Want a Cozy Home? Try These 4 Tips for Ultimate Comfort

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Having a comfortable home (even better — a cozy home) is one of the great joys of life, and something that really makes ordinary life so much easier and more enjoyable on the whole. If you are keen to ensure your home is as comfortable as possible, you need to think about how things change throughout the year and act accordingly. In this post, we are going to look at some things that you can think about doing in order to keep your home as comfortable as possible throughout the year.

cozy home; a picture of a bed with fluffy pillows and blankets. There's an open book on the bed, a lamp next to it, and a fiddle leaf fig plant. Above the bed are wall decorations that look like eyelashes. Above that is a shelf with plants.

How to Have a Cozy Home

Get the Right Kind of Furniture

Furniture is always going to be one of the most important things about your home, and vital to look into if you want a cozy home. But what do we mean by suitable?

Simply, it is the furniture that is going to be easy enough to spend time all year round, without getting too hot or too cold. That comes down to the material choice: many people find leather great in the winter, but too sticky in the summer, for instance. For a sofa, your best bet for all-around comfort is normally just to go for a fabric one.

As far as beds are concerned, we’re obsessed with our Sleep Number bed. We’ve had it for about 15 years now, and it’s just as comfortable as the day we bought it. I have a connective tissue disorder (among other things), which is an excruciating, incurable condition. Guess who doesn’t have back pain because of using this bed? ME. We’ll never go with another type of bed.

Mind the Temperature

One thing that you will want to have control over all year round is the temperature, as this ensures that you are going to be a lot happier and more comfortable in the home. Of course, this basically means being able to heat the place in winter and keep it cool in the summer, so you need to have operational heating and cooling systems in place. If you need air conditioning repair carried out, be sure to do that – as well as any furnace repairs that might need doing. It is going to make all the difference.

This morning I woke up to the first snow of the year and noticed our thermostat reads two degrees below the temp we’ve had it set at. This means I’ll need to call an HVAC person to service our furnace. It’s 30 years old, and companies don’t make a lot of the parts anymore. It’s on our list to get a new HVAC system in the spring because of this—we don’t want to wait until we desperately need a furnace for it to go out. However, we may need to bump up our timeline significantly if the parts aren’t in.

Replace Air Filters

The air filters in your heating and cooling systems are always going to need clearing out, otherwise, you might find that you struggle to make them work well for you. You will also end up with dirty air if you don’t clean them, and there is no quicker way to make a home feel uncomfortable than that. So make sure that you are doing all you can to replace the air filters in your HVAC and other systems as often as you might need to. It really will make a profound difference to your home. There’s usually a little panel you can slide off the furnace, so you probably don’t even need to have a technician do it.

Insulate and Ventilate

Finally, two things that really make a difference to the home, no matter what time of the year it is are insulation and ventilation. As long as you have both being looked after, it means that you are going to have a much more cozy home. Insulation and ventilation both keep the place comfortable and easy to maintain and are equally important in winter as in summer, so be sure to keep on top of it and do them.

Depending on your energy provider, they may do free home energy audits to tell you what you can do to keep a more efficient home. For example, we use MidAmerican Energy for our gas, so they came out and checked all kinds of things in our home. They gave us a new thermostat (for free), and a list of things we can do. On that list was insulation, which I was shocked about, considering we live in Iowa. Why on earth wouldn’t the previous owners have put insulation in? We get super hot summers and super cold winters. It just makes little sense. Your home energy audit can catch things like that, so schedule one if you want a cozy home.