Your bedroom feels cramped. Your bed and your dresser take up enough room as it is. Squeeze in some drawers, your clothing, and any personal touches, and your bedroom might feel like you’re living in a glorified broom closet. Just because it feels like you’re living in a closet, doesn’t mean that you have to decorate it like one. Make use of your space in the best way possible, with these 7 ways to make your bedroom look bigger.

Driving You Up the Walls

Even if your floor space isn’t all that large, you still have walls, right? Start thinking about using those walls to extend the space available in your room. Get some of your items off the floor. Shelving is a great way to do this. Build them up from floor to ceiling to add some storage and make your space more visually interesting.

Maybe shelves aren’t possible for you, though. If you’re not confident in your ability to nail those shelves in properly, create the illusion of shelves with bookcases that can reach the ceiling. Just one of these will make the room look larger by drawing the eye upwards. If you paint your shelves to be the same color as the wall, it’ll make the room feel even larger, too.

Hang-Ups

Instead of putting all your items on the floor, make use of those walls in another way. You don’t even need shelves for this one if you don’t feel comfortable using them. Instead, figure out how to hang up your items. Add some hooks, hang a few racks on the backs of doors, and so on. Doing all of this will save your floor space for things that you genuinely can’t hang up, like your bed or dresser for instance.

Your Own Illusions

Mirrors: thin, small, yet oh-so important when it comes to making your space look larger. Mirrors are amazing because they can create an illusion of depth if you put them in the right position. Try placing them on either side of the bed or along straight lines. Not only will they widen the space, but they’ll brighten it, too, by reflecting the available light.

Do be sure not to go overboard with the mirrors though. You’re not trying to make a funhouse. All you need are two full-height mirrors carefully placed around your room to add some depth and to save a little floor space.

Brighten It Up

Beyond mirrors, a great way to brighten your room is to change the color. Dark colors have a penchant for causing small places look even smaller. Lighter colors have the opposite effect. Pick out something like white, cream, or grey when it comes to decorating your room. A coat of paint really does go a long way. Even comfortable bed sheets are an amazingly affordable option to brighten up your room.

Now, you may think this is boring. Most people don’t want their room to be hospital white, but it will improve your space and give you a nice blank canvas to add pops of colors elsewhere. Use a bright bed spread along with the wall color or add in some funky throw pillows.

Show Your Floor

There are a few ways to do this. First: remove your clutter. If you have clothes everywhere or boxes set around, it only makes sense that your room will look smaller. Don’t just move small items that only work to take up space, remove anything else that doesn’t need to be on the floor.

If you can get away with having only your bed and bedside table taking up floor space, that would be ideal. Instead of storing things like computers and washing baskets in your room, try to find other places for those items.

Show your floor with furniture that’s raised as well. If your bed is raised a bit, you’ll be able to see all the way to the edge of the room, which will automatically make your space look larger without items interrupting your sight.

Trick Yourself

You know that your space is small, but your brain doesn’t need to register that every time you step into your room. Influence your own perception by changing the flow of the interior to be more vertically-focused rather than horizontally. You already know how to do this by hanging your items up on your walls, but you can also do this with decorative pieces.

Add a wallpaper or pattern behind your bed or on one of your narrower walls. With the right choice of design, you can convince yourself that the space is bigger every time you step in.

Don’t Block Your Walkways

You can add colors everywhere or hang all your items up, but the second you put something in a space like a doorway, your room will automatically feel smaller. If you need to squeeze yourself out of your own room, you’ll always feel like you’re entering a small, cramped space.

The arrangement of your furniture makes a big difference, even if you only have a few major pieces that you’re placing.

Conclusion

You live in a small room. That’s the truth for many of us, but that doesn’t mean that you need to feel like you’re squeezing yourself into a closet when you just want to relax at the end of the day. Decorate your room to make it look larger than it really is. With just a little mastery of design and these space-saving options, you’ll forget why it ever felt small.

Sebastian Morales is Founder and CEO of Good & Bed. Prior to Starting Good & Bed, Sebastian was an investment banker based in New York City

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