Less is More in Interior Design
Simple Interior Design. One of the most important interior decorating steps that you can take is to make maximum use of the furniture and accent items you already have in your home. A classic decorating mistake is to think that you have to spend more money, buy more furniture, or buy new accent pieces. Most of the items you have in your current decor are there for a reason.
More than likely you bought each item because something about it appealed to you in the first place. Adding more stuff to the decor you already have will not give your home that pulled-together, attractive look that you want. It will just give it a cluttered, disorganized, overcrowded look.
Here’s what you do. Take everything out of the room. Stack it in the next room and get to work. Clean up the corners and nooks and crannies that you don’t always get to. Bring in one of the chairs that you know for sure you will want to keep in the room and place it so you can survey the rest of the room from it. Sit down and look around. Imagine you have just discovered this room and you can do anything you want with it.
What is the main purpose of the room? Is it a place for entertaining? A quiet place to read and listen to music? A family room? Once you know what the function of the room is, then you can decide on the form. Bring in the large pieces of furniture that suit the needs of the room and place them in the most effective arrangement around the room. Fit in the lamps, end tables, large wall hangings, and other such smaller items.
Look at what else you had jammed in the room and make a quick decision what to do with it. Do not stuff it into the tidy corners, don’t put it in boxes and store it for later. Immediately sort it into two piles: keep and toss.
Now that you have used what was already there and gotten rid of the items that detracted from the room, look around again and see what might be missing. Perhaps it is time for a new lamp after all.
Cheap Chic – Home Decor
There are so many things you can do to make your home a masterpiece of interior decoration without wrecking your budget. Your home can be uniquely yours, reflecting your own taste, hobbies, and talents. People will look at your decorating techniques and ask, how did you do that? Some people paint and that is such a classic way of decorating. But you do not have to be an artist in watercolor or oils to create those touches that turn a room from pleasant into startling.
Photography has become more and more effective as an art medium. Use your digital camera and take some photographs of scenes that you think would be great in your decor. Use a photo software program to crop them and add special effects and then take your disk to the local copy shop where you can have prints made in a number of different sizes. I have seen some spectacular arrangements of the setting of the sun taken over a five minute period and then arranged as a gallery type show in a front entrance way. Needlework like cross-stitch, needlepoint, bargello, and even quilting can be used to create a series of masterpieces.
If you are in more of a rush to have some interesting and appealing art accents to your interior decoration, here are some fast tricks:
Buy a large art calendar and a dozen frames — ideally with mats — and frame each page of calendar art.Scarves! You can buy these by the fistful at thrift stores. Get a dozen in matching colors. Sometimes you can even find a several identical ones.
Use them to tie together elements in your decorating scheme. Drape large scarves over your end tables like little table clothes. Toss smaller ones over shabby lamp shades. Wrap them around flower pots and safety pin them into place.Glass bowls can work together to create an interesting focal point in a room. Fill them with colored water and float candles in them. Fill them with colored glass beads or colored sand. Pile them high with dry potpourri.
Making it Work with Junque -be creative
It is so tempting to try to carry off a special kind of flair in interior decorating using something funky, whacky, or just plain peculiar. In the good old student days, a nonfunctioning toilet might have been a good conversational pieces as furniture in your dorm room as well as another place for people to sit in the tiny room. In your home however, it is important to be careful with “junque”. There is a fine line between being creative and being tacky.
Plastic lawn furniture draped with serapes can be cute when you first move in but long term, you need to have a little more pizzazz.A friend was given her grandmother’s mustard yellow living room set straight from the fifties. The fabric was a nubble polyester or nylon type and the furniture was in near perfect condition. It was not old enough to be antique but it was in too perfect condition to be considered junk. In other words, it was the perfect kind of furniture for pizzazz. This was true junque. There was a four cushion sofa and two chairs, one with arms and one without. This is a rare kind of find and not easy to duplicate.
Finding a similar set and having it reupholstered does not give it the same impact. The fact that this was the original stylish fifties color and fabric was what made it so special.What can work is a special piece that was handed down to you from someone in the family or an unusually constructed smaller accessory such as a coffee table or side table. Highlight this item by giving it place of pride in the room. Look around your home and see if you can find an unusual trunk or odd-shaped bookshelf or some other item that can become a centerpiece for your interior decorating.
Making Your Bedroom a Heaven
The bedroom is often considered one of the easier rooms to redecorate. The typical advice is to splash on fresh paint, buy a new comforter, and make curtains that match the comforter from sheets that complement the comforter. All of this is excellent advice but let us take a longer look at the bedroom.A bedroom is a very personal place. What you have to look for in this room is what you have to work with. If the walls are clean and even, perhaps you don’t need to paint them. Unless of course you dislike the color. You money might be better spent on new pillows and fresh sheets. The important thing about this room is that it has a very specific function. You sleep here and sleep is crucial to your health and well-being.
While the room needs to be restful, it really needs to be comfortable. Before even thinking about paint, think about your most basic needs — good sheets and pillows. Get rid of worn out and pilly sheets and flat, worn-out pillows.Now that is out of the way, you can look at the placement of furniture. Is the bed easy to get in and out of? Do you have room to move in your bedroom? Is there a good reading light in case you want to read in bed? Is there a place for everything and is everything in its place?
Before doing anything like painting and making new curtains, get someone to help you to take out all the furniture except the bed. Then place the bed so that it is the centerpiece of the room. Place it with the head against the middle of a wall and lie down on it and look around. Will the morning sun shine in your eyes? Look at the wall opposite you. What do you see? If it is a hodge-podge of pictures, rearrange them on another wall and place a large, pleasing picture here.
If it is a blank wall, find something to decorate it.Once you are happy with the placement of the bed and the decorations on the wall opposite the bed, bring back the rest of the furniture one item at a time with the most important pieces first. You may find that the bedroom is looking wonderful before all the pieces are returned. Congratulations, you have just redecorated your bedroom.
Redecorate your kitchen with a few simple changes
One of the biggest problems with kitchens is that they become a catch-all place. It is the one room that most family members are guaranteed to enter during the day. I know it is almost a requirement that the fridge holds a great deal of information but if there was one piece of decorating advice that you followed, I wish this were it. Get rid of the fridge magnets. Now. If you absolutely must, you can leave one item attached to your fridge. If the fridge bristles with recipes, put them in a big brown envelope and stash them in your recipe drawer or shelf. If it is covered with jokes, look at the jokes and dump the old stale ones. If you absolutely must keep the jokes, find another place for them. I have seen them mounted in a collage and framed.
The next thing to do is to take everything out of the top shelves and off the top of the fridge and put it on the table. Be brutal. If you have not use any of these things for a year, get rid of them. Sell them on eBay. Give them away. Anything but put them back in the cupboards. They are taking up valuable space. Set aside the things you think you need to keep and if any of them do not belong in the kitchen, send them off to the room where they do belong. Put the rest of them back on one of the empty top shelves. Now clean out all the non food items that are under the counters and in the stove drawer and do the same thing. It is almost certain that you will have things that you never use stashed away. Do the same thing with these items. Get rid of the ones that are useless to you, put the non-kitchen items in the proper rooms and put the rest of them away.
Next attack the countertops. Take everything off the countertops and stack it all on the table. Wipe down the counter and then put back the things you use everyday — coffeemaker, toaster, microwave. If you do not have a utensil jar, find something that you can use — a vase or a jug that is rarely used and put your spatulas and mixing spoons and other utensils in it. Then be brutal with the rest of it. Could some of this stuff really be stashed away in one of the newly empty shelves under the counter?
Take down the curtains, round up the decorative towels, oven mitts, potholders — anything washable and toss it in the laundry.
If you are really enjoying it, you can go through the dishes in your cupboards as well and get rid of the ones you never use. Stash them with the holiday china or give them away.All it took was a little time and no money. Instant transformation.
Make your own Groupings -Arrange furniture
Your living room. When you walk through a furniture store, you see those room settings — the tasteful living room with the matching sofa, love seat, chair, footstool, coffee table, lamp, end tables or the bedroom with the lovely plump pillows. Then you go home and see the reality of your own living room or bedroom and just want to throw it all out and start over again. This is the kind of interior decorating that can cost you a lot of money even if you buy it on one of those whim-driven, buy now pay later plans. (Let’s face it, if you do it that way, by the time you get to paying for the furniture, the warm glow of newness will have worn off and you will not be happy about the monthly bill.
I’m not saying you should not buy furniture. I am saying, stop and look at what really makes those store displays so appealing. Of course, the lovely new furniture is part of it. However, the arrangement of the sofa, chair, and love seat often have a strong psychological appeal.Create useful conversational groups in your home. Think about the typical use of your living room. Is this where you and your best friend sit and have coffee or do you do that at the kitchen table? Do you and your spouse sit in the living room and have conversations or do you watch television in this room.
When your friends drop over, do you sit in the living room? If so, do you have to drag in a chair from the den or the kitchen?. Go into your living room and rearrange the furniture into the type of conversational arrangement that you would find useful if there were four people chatting in the room. Is there a place for everyone to set down a cup of coffee or a glass of wine? Can all of you see each other comfortably? What do you have to add to the grouping to make this arrangement work?
Use the same grouping and treat the room as if you and your spouse were there alone and wanted to watch television. Is it convenient? What would it take to be convenient? .You see, the groupings in furniture stores are set up with a single purpose in mind. You might want to consider whether you can set up single purpose groupings in your own home. It does create a great oasis and in this busy world, this is a very good thing.
A Dash of Paint can Revitalize a living Room
Living room, one of the easiest and cheapest ways of changing the look of a room is with a splash of paint. You don’t have to be a master painter or make a huge project out of the effort. While it can be satisfying to make a major paint renovation in a room, here is a simple and inexpensive way of making your room look completely different with a minimum of effort. Choose the wall with the smallest surface area. Perhaps it has a big window, or a couple of doors in it, or maybe it is one of those odd-shaped walls that is really part of an alcove. Remove everything from the wall. Take down the draperies. Look at the colors in the room. If the paint is dark, then go light with this wall. If the rest of the room is light, go dark with this wall.
This is the kind of project that can be done in a matter of hours — minus drying time. Choose a trim color that matches the rest of the room and paint the woodwork, window and door frames in that color. Then paint the wall in the contrasting color. Get a good brush, use latex paint, lay down an old sheet, use wide masking tape to protect the edges of the trim. Better yet paint the trim one evening, let it dry and the next evening, paint the wall.
Don’t bury the wall behind a bunch of furniture and wall decorations once it is done. Let it shine as a feature of its own. Perhaps you can use it as a backdrop for a dramatic piece of furniture or make it more prominent by pairing it with cushions or throw pillow in the same shade or hanging a picture or ornaments on another wall in a matching color.
Stitch a Fine Seam -Use of Fabrics in Rooms
Use the right fabric. A dramatic difference can be made in the most basic room through the clever use of interesting fabrics. Cottons, silks, and shimmery fabrics have their place. So do heavier materials like jute and canvas. One of the most budget conscious steps you can take is to go to the local fabric outlet and look for the remaindered bolts of material.
There are often excellent quality heavy cottons on sale because there are just a few yards of it left. Not enough for drapes, for instance but plenty for a table runner with matching arm protectors. Or a valance for a small window and a matching lampshade. If you are not really handy with a sewing machine, such items are simple enough to have the local seamstress do them for you for a fairly inexpensive fee.Several twelve-inch fabric squares with neat hems can pull together various elements in a room.
Place one under a plant, another under a collection of small china figurines, another one under a vase. You get the picture. Suddenly these items seem related to each other and the room pulls together in a subtle way. One living room that was an uninspired rectangular shape benefited from 6 yards of a heavy cotton drapery material. It was cut into a four-foot square of a table cloth that covered a leggy old-fashioned accent table. A magazine rack was covered with fabric that was stapled to the inside bottom, draped over the sides and stapled underneath it.
A long matching runner covered the top of the television set and a piece was cut, hemmed, and laid over the scarred coffee table and then covered with a heavy piece of tempered glass cut to fit the top of the coffee table. I’ve seen clever touches with circles of fabric with elastic run through a hem that goes around the outside edge making a tasteful slip on cover for anything from a wastepaper basket to a plastic plant pot.
The trick to decorating with fabric is to be careful not to overdo it with too many patterns and colors. Keep the accent fabric to no more than two coordinating or contrasting choices.
