10 Ways To ELEVATE Your Home 🏠 Designer Worthy Home Hacks!

Hi, welcome back to the channel. Drew here from Lone Fox and today we are doing a 10 ways video, which I love these kinds of videos. I find so much useful information whenever I watch these or come across them on YouTube. So today I'm going to be sharing with you guys 10 ways to elevate your home from the Lone Fox perspective, I guess you could say. I've actually done a couple of these in the past and they were when I actually lived in my rental apartment. So I've been living in my house for about seven months now and I've owned it for almost a year, which is crazy to think, but there's definitely things that I feel like I have learned and picked up on and have done in this house that have elevated it, that I've wanted to share with you guys that you can implement into your own home. And I hope there's at least one hack in this video that you feel confident or inspired to actually implement in your own home. And of course, the main way you can elevate your home is shopping my home decor site, LoneFox.com. I never talk about it here on the channel, but I work so much on it and I feel like it's in such a cool spot. There's so many really cool pieces over on the site and there's a fly flying around. So I will link at the top of the description box below. And then right under this video, I'll put a bunch of my random favorite products that you guys can shop. So if you have not checked out Lone Fox in a while, throwing in that shameless plug, but let's get into tip number one. Our first tip is one I have mentioned on the channel before. This works in rental friendly spaces, this works in a home, this works anywhere you need to cover up some windows. And that is just making sure that your curtains are floor to ceiling. Like I feel like I cannot stress this enough is how much of an impact floor to ceiling curtains really make. I actually just recently did my friend Trevor's space, as you guys saw, and his curtain rod, they mounted it just right above the window, which I don't know why people do that. It's just such an instinctual thing to mount it directly above the window. But if you can mount it as high as you possibly can with your curtain still falling and hitting the ground at a good level, or even like puddling a little bit at the bottom, always looks the best. So if you have the option to raise your curtain rod, or if you can raise it, or if you need to get new curtains to make them taller, it always will just make your walls look and feel taller. So the room that you're in, it's just going to just feel grander. It's kind of going to have a taller look visually, just because your eyes actually drawn up from like the linear lines hanging in the curtains. And I just overall feel like floor to ceiling curtains are no brainer, one of the easiest ways to elevate a space. My second tip is all about color, and that is just incorporating color into design. And I feel like a lot of people are scared to incorporate color. It's definitely a little bit more challenging because when you buy something that is colorful, like you're stuck with that colorful item. So sometimes it's easier to think about, oh, like I'd rather have a neutral piece that I can style in multiple places. But incorporating color is a really great way to make the space feel more intentional and make it look like you really thought it out. And like these pieces were purchased because they go together and they create this story in this space. So some really easy ways to do this is through items that are returnable. So things like throw pillows, rugs, throw blankets, things that can add a lot of color, but aren't things like paint that are kind of not returnable. Like I mean, you could totally go back and paint over the top of the color, but I've kind of come to learn that I always need to desaturate the color that I'm going to go for a little bit. So if there's a shade that I really like, and it's the one that I sat on, like this is what I want the wall to look like. I always desaturate it like one or two shades. Just on the color card, I kind of go up or down depending on what's a little bit more grayer or a little bit more duller because on a large space, it's going to look much more intense. So always remember colors are going to look much more intense on a full wall than on a little swatch. So you might want to test out a couple options that are more bright and more dull. We are going into rug sizes because rug sizes can be a challenge. It's one of my most asked questions. I feel like whenever I do like a live or I have a question, a Q&A is like, what size rug should I get for my space? And I feel like a good rule of thumb for picking out a rug is first of all, it needs to fit in your space. So make sure that you measure your space and the rug is adequate for the space, but you also want like at least all of your furniture to be on the rug, at least the front legs of it, if that makes sense. So sometimes I'm designing like a smaller living room where the sofa might be on the rug and then just the front legs of the chairs are on the rug. And I feel like that looks really nice, but the second anything falls outside of the rug or is off the rug, it kind of feels disconnected from the space. And another thing is that no rug is better than too small of a rug. I am not someone that is a fan of like a small little rug and the couch is like off of it and then the chairs are off of it and there's like a coffee table on it, like a little rug for your coffee table. It might look good, but overall it's actually minimizing and making your space, like the scale of your space, feel a lot smaller because nothing's on top of the rug. Like if you put a full area rug in a room and you put all the furniture in place, it's really going to make the room feel more expansive as opposed to if you didn't have one. Or if you had a smaller one, a lot of times it makes and kind of tricks the eye into making the room look smaller. Honestly, as long as the rug fits in the room, you really can't have too big of a rug, but you definitely can have too small of a rug. Tip number four is about getting your pieces from different places. Really try to break it up and find pieces that are unique, one of a kind, use Facebook marketplace, thrifting, antiquing, just wherever you can add elements of either handmade or more of a one of a kind element. It's really going to make your space stand out compared to what you can find in a lot of big box retailers. So for example, going out to Crate & Barrel and spending all of your money on this dining room and all the decor and all of the accessories for it, it's just going to really make it feel like a Crate & Barrel showroom piece. And I just think if you could at least try to incorporate like 40% of different items, so you have like 60% of one store as your base, at least incorporate 40% of other pieces just to kind of mix throughout a good mix of new and vintage is what I always like to do. I try to do like a 50-50 blend of new and vintage, but I've been steering on the lines of vintage a little bit more lately. Which honestly leads into tip number five, all about integrating vintage and antique into your home. I feel like a lot of people think when they hear the word antique or they hear the word vintage instantly, the piece is expensive. And that is definitely not the case. Vintage and antique more so refers to how old the piece is. And I feel like a lot of people like, oh, antiques, they're so expensive. I'm not shopping at an antique store, but that is not the case because I have found some incredible antiques. This is an antique French club chair that I got for under $500 on Facebook marketplace, over a hundred years old. There has been so many comments that I've gotten on past videos of people that might be stumbling across my videos, or they just found a video or something and they're like, gosh, I've never wanted to go flea market shopping or antique shopping because I feel like everything's haunted. And you just have to think of it from a different perspective that these were pre-loved pieces. Like the person couldn't take them with them anymore, so they had to go somewhere. They went to the flea market or to the antique store and you're just giving them a second life. And a lot of times those pieces have such great character, it really looks like they've lived through like a lifetime. And you can really find some cool, unique pieces for sure. Like my house is filled with one of a kind, like vintage pieces that I've just sourced and I've collected. This entire mantle is all pottery that I kind of have collected over the past year of purchasing my home. This was one of my more recent makeovers. And after a year of collecting, I finally had enough to put up on this mantle here. And it really wasn't too expensive because I was able to find them all at flea markets and thrift stores and antique shops at price points that I felt reasonable for the pieces. So just think about next time you're going out shopping at Target or you're going out shopping at your favorite home decor store. Maybe stop by an antique store or a thrift store. Try to find some pieces that you could supplement for some pieces that you might be purchasing at a big box retailer. Swapping out your light fixtures, whether they are rental grade, they are old, they are just not the aesthetic. Like a light fixture really is sometimes the focal in a room. Like when you walk in, a lot of times a light fixture is almost at eye level. So it's one of the first things that you see when you walk in a room. And you can have a lot of fun with light fixtures as well. I've gotten a bunch of light fixtures on Facebook Marketplace. I've shopped at antique stores and vintage stores that have really unique light fixtures. And you can also have almost anything wired into a light fixture. So if you saw like a cool form or you saw this really great bowl, or you saw like, I don't know, something, an iron swirly situation, you're like, I want to hang that above my coffee table. You can always have somebody actually like add lights to it and figure out how to wire it up. Always consider, even if you're in a rental apartment, you could take off those light fixtures and store them in a place that's safe and add your own light fixtures, whether it be some vintage ones or maybe some that you found on Facebook Marketplace or online. And then you can put them back when you leave. But it's a great way to enhance and just make the overall feel of your space a little more elevated because lighting really is a huge component to a elevated space. A little unrelated but also related is the use of table lamps and floor lamps. So there was this whole kind of trend going on. Not turning on the big light is what everyone was calling it as the overhead light and utilizing just like sconces and table lamps and floor lamps for more of that ambient glow. And I love that. But I also do love a ceiling light. So consider different lighting sources. You can have sconces, you can have a table lamp, you can have a floor lamp. You can even have sconces that don't work because it's your home. Like if you don't need them to function, but you want it to look pretty, just put them on the wall. No one's going to know they don't turn on. Tip number seven is on the newer side for myself with this house. And that is finding an area that you can implement built-ins because built-ins always look completely custom and fully built into your space. So it kind of looks like the contractor or the architect took like a design feature in your home and created this like built-in section, which is exactly what I did in the upstairs living room. But a great way you can do this is actually just using pre-done bookcases. So for mine, I just use the Ikea Billy bookcases, but there are a lot of different bookcases that you can order online where you can connect them together, find the ones that fit your space and then just retrim the front of them. So apply like trim boards on the front of all of your bookcases and it's going to give it so much more of that custom built-in look. And then you're going to paint it the same color as the wall. And I just love the way a built-in can transition a space. Even if you have the smallest little area, a little tiny nook, you can add shelves across that. You can do it in an arch shape if you want to, to kind of give more of that Spanish feel. I have like a really pretty arched built-in over here. My friend Erica, I love what she did because she had this tiny little wall jut out, almost like it was part of a cased opening, but it was just in the middle of her living room. So she actually extended it a little bit and then was able to use that as a side of her built-ins and put them all across a living room wall, which I thought was really clever. So you can kind of look around your space as well and think of different ways and maybe look at some of the corners and some of the little pop-outs in the walls and think about how you can maybe incorporate a built-in shelving. There could be like a little cutout that you might've never even thought to just add some shelves across and you have a focal feature in your space. Art is another humongous focal of a room. It's again, something that you see at eye level when you walk in. You see a light fixture and you see wall decor usually when you're walking into a space. And artwork also can really kind of create a mood. It can set a tone in the room and it can also give you kind of like the direction of the space as well. But I really do love incorporating real artwork in terms of old oil paintings. I'm always hunting for them at the flea market or on Etsy. You could find some every now and then or on eBay. So never look past artwork because it is a great way to fill in blank space. It is a great way to add color to a space. If you're one that doesn't do color very well, you can do it with artwork and it's also a great way to change up your space often. If you're someone that gets kind of bored of your living room, swap out your prints every now and then you have a new color palette in your space. This tip's kind of come up recently on the channel throughout the couple past makeovers ever since I found the product Feed & Wax. And I'm including this because the way that Feed & Wax can take furniture from looking so drab and dreary to looking so high-end and just produced is unreal. Like you can wipe this orange oil and like beeswax product that I buy on Amazon, which I'll link below for you guys. It's literally called Feed & Wax. I put it on a cloth and you can put it on anything that's wood. So people do it on their wood floors. You can do it on wooden furniture. Like I could do it on this lamp if I wanted to. It evens out the tone, it evens out the grain, it makes the grain pop. It just overall adds like this vibrancy to the wood and this like new life. It also rehydrates it at the same time. So a lot of times if you see like old and kind of like dry looking wood, you can apply this and it kind of gives it a fresh feel and a fresh look, which I like. So just consider conditioning your wood furniture because I'm sure many of you guys haven't conditioned your wood furniture in a long time because I know I hadn't before I found Feed & Wax and it really, it elevates the pieces, I will say. One, the little fireplace cover here, it had a big scratch across the front of it and I thought I was going to have to like restain the whole thing, but the Feed & Wax literally buffed the scratch right out. It looks like it was never there. This last tip is all about the small things because you never want to overlook the small little details. They really do make the biggest impact. There's so many times when I'm doing a space when Justin and I are working on it and there's even just the tiniest little bit of paint that is out of the line. When you go touch that up, it is crazy how big of like touch-ups and tiny little tweaks and tiny little details that you go back in and just fix really do make an impact on the overall look of a space. So for example, there is a light bulb tone that a lot of people like, which is between 2,700 Kelvin and 3,000 Kelvin, which actually gives you like a really soft-ish warm white light, which is really pretty in a space. Coordinating the finishes of your hardware is also a great one. For example, in my kitchen, I did my pot rack, I did it as brass, and then I also did the cabinet hardware as brass, and the actual faucet fixture was brass as well, but I did go in with some copper as you guys saw in the dishwasher area and with the copper pots. That's just because I really love a mixed metal look. Swapping out your light or your outlet covers is something small that you might not think about, but it is something that can make an impact, and they even have really beautiful ones now that are made out of brass and even paintable ones so you can make them match your wall. And those are 10 ways that I have found are perfect ways to elevate your home, whether you are living in a rental space, whether you're living in a home with your friend, with your mom, whatever it might be, there are little things that you can do or just little things you can keep in mind next time you're decorating your space or even just cleaning it up that you might be able to incorporate from this video. And if you like this one, I would love for you guys to subscribe to my channel. I post brand new home decor videos every single week here on Lone Fox, and you can also follow me over on TikTok and Instagram. Both of them are at LoneFoxHome, so you can't forget to check out the website, LoneFox.com. I actually just recently created a little Drew's Projects tab at the top, which is really cute, and you can click on it and it shows a bunch of my projects in terms of like gallery photos. So if you've ever wanted to see more in-depth photos of like this room, for example, or the upstairs living room or the kitchen, they're all over on the website. I finally created like a cool gallery. I love the way that it's looking so far, and I will catch you all in my next one. Bye, guys.