatever you do should also be much more than a superficial new coat of paint, although a repaint job is an essential part of the face lift. But you might also want to examine the look closely and see how you can add dramatic highlights, perhaps with a larger main door or bigger windows.
Perhaps the window frames need updating or a feature wall can be clad with a new kind of tile. You might want to redesign the roof elevations – after all, you will also want to give yourself a new roof so your house gets a major infusion of new period energy.
It is important that you make your main door look obvious. It should be easy to find, and ideally the main door should face the same direction as the house itself. In fact, the main door, being the mouth of the house should receive a great deal of attention. Its frame, the material it is made of, its size, its colour – all should add impact to your remodeling project.
Related Article:
10 Strategic Renovation Ideas (Part 1)
