Open a new Excel sheet, mark out goals in your journal, focus on what is currently relevant, and take a deep breath. Tidhar has a few tips that will help you make planning your apartment a fun, pleasant, and efficient process. Here are some tips from the experts.
Bought an apartment? Congratulations! Start planning.
To enjoy an apartment that will serve you and your lifestyle to the fullest, you should devote enough time to planning and personal adjustments to avoid any future stress. In this time, you can collect enough information and inspiration, give proper thought to each decision and choice, and – just as importantly – enjoy the process.
Here are a few tips to make your apartment planning extremely efficient:
- Make a List
Include in this “shopping list” everything you want and need to do in your home, and everything you dream of and are used to doing.
Even if you aren’t aware of it, you have habits and rituals that you engage in at various times while you’re at home. The place you put your bag when you get home, for instance, or where you sit to have your first coffee of the day.
When buying a new apartment, we should start examining our lives from the outside to identify these habits and rituals that make up our daily lives. If we put them on the list, we can better plan to accommodate the way we live. Identifying our habits, by the way, can also help understand which dreams we can make a reality, and which only look good on paper.
- Make Choices
Make decisions related to your views on life and devote some of the time allotted to planning to discussing them as a couple or as a family, gathering information, and consulting with experts. For instance: will your kids be sharing a room? Will the kitchen be open or closed? Will the dinette be part of the kitchen or its own space? Should you cancel the guest bathroom?
- Measurements and Distances
During the planning stage you’ll receive the apartment’s plans and internal divisions. If you have any furniture that you plan on moving into the new apartment, you should measure it to ensure that it fits into all the rooms that you planned to place them in. If anything doesn’t fit, it’s better to find that out in this stage and deal with it accordingly.
- Finding a Lid for Every Pot
If you’ve planned properly, you already know which room will serve what purpose. When you go shopping for your new place, make sure to match the size of the room and locations of its fixed elements to the furniture you buy. Make sure, for example, that the bed you’ve picked fits the bedroom space you’ve designated for it, that there’s enough room for dressers on either side, that its width doesn’t obstruct any doors (closets, entrance), and that its headboard doesn’t obscure part of the window.
- Here and Now
When planning your apartment, don’t try to account for future factors that might be part of your life in a decade or two. Whether you’re a young family of five or a couple moving into a new apartment after the kids have moved out, plan your apartment for a maximum range of five years in advance.
We recommend focusing on the present not just in planning the rooms and their purposes but in the style of design, the choice of materials, and the color palette. Every category has the safe, classic choice and the choice that will put a smile on your face. True, you won’t tire of light, sandy hues in ten years’ time, but if your favorite color is orange, it’s worth thinking of a way to incorporate it into the space.
- Just One Consultant
You can ask everyone you know what they think of the flooring tiles you’ve picked out for the kids’ bathroom, for instance; you will almost certainly hear as many opinions as the number of people you ask. In our experience, this is a surefire way to get mixed up. Therefore, we recommend asking only one’s or two people’s advice.
Disclaimer: Everything said in this post is strictly a recommendation. Culpability for use of any products purchased as a result of this recommendation lies solely with the purchasing party.
