(NewsNation) — Furnishing a home is not an easy, or cheap, task, but it may impact your mental health, according to experts.
“Our brains are wired to appreciate and respond to patterns and assign emotions to art and decorative elements,” Samantha Smithstein, Psy.D, reports in Psychology Today.
According to new research, furnishing a two-bedroom home with quality furniture can cost $31,600 on average. Analysts claim that if you choose wisely, it’s possible to keep the entire cost of furnishing a two-bedroom home to less than $8,000.
Storage Café, an online platform that provides storage unit listings across the nation, estimated the average cost people are spending on each room.
They say the following steps are key in cutting costs on furnishing without sacrificing style:
- Shop for vintage furniture
- Look for furniture sales
- Attend a storage auction
- Shop at IKEA for some complementary items
- Splurge on select items only
“Investing in some quality pieces that mix durability and style will pay off in the long run both in terms of cost-effectiveness and the positive impact it can have on your state of mind,” wrote Storage Café analysts.
Prices for furnishings are higher than they were only a few short years ago, and that’s correlated to the COVID-19 pandemic. Storage Café noted that lingering supply chain issues impacted its research.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted almost every sector of the economy, causing a ripple effect of supply chain issues. A big part of the problem was shipping and import issues. Massive container ships sat offshore at major ports for long periods of time, delaying deliveries of all sorts of goods to stores’ shelves or homes.
Storage Café went through a varied selection of items at several online furniture décor stores to estimate the potential cost of furnishing an entire home.
It ranked each room by its average cost:
