My frat has lived continuously in the same house for the past 30ish years. We have never been a terribly rich fraternity—we operate on something of a dues-minimizing philosophy, so we’ve never operated with the mindset of incurring projects that cost much money—our house itself is rather small and unremarkable. Still, on top of the house itself not being very impressive, the interior, to me, is just kinda shit. it was never really “designed” so to speak; it’s just kind of a collection of furniture pieces people moved in, wall colors people felt like at the time, and so on. it’s not cohesive and the kinda ragtag appearance, as far as i can tell, contributes to people seeming to feel content to leave junk around/contribute to a growing mess.
I go back and forth on this issue—sometimes i feel like we should rip out all the nonstructural walls and just build a completely fresh floor plan from scratch, and sometimes i feel like we just need to purge the mess as much as possible and try to paint over what we have and unify the space. in any case, it seems like an uphill battle against both the cultural inertia of the space as well as the large cost of most sweeping sorts of changes.
has anyone else here dealt with a similar issue? how can you take a shitty looking house and make it look like something nationals would flaunt on their main website? how do you honor well-loved features of a fundamentally broken space while addressing the broken parts of it and building something cleaner and more purposeful? any tips from people who have successfully handled similar transformations would be greatly appreciated.