Feeling at Home

Say you and your significant other have been lucky enough to land jobs in Ottawa. With the state of today's job market, you should be thrilled. Instead, you're dreading moving out of your comfortable home and into the one the relocation company in Ottawa provided you with. You've seen pictures of it and it's completely unlike your current home and you're sure you'll hate living there. What do you do? Put up with it? Try to find another home? Refuse to take the job? Try none of the above. No matter what you think now, no home is beyond help. For advice in helping turn your house into somewhere you'll actually want to come home to, read on.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a real estate license course to stage a home properly. Regardless, some people never took the time to do so and their homes look unappealing to potential buyers. Therefore the first thing you should do to make your house feel like your home is to remove all traces of the previous owners. With their art, furniture and decorations gone, you can more easily imagine where your existing stuff will fit, and what you'd like to buy to round it out. This process can actually be very exciting and once you've got your own furniture in the place will start to feel more like yours.

Only once you've removed all the staging will you be able to decide if you'll really need to knock down that wall or build a partition in the other room. While you shouldn't be aiming to get your new home to exactly match your old Halton Hills real estate it should at least be functional enough to meet your needs in terms of the number of rooms and their configuration. For instance, if there's a set of stairs leading to the front door and you need a ramp, or the house has three bedrooms but you need four. If that's the case, you may have to look for another house or hire a contractor to do a little work.

The next step is color. The Toronto executive recruiting firm that hired you probably didn't think to pass on what colors you liked along with your resume and cover letter, so your employers either left the house the way the last owners had it or painted everything a bland color like white or cream. The feeling you get from this can range from ugly to institutional, so to remedy it head out to the nearest home improvement store and pick up some swatches. The sooner you can get the walls painted to fit your family's style the sooner it'll start to feel livable.

Once you've got the major issues out of the way it's down to personal touches. Hang up that old 'Home Sale Whitby' realtor sign from your old house in the garage, put a bright blue floor lamp in your living room, or install shelves for your spoon collection in the dining room. Trust us, once all these steps are complete and your stuff is set up, it won't just be a house anymore, it'll be your home.