I’m an advocate of people spending more time thinking about how to improve the normal parts of their lives. We often invest in the showy things: a new car, a fancy vacation, or nice clothes. While these things can be great, most of the free time in your life will be spent doing ordinary things in the most ordinary of places: your house.
Therefore, in my mind, one of the highest returns on investment you can make is turning your house into a home you love to be in. If your home is cozy and inviting, then you can turn mundane evenings into beautiful experiences that you look forward to. Thankfully, I’ve found that it doesn’t take much money to transform your house in this way—it’s more about being intentional than anything else.
6 Ways to Transform a House Into a Welcoming Home
Our home is currently filled with the energy of five young, active children, so you can be sure the lessons I’ve learned are battle-tested. They certainly don’t require perfect conditions or an abundance of maintenance time. Here is what has worked best for us:
1. Comfortable Blankets and Pillows
A huge part of having a cozy home is making it comfortable to lounge around. Instead of fancy pillows and throw blankets that are clearly just for show, fill your home with items that beg to be felt and used. Leave them on couches and chairs, but also in baskets in every room—a sign to all that your house is a place to linger.
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2. Cook With Pleasant Aromas
There’s probably no faster way to make a home feel inviting than to throw a few cookies in the oven or fry up some food in the skillet. Where there is food, there is life, and I think our brains recognize this at an instinctual level.
3. Warm, Ambient Lighting
Lighting affects you whether you consciously recognize it or not. It may seem intimidating to try to get it right, but good lighting is very forgiving, and you really only need two rules. The first is to use as much natural light as possible: open the windows wide and let that beautiful light in. The second is to add more sources of side lighting and rely less on overheads.
4. Let Fresh Air Flow
One big turn-off in a home is stale air that maybe smells like yesterday’s food or a heaping pile of laundry. Besides keeping things tidy, one of the best things you can do is to open your windows as often as the weather allows. Even in the dead of winter, my wife will open a bunch of windows in our house for about half an hour to restore that fresh air smell.
5. Display Memories
A decorated home can be a welcoming one, but you don’t want it to look like a Target or Ikea catalog. This happens when you predominantly decorate with new, generic items and try to match styles too perfectly. Instead, decorate with books you’re reading, pictures you’ve taken, and items you’ve collected along the way—a nice mix of old and new. These flourishes will naturally make your house an extension of yourself, and people will feel more at home.
6. Welcome Others
I would be remiss not to mention the number one way to turn your house into a home: fill it with those you love most. In the past several years, as we’ve added more children to our family, we’ve also been more intentional about hosting family and friends for meals. The result is a home that is regularly bustling with energy.
Since I work from home and my wife homeschools our children, you can walk into our home at nearly any hour of the day and see people doing life together—which, to me, is the best mark of a home.
Building a happy home is one of the greatest ambitions you can have. The world can be a hard and unforgiving place, and it takes effort to carve out a spot where you and your loved ones can feel safe and at peace. Every act of homemaking—whether it’s a warm meal, a made bed, or a picture that evokes memories of happy times—brings order out of the chaos that surrounds us and creates a place where people feel they belong.
