Are you looking for the best way to improve your home?
Perhaps you want a new kitchen, you’ve eyed up a new colour scheme, you’re saving for a new bath, or you want your garden redone?
All great ideas, but, they might not necessarily give you the best value for money. There’s one addition to your home that can give you a wide range of benefits including:
- Increasing home value
- Increasing the liveability of the home
- Increasing how eco-friendly a property is
- Bumping up energy efficiency
- Improving how aesthetically pleasing a home is
That addition is glass. Read on for 6 reasons using glass to improve your home is a truly fantastic idea.
1. Living in a home with lots of glass could improve your health
Our homes have a lot to do with our health, because they offer us protection, a space to express ourselves, and a place to rest and socialise.
Using a lot of glass in the home like floor to ceiling windows, glass connecting doors and glass roof windows can help you optimise the health benefits of your home. The benefits all relate to the circadian rhythm we all have naturally. This rhythm connects us to the sun and helps us regulate when we sleep and wake properly.
A glass home enables you to have natural light flooding in, satisfying some of your most basic human needs.
2. More glass means more beauty
Glass is a gorgeous material that lets the light pour into a home.
The most modern homes use glass to create an aesthetically pleasing, light and airy space. This is still quite a new change in home design, as a lot of the last 100 years of home design was obsessed with creating more rooms and contained areas. Different rooms for dining, sleeping, living, washing and anything else where necessary for a home to be desirable. Now, open plan living and ‘zoned’ spaces are key to a contemporary home fitting the needs of modern home buyers.
Glass lends itself to open plan living, and without a doubt creates a more beautiful home fit for the demands of home-owners today.
3. Glass extensions add value
According to recent reports, extensions such as conservatories or glass box style rooms can add around 3% onto the value of your property. Any addition that adds space is likely to be of value, but glass extensions like orangeries and conservatories are very desirable because they are so modern and beautiful.
4. Windows could improve energy efficiency
You may think that having more windows or glass in the home will only decrease energy efficiency through leaking heat out of the building, but the most modern windows can actually increase the energy efficiency of your home overall. Triple glazed windows use three sheets of glass with gas filled gaps in between to keep heat in. If you also get a Low E glass and special glass coatings which keep the heat in even more, your home will let more light in and retain the heat inside. So, a home with more windows that are eco-friendly types will at the very least maintain a good energy efficiency rating, but possibly even improve the rating of the home because there are active products keeping the heat in.
5. Glass in the home keeps you happy
Many different studies suggest that we are all happier when we are interacting with nature. MIND UK, a UK mental health charity, actively promote eco-therapy, a programme that involves being outdoors to improve mental health. The Japanese government is also a fan of using the outdoors to help with mental health, actively endorsing something called forest therapy, which is another version of eco-therapy.
Many studies suggest being in nature makes us happier, and part of that can be simply being able to see nature. Seeing your garden through your beautiful external bi-folding doors, or across the local area from your loft extension window, reminds you of the outdoors and that you’re part of nature and something bigger.
6. Glass in the home improves airflow
It may sound basic, but good airflow in a home is actually really important. At its most basic, it provides more fresh oxygen for you to breathe in and benefit from as a family. It also improves the air quality in your home by working against condensation which causes mould, which in turn releases nasty spores into the air that can contribute to respiratory issues.
New build homes are exceptionally energy efficient but they can suffer from being so energy efficient they don’t let the building breathe. Having plenty of windows to open and close means you have the ability to control airflow in your home, contributing to a happier, healthier environment.
Glass really is an exceptional addition to any home. If you want to benefit from a happier, healthier, more valuable, more eco-friendly home, look into adding or improving glass features next time you plan your home improvements.
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