You want your home to feel like home, and, for most, a home is a place that’s comfortable and welcoming. A welcoming home is one that puts you at ease the minute you walk inside. It’s a place where you can lay back, relax, and cast away your worries. It’s also a place where you can spend time with family and friends.

If your home feels cold and impersonal instead of warm and inviting, you’re probably looking for ways to change that. Wondering how to make your home more inviting? Here are some simple and inexpensive tricks.

Paint the Front Door

The eyes are the windows to a person’s soul. What are the windows to a home’s soul, then? Ironically, not the actual windows. It’s the front door, the thing that allows you to enter and leave your home.

A beaten-up and faded front door doesn’t make your home look welcoming. In fact, it does the exact opposite. It makes your home seem unwelcoming.

Painting your front door is a simple way to make your home seem more inviting. Bright and colorful hues will make the exterior look happier and more appealing.

Upgrade the Seating

The next tip on how to make your home more inviting is to upgrade the seating. No, you don’t have to replace your old couch. That would put a real dent in your wallet! Instead, make your existing seating options more comfortable by throwing down brand-new pillows, blankets, and maybe even a slipcover. You can also get an ottoman (or two) so your guests have a place to kick up their feet. If you have a lot of family and friends and want to add new seating without breaking the bank, try cheaper options such as beanbags or poufs.

Fill It With Plants

Humans are hardwired to adore flowers, shrubs, and trees—anything vibrant, green, and leafy! There’s even a name for it: biophilia, the tendency to prefer natural environments over manmade environments as a result of evolution.

Plants can make a room feel more calming and inviting, so why not scatter some throughout the house? If you’re not much of a green thumb, don’t worry. You can decorate using fake plants or durable real ones. Yucca, snake plants, and jade money plants are good low-maintenance choices for inside the home.

We call them living rooms, but is yours full of life? Whether you call it a front room, sitting room, or living room, it’s the room that shows your home at its best. If you feel like your living room is looking a little tired, it’s time to mix things up and add some new elements that make the room sing. To help, here are a few terrific tips on how to update your living room.

Rugs Do It All

As a wise man once put it, a good rug can really tie a room together. But area rugs can do more than that. Rugs bring color, abstract images, and startling patterns that can break up the monotony of a humdrum living room. They also provide engaging textures that can give a room a more comfortable and comforting feeling, and not just under your bare feet! Rugs bring a sense and actual feeling of warmth as well and can provide a bit of safety to the area if they’re non-slip and plush.

Paint Selectively

A full paint job of the entire living room can be costly, time-consuming, and even an ongoing offense to your sense of smell. You can save by painting one wall a single striking color, or use patterns, stencils, a quotation, or, if you’re artistically inclined, a painted or wallpaper mural or wall decal. People’s eyes will be drawn to your special, letting them ignore the blander coloring of the other three. But don’t let those walls go fallow. Decorate them with complementary framed photographs, prints, and paintings that make up for the field of beige they rest on.

Move the Furniture or Add a New Main Attraction

Sometimes all a room needs to feel new is a rearrangement of its furnishings. Try a new pattern with the idea of increasing air flow and improving traffic patterns in your living room. Get away from the same old pattern of all chair and couches facing one another, perhaps finding a way to provide two separate spaces where people can converse at family gatherings. Consider making an investment on a new central piece, like a chair or sofa, and slowly build a new living room on the old one.

Put a New Accent on Everything

When deciding how to update your living room, don’t forget the little changes that create a big statement. Accent pillows are a nice way to drop a different color, texture, or shape in the canvas that is your living room. Be brave and mix them up, avoiding the same sizes and patterns as you decorate the couch and chairs. Add a few different throws and other blankets, and decorate any surfaces like end tables, console tables, and the like with knickknacks in colors, themes, and styles that hearken back to the softer appointments in the room.