Creating A Seasonalized Home: The Ultimate Guide
29th Dec 2022
Welcome to our ultimate guide to seasonalizing your home.
If you want to:
- Simplify your decorating
- Engage the senses in your decor
- Discover the art of seasonalizing
Then you're in the right place.
Seasonalized Home Chapter Guide:
Chapter 1: How to Get More With Less: Five-Senses Decorating
Chapter 2: How to Seasonalize Your Home With Scents
Chapter 3: The Power of Taste in Holiday Decorating
Chapter 4: Enjoy the Holidays More With Textures
Chapter 5: How to Engage the Festive Spirit With Selective Art
Chapter 6: How to Use Sound to Enhance Your Home Decor
Chapter 7: Bonus Pro Tips
How to Get More With Less: Five-Senses Decorating
Decorating for the holidays can be quite a chore. However, if you don’t decorate, your home décor will lack the festive spirit that comes with the holiday. Using the five senses in decorating minimizes how much you need to make your home feel festive.
How Engaging the Senses Heightens Your Décor
Think about your favorite childhood memory. What smells do you remember? Was there food? Our senses and memories are tied, which is why decorating with them enhances the ambiance of our home.
Less is More in Seasonalized Homes
When you decorate with your five senses, you soon realize that you don’t need as many decorations to embrace the holiday. Instead of decorating every nook and cranny of your home with holiday décor, you can play festive music, light a holiday candle, and set out a couple of well-placed holiday pieces that you routinely change out with each holiday or season.
How to Seasonalize
To seasonalize a home, engage the five senses for the season instead of the holiday. For instance, Thanksgiving and Halloween are both in the fall, so most of the décor would be fall themed.
To seasonalize your home for the fall, you would add smells, tastes, textures, sound, and a couple of décor pieces that scream fall to you. This décor might include a flannel blanket, the smell of pumpkin pie, songs that remind you of fall, a couple of fall snacks you enjoy, and some fall leaf decorations.
When you seasonalize a home, you only have to decorate for the four seasons. You can then add a couple of small touches for each holiday, minimizing your holiday setup and take down to a couple of minutes.
How to Seasonalize Your Home With Scents
Our sense of smell is probably one of our more dominant senses. Adding scents that remind you of the season makes a big difference in the overall feel of your home, even if you don’t have any decor specific to a holiday or season.
The Smell of Holiday Cooking
When you think of certain times of the year, you probably think of different foods, but what you first associate with those foods is their smell. One way to replicate these smells is by increasing your holiday cooking. However, you can also increase the holiday smells by simmering seasonal potpourri on the stove or in a crock pot.
Candles, Wall Plugs, and Room Sprays
If you want to make adding seasonal smells even more convenient, find a candle, room spray, or wall plug brand with scents you enjoy. By choosing one of these routes, you can easily add your favorite seasonal smell in a couple of minutes or freshen up a fowl-smelling area, like a guest bathroom.
Hand Soaps & Cleaning Supplies
Another great way to increase seasonal smells is to switch out your cleaners and hand soaps with the new season. For example, you can choose a cleaner that smells like pine trees during the winter, lavender in the spring, lemon in the summer, and spiced apple in the fall. When your cleaners and hand soap smell like the season, they will re-introduce that smell during your regular cleaning, making keeping up with the season a little easier.
The Power of Taste in Holiday Decorating
Everyone has certain foods that remind them of different seasons and holidays. Making sure you have those foods on hand so you can enjoy them is a great way to decorate with your sense of taste.
Holiday Dishes
What holiday dishes do you typically have? Maybe there is a certain jello you have every thanksgiving or ham. Having a few of your favorite dishes on hand will increase the holiday tastes in your home.
Snacks
Holiday or seasonal snacks are a great way to decorate with your sense of taste. Some examples include Halloween candy, nuts, colored M&M's, easter peeps, or seasonal drinks like sparkling cider, hot chocolate, and egg nog.
Baked Goods
Just about every holiday has some baked good that pairs well with it. It could range from a sweet roll, muffin, bagel, pie, or bread you associate with the season. Having your favorite baked goods in the house during the appropriate season will help complete the feel.
Enjoy the Holidays More With Textures
Most don’t think about our sense of touch when decorating, but textures play a significant role. Does a thick blanket feel out of place in the middle of summer? How about a thin decorative blanket in the winter?
Decorative Pillows & Accent Pillowcases
One of the best places to add texture is with pillows. You can purchase accent pillows for each season and a couple for each holiday. Or you can buy pillowcases and save yourself some storage space.
Throw Blankets
Throw blankets are another great way to add some texture to your home. You can put a throw blanket on the edge of a bed, couch, chair, or decorative ladder.
Rugs
While switching main area rugs can get expensive and requires a lot of storage space, switching out a welcome mat is feasible and can bring texture and seasonal charm to your front door. If you want more texture, you could switch out a couple of your smaller indoor rugs each season.
How to Engage the Festive Spirit With Selective Art
Home decor is a great way to decorate for the season and holidays. However, if you have covered even a couple of the other five senses, you don’t need nearly as much visual decor to make your home feel like it fits the season.
Minimalist Decor: Bows, Art Prints & More
One way to bring seasonal decorating into your home without going over the top is by switching out a couple of stationary pieces. For example, you can switch the print in a picture frame that stays in the same place all year long, switch out your hand towels and drying mat, or add some seasonal bows to a few decor items that never get taken down. These small touches can turn your spring home into summer without hours of decorating.
Festive Wall Decals
Wall decals are a great way to add visual appeal to your home decor without taking up a ton of space. You can add Halloween decals to your window or some Christmas wall stickers next to your tree. There is a decal quote for just about everything and adding decal family names to your family room or front door is also a classy way to add a personal touch to your decor.
Front Door Decor
Front door decor is the first thing people see when they come to your home. You can go all out or keep it simple, but keeping it mostly seasonally themed with a couple of holiday pieces that get switched out will make it a lot easier, regardless of how elaborate you like to go with your outdoor decor.
One way to visually decorate your front door is with a door leaner. You can hand paint a door leaner for each season and holiday or apply festive leaner decals. If you want to make it even easier, you can
make a generic welcome leaner, use one leaner and switch out the removable vinyl decals, or decorate each side for a different season.
How to Use Sound to Enhance Your Home Decor
Adding sound to your decor is probably thought of the least, but we use sound quite often. A restaurant or grocery store without background music is an oddity. And if the music in the restaurant matches the decor, it doesn't matter what time of year it is. On the other hand, a grocery store can have minimal decorations but have Christmas music playing and still have a holiday vibe.
Holiday Playlists
When decorating for the holidays with sound, the easiest way is to ask Alexa to play Christmas music, but if you don’t want to leave your music up to chance, you can create holiday playlists on Pandora, YouTube, or Spotify.
Seasonal Playlists
Seasonal playlists are another option if you don’t want to create a playlist for every holiday. However, it does require you to do a little more. Asking Alexa to play fall or spring music may not bring up the type of music you want. You will need to create playlists that remind you of the season or ask Alexa to play sounds that remind you of the season, like rain or bird sounds for spring and cricket sounds for summer.
Seasonal Movies
Seasonal movies playing in the background can also bring in the holiday. Finding Christmas and Halloween movies is the easiest, but some films fit other holidays.
Seasonal movies are a little harder to find. However, there are movies set in the fall, spring, winter, or summer that aren’t specific to a holiday. If you don’t want to watch a movie, but want the vibe it brings, try listening to the soundtrack.
Sound Enhanced Decor Pieces
Another way to add sound to your decorations is to add decor pieces with sound. You can use traditional sleigh bells on a door for Christmas or a cackling witch stirring her brew for Halloween. There are many sound-producing decorations out there.
Bonus Pro Tips For Decorating
Now that we have covered decorating with your five senses, here are a couple of pro tips for decorating.
The Rule of Three in Decorating
The first pro tip is to decorate in odd numbers, also known as the rule of three. To apply this method, you decorate with odd numbers, most commonly in groups of three. To add more interest to your decor, make sure that your decor items have varying heights and sizes.
Storing Decorations
While decorating for the season instead of the holiday does decrease your overall decor, you will still need to store decorations. Thankfully, there are a lot of options for keeping your decorations organized.
Declutter Your Decor
One of the most important decoration storage tips is to declutter old decorations every season. Over time your decorating style will change. To help keep your decorations manageable, you should donate or throw away the decorations you no longer use. The best time to do this is either right after decorating for the season or when you take it down.
Keep Decorations in One Place
It’s tempting to shove decorations in bare cupboards and closets throughout the house or empty spots in the garage, basement, or attic. However, decorating throughout the year will be more manageable if you have all your decorations in the same place.
Additionally, labeling your storage containers and putting the decorations you switch out often, like pillowcases and kitchen towels, in an easy-to-access spot is a good idea for better managing your decor items.
Using What You Have Vs. Buying New Storage Containers
You could use all the original boxes to store your decorations, but that will probably take up more space than you need. The best option is to use storage items you already have and repurpose them for decorations, so you can easily find them later without needing an extra shed.
However, if you want to start from scratch and buy an all-new storage container or organizational system, there are several options on the market. It just depends on the aesthetic you are going for and how much you want to spend. If you decide to buy storage items, measure the area for your decorations before purchasing anything.
Conclusion
This concludes the Custom Vinyl Decor guide to seasonal decorating with our five senses. If you have any questions or comments, please share.
