5 Ways to Hide Eyesores in Your Home

You put a lot of effort into designing and decorating your home, so when something purely functional—like an AC unit or a radiator—causes a painful eyesore in your home, you can’t help but be frustrated. And while we need these things in our house, we don’t have to live with the distracting effect that they can have on our space.

Though you may have grown to begrudgingly live with some of these unsightly items in your home, we’ve rounded up the best ways to cover them, so you can focus on making your house look more like this one from Sugar & Cloth. Whether you want to cover up that dusty old fuse box or you want to never see a popcorn ceiling again, these are our favorite ideas.

Air conditioners are great for cooling down your home, but they can have a chilling effect on your carefully considered design scheme—especially for apartment-dwellers who don’t want to spend the winter months staring their AC in the face. Good news: With a little effort, you can tuck any AC behind an attractive cover, like this DIY’d one from Vintage Meets Glam. Take a simple box frame, some laser-cut wood panels from Michael’s and a bit of white paint, and you’ve got an AC cover with a bit of vintage flair.

Who knew air conditioners could be glam? This DIY from blogger Adventures of an Almost 40 Year Old Intern proves even the ugliest, most style-free parts of your home can be a blank canvas for creativity. This gold-flecked design comes together with some wood (get it cut to size), decorative paper, spray paint and gold disks, for a look that’s reminiscent of hammered metal or a nailhead trim.

While we’ve been focusing on window ACs so far, anyone with central air knows that outdoor units can be a real blight on your perfectly manicured backyard. Fear not: There’s a solve for that. One idea we love is this enclosure from Ugly Duckling House, which repurposes pieces of a picket fence to hide an outdoor unit. While you’ll need some serious woodworking skills to execute this one, you’ll thank yourself the next time you throw a backyard barbecue.

Creaky old radiators are right up there with air conditioners when it comes to common at-home eyesores—and buying a big, boxy radiator cover can feel a little bit like replacing one design blight with another. So why not create a charming distraction, like a wooden shelf that hangs just above your radiator? Coco Lapine Design’s narrow, mid century-inspired shelf is set off at the perfect height to draw the eye away from the radiator and toward an array of artful knickknacks, and it couldn’t be simpler to DIY. Just be sure to allow for some separation between the radiator and the bottom of the shelf—the last thing you want is an accidental fire hazard.

Not up for creating a radiator cover from scratch? Take this shoe rack-meets-radiator cover from Engineer Your Space as inspiration, and hack an existing piece of furniture to repurpose it as a stylish (but functional) form of camouflage. IKEA dressers can work well—just cut a radiator-sized hole in the back, replace the doors on one side with a grate, and voilà!

Sopurce: thespuce.com

Collected and published by propertyeportal.com editorial team. Get in touch with us at [email protected]