Winter holidays with all their bright decorations are over, and Spring with its open doors and fresh flowers to bring inside is not quite here, so a home can sometimes become almost sad in its appearance. This is when it is fun to find ways to liven and brighten a home with bringing the outside in. If you enjoy creating a home with character and seasonal beauty, you can try the following suggestions:
- How about some fresh paint? Find an area, maybe just a bathroom or a hallway and bring in bright outside colors such as yellow, sky blue, or soft green.
- Hang pictures or posters depicting sunny, outdoor scenes. It is fun to have areas such as a family room where the wall art can be changed seasonally. If there are children in the home, have them create a wall mural with an outdoor theme. Water-based paint, markers, or even pictures cut from old magazines and glued on poster board make great mural compositions.
- Again, if there are children in the home, go on a family nature walk and collect interesting rocks, leaves, wood pieces, and maybe even early flowers to create a nature display.
- Attractive bowls, dishes, baskets, boxes, and jars can be filled with fragrant potpourri. You can purchase the smell your family loves, such as Mom’s Apple Pie, Rose Garden, Pine Woods, or Sweet Meadow, or you can make your own potpourri. To make potpourri use dried flowers that contain a scent, or you can add a few drops of fragrance or essential oils. Mix dried flower petals with other materials found outside, such as small pinecones, small pieces of bark, seed pods, and dried berries. Recommended flowers to use include lavender, rosebuds, scented geranium, pansies, larkspur, and dianthus. Whole cloves, cinnamon sticks, dried citrus rinds, and nutmeg berries are also pleasant additions for a spicy scent. As a final touch, add a fixture which will help the scent of your potpourri mix last longer. About ten percent of the mix should be a fixture such as orris root, vanilla beans, myrrh gum, angelica root, or oakmoss.
- Growing plants inside such as gardenia, miniature roses, and fragrant lilies add scent as well as color. Spring bulbs such as tulips, daffodils, and narcissus can also be grown indoors to bring an early touch of outside Spring inside.
- And, in case you are on a tight budget for both money and time, a trip to the local dollar store will allow you to purchase a wonderful variety of Spring artificial flowers. Attractively arranged, these flowers and potted plants can brighten up any room in your home.
So, you can see, there is no need to feel down or dreary at this time of year. Perk up your home; bring the outside in; enjoy an early Spring.
