So you want to make your house a home? Prepare to transform your vision into reality.

Sometimes a collaboration is just a natural fit—like ours with building product supplier BuildDirect.com. Yesterday, they allowed us to contribute a guest blog posts (which can be found here), and today it’s our turn to spread the word on our end.

BuildDirect.com Content and Social Media Manager Rob Jones talks about nurturing your vision and transforming it into what you’d like your home to look like.

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A dream home exists in our imaginations, and perhaps has existed there since we were kids. As we get older, and as economic realities begin to intrude on that vision we’d made for ourselves, maybe the idea of a dream home becomes more about the “dream” than it does the “home.”

But, does that have to be the case?

Well, yes and no. If we dreamed of a huge sprawling mansion complete with features that border on the fanciful where our actual budgets are concerned, then maybe a little revision is what is needed. Even dreams need to grow a bit, as we ourselves grow our own understanding about what building a home means. Luckily, in the 21st century, the idea of excessive luxury isn’t really the ticket anyway.

But, what is?

Tile floors can transform an ordinary room into something extraordinary.

Simplicity and elegance are the best home improvements

Well, it’s the simple things. It’s the subtleties. It’s the things we perhaps missed when we were younger, and dreaming of the home we’d live in off in the future somewhere.

It’s the light fixtures that add a touch of warmth and subtle style. It’s the bathroom faucets that hint at the touch of class we’re looking to create in our bathrooms. It can be the simplest additions like door knockers and other hardware accessories that make the mundane into something that can catch our attention in the quiet moments, and that make our spaces, in whatever capacity and no matter how small, into our own unique homes.

Even larger items like flooring, new countertops or vanity tops, or decking materials for big renovation projects are just a means to an end. We don’t invest in home improvement materials for the materials themselves. It’s not really what we’re buying that makes our home into our dream home. There is a bigger picture.

Home improvement is about transformation

What we’re really after is a vision, that idea that exists in our imaginations. We’re looking to take what we have in front of us, and transform it into what we imagine it could be, little by little. Examining what that means and which projects to focus on to take us where we’re looking to go are our chief concerns as we improve our homes.

When we concentrate on the details, the little stylistic and functional flourishes that can add so much to our spaces, what we’re doing is injecting our personalities into our homes, and strengthening our connections to them. The good news here is that this attitude is both fashion-proof, and recession-proof. We don’t need to spend and spend to help us move toward the home we’ve always dreamed about. And we don’t need anyone else to set the pace.

The little things, the small projects that add the right touch of aesthetic and practical value, make building a dream home into a pleasant journey, and not a stressful race.

How do you make a house a home? Transform your current home into the one of your dreams.

Transformation is another way to own our homes

When we define what our own idea of a dream home means, then we add a new layer of ownership to our homes. In this, a dream home can take any form we choose. That’s the real power behind a successful home improvement project, whether large or small. We don’t have to inherit someone else’s dream.

We are free to create our own.

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Rob Jones is the Content and Social Media Manager for BuildDirect, and Editor-in-Chief of the BuildDirect blog. BuildDirect is an online building materials company that started in 1999, offering customers high quality flooring, tile, kitchen & bath surfaces, and outdoor living materials for affordable and durable home improvements.

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