Feeling squeezed in your house? With HDB flats, condominiums and houses getting smaller over the years in land-scarce Singapore, you will be amazed by how these tips can brighten up your house. Here are 10 home décor tips and ideas to brighten up your house for a bigger and nicer home. Your claustrophobic friend will now have no fear entering your house anymore!

We present to you 10 home décor tips and ideas to brighten up your house for a bigger and nicer home.

ONE: Ditch overhead lights

Overhead lights are common and easy to apply, but they are not enough to illuminate the whole of your room! Try using smaller lamps to spread the light around, drawing the eye around the room. This will make your room look bigger and brighter!

TWO: Rethink your paint colours

The easiest way to brighten up a room is to give it a clean, crisp look with soft white shades! Use light colours on the walls and floor like soft peach, apple blossom, casa and white dove for a clean and spacious look.

If your room lacks of natural lighting, be bold and brighten up dark spaces with a splash of bright colours! You do not have to paint the whole room, but you could choose a side of the wall that is most eye catching and enhance it with a bold colour that complements your furniture.

THREE: MIRRORS MIRRORS MIRRORS

Placing a mirror across the window is the best way to reflect lights. Choose a strategic place in your homes for a mirror to create illusion of more space and reflect more light!

FOUR: Task lightings!

Instead of having an overhead lighting in your rooms, try having extra lightings for specific areas! They could be over desks, over stoves, near couches and beds. This could highlight different areas and showcase simple details of your home.

FIVE: Use wall-mounted shelving

Instead of having a lot of furniture cluttering in your home, try looking at wall mounting ones to tidy up the area. With wall-mounted shelves, you get to see more areas of the floor and that makes your house bigger and brighter!

This is especially useful for small flats where there are limited spaces to place your furniture. With wall-mounted shelves, it opens up more space for walking.

SIX: Open up a dark ceiling with recessed lighting fixtures

If you like dark colours, or you are trying to create an industrial feel for your room, do remember to add a handful of pendant lights to brighten your room! They are like a decorative spotlight, without the harsh brightness for a comfortable room.

SEVEN: Wall art

Empty walls could be plain and boring. Do consider having some wall art to brighten up the atmosphere! They are really simple and fun to do during your free time.

You could use some scrapbooking paper to make a decal to decorate empty walls in your house to enhance the looks.

You could also decorate your walls with marquee letters! They are getting more popular in recent years for parties, weddings and photo shoots. Consider having them in your home to brighten up the atmosphere for a cheery room!

Learn to make them here! (Hover over for link: http://www.hgtv.com/design/make-and-celebrate/handmade/how-to-marquee-letter-sign)!

EIGHT: Variety is key

Having too much light focused at one point could cause light fatigue and it distracts people from the details of the room. Keep parts of a room at different brightness level to prevent lighting fatigue.

Use a range of lighting in varied heights and locations to show variations and diversify their attention. This could also include having a mixture of warm lights and spotlights to focus on specific art or detail in the room.

NINE: Vertical lines carpet

Having stripes on your carpet or rugs can make a room look bigger with an illusion of more floors! What’s more is that, they often come with many colours, which open up the possibilities of having more colour options to decorate your room for a uniformed look.

TEN: PLANTS!

Houseplants bring nature indoors with colour and texture, and they can be surprisingly easy to maintain. They also have a purifying effect that can help to improve the air quality at home. These plants are surely going to brighten up your house for a livelier atmosphere.

Sansevieria (left), more commonly known as Snake plant, or Mother-in-law’s tongue, is a good option as it thrives with low light and steamy humid conditions!

Epipremnum aureum, widely known as money plant, is arguably the easiest houseplant to grow! Be sure that you have enough space as it can reach 40 feet or more in good tropical conditions. However it usually confines itself to 6 – 10 feet in containers. The good thing is that it is tolerant of low light conditions and erratic watering, and it tops the list of purifying plant! What an ideal houseplant to have!

Tell us how you like these ideas and drop some of your own at the comments below!