Improving your home can make it a nicer place to live.

Improving your home can make it a nicer place to live.

The two most common home improvements are new kitchens and new bathrooms, for a variety of reasons. Few people replace their living room or bedroom regularly, but kitchens and bathrooms have so many fixtures and fittings that can quickly become dated, as there are constant advances in design.

When you’re improving a kitchen, you’re probably most interested in the decoration – function is important to some extent, but in the end kitchens work very similarly, and most modern fitted kitchens will have similar facilities. What you’re looking for is a kitchen that you like the look of, and that suits your style. Metallic kitchens are quite fashionable at the moment, and are worth taking a look at, but there’s nothing to say that you have to blindly follow fashion.

While bathroom improvements might seem similar at first glance (they are often sold in the same showrooms, after all), they tend to be much more about function than aesthetics. Yes, no-one wants an ugly bathroom, but most people who upgrade their bathrooms are doing it because they want a better bath or a better shower from a practical point of view. A popular improvement recently is to turn part of your bathroom into a shower room – it can be very nice if you have room, but don’t try to squeeze it into too tight a space.

Of course, plenty of people also embark on much larger home improvement projects, such as extensions (including conservatories). This might be to add a bigger or extra bedroom onto your house, or a home office, or simply to make your living room larger. As you can’t just buy extensions in a shop, you need to consult a professional architect and a builder first, but don’t worry – a good one will be willing to listen to your needs and ideas and make something unique and great for you.