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Tips to make a room look bigger.

Updated: Dec 4, 2020


XXL and Grande boards. longer boards, wider boards, random length boards all affect the look and size of a room. So do colour and light in a space. Here are some tips to make the most of your space using a few illusions.





Colour

Dark colours tend to absorb light making a room look smaller. For an optimum effect, select soft tones of off-white, blue and green, these colours recede away from the eye and create a sense of space. Remember that brighter rooms look bigger and more inviting. Try painting your wall trim and mouldings in a lighter colour than your walls. Painting one wall a dark colour can make a room seem longer, whereas vertical stripes can make it seem taller.

Also painting the ceiling with a shiny gloss or metallic paint can make the room look taller and the ceiling bigger. Of course, using all of these tips at once may make the room far too busy, so its best to use these tricks in minimal amounts.


The size of your room

If you have a large room, then long, fixed-length boards will reinforce the size of your room and may even work to make it look bigger.  If this is what you want to achieve, then choosing long, fixed-length boards aren’t an issue.  However, if you want to make a cavernous room appear smaller, then there’s no getting away from the fact that either short, fixed-length boards or random boards will achieve that objective better.


Small rooms. If you have a small room, wide boards will give an impression of greater volume to your room, particularly if they are light coloured.


Big rooms. In big rooms, you can normally get away with either narrow or wide wood floorboards, but ironically, while wide boards will make a small room look bigger, they can also make a big room seem smaller.  In big rooms, where you want the room to seem more proportioned, it is a clever trick to mix wide and narrow boards to create an illusion of bringing in the walls.  For example, if your room is rectangular, you could create a rectangle of either wide or narrow boards in the middle of your room where the sides run parallel to the walls.  Thereafter, you could place a border of the opposite type of board around the outside.  That’s to say, if you’ve created a central rectangle with narrow boards, you could create the border with the wide boards or vice versa.  Cutting your room up in this way will cleverly reduce the impression of volume and add interest to your décor at the same time.


Narrow rooms. A clever way to make narrow rooms seem wider is to use wide boards that are laid perpendicular (at right angles) to the long side of your room. The effect of this will be that your room will seem immediately wider.


Long rooms. In the same way, that wide boards laid perpendicular to the long side of narrow rooms will make the room look wider, wide boards laid perpendicular to the long side of long rooms will make them look shorter.


While all of these effects are only visual rather than actual, the right choice of the board can make a huge difference to the look of both your décor and your room size or dimension.  All of that said, with the immense choice of boards that are available today, making the right choice for your project can seem overwhelming. 


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