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Decorating a HomeLet’s Decorate Your Home ! ...(* Your details are safe with me! and will never be sold or exchanged).
Here’s an easy step-by-step plan for you to follow –
Decide on your overall style or theme. Create a vision in your mind of your home in its total overview sense, as you would like to see it be and feel like … If you’re not sure yet, go back and revisit
Ideas and Tips
to help inspire you further to get your plan into action.
• Make a list of what you want to change and prioritize it into long-term and short-term projects that you feel comfortable with and fit in with your lifestyle. Work it room by room, in priority order.
• Make a list of the things you love – if you stick to this list, and you’ve developed a taste for your own style, you can’t go wrong. You can refer to and make that list or review and expand that list further.
• Make sure that you plan your colors in overview so that they blend, flow and move with ease through your home. Your aim is to develop an overall blueprint, an impression of what you want to achieve, and to have your rooms complement each other. You should be able to take an item – one of your lamps or rugs, for example - and move it into any room in your home and have it easily blend in. If you’re not sure where to start – Keep it simple – Start small if it overwhelms you –
This is usually the Family room or Living room/Lounge room.
Or it may be another favorite room for you, a study perhaps, or a master bedroom or bathroom. 
Or, if you feel drawn to start with another room, perhaps your sun room or child’s room, then follow your instincts and preference. 
It’s important that you don’t feel overwhelmed. Start small if you feel more comfortable. Feeling overwhelmed will most likely block you and you won’t move forward. Pick the room you'd like to work on and then get let’s get started ...
You can use these focal points around which to build your home decorating ideas and themes.
Fireplaces are a fabulous focus for a room and an attractive architectural feature – They add a cozy homey touch with warmth and personality to your room and your home. So if you have a fabulous grand fireplace, make it the focus and anchor of your room around which you arrange other things.
Here’s a vital tip - I highly recommend that you avoid making your TV wide screen and entertainment centre the focal point or it will make your room look like a temple of worship to those items. Unless, of course, it’s a specific purpose built home theatre room. Your home, your room should be a shrine to you and who you are, rather than to the TV wide screen, remote control caddy, DVDs, or the stereo system and CDs.
There are six key ways to change a room, or home, quickly and with greatest impact:
This is a great way to go as it gives you an immediate focus. A sofa is a major purchase item, and one that you will hopefully, have for some length of time. So, consider your choice carefully.
The color you choose should not be ‘too wild’ or extreme, unless you have chosen to go really bold and unusual as part of your decorating theme for your room. Its better if you consider a sofa as part of the canvas of your room, with some leeway of course, that you can accentuate further with colorful cushions, throw rugs and other home accent accessories.
It also gives you the flexibility to change the look of a room easily, quickly and inexpensively, with new cushion covers, throw rugs and other decorative home accent accessories.
You also have the flexibility to change your home accent colors in the future, as your mood changes, or seasons change, or as you develop and evolve your style further and wish to experiment.
Feature Feature Feature -
Perhaps you have some other favorite piece of furniture you have collected and loved along the way, a favorite chair perhaps, armchair, coffee table, or side table, period piece divan, chest of drawers, painting, or even a crazy quirky collectible item or two, or even a few ...
If it says something about you and holds its own as an item of interest and character – feature it as a center piece, give it pride of place, and then build around it.
Arranging your furniture in a room to make the room do what you want is key to maximizing the livability and ambience of your room. Here are some pointers for you to follow: • Function and Ease - Think of how you and the people who live in your home, or come to visit, use your room and spaces. It’s all about common sense - creating ease of movement, practical and easy function, and heaps of flowing, comfortable and highly user-friendly livable space. • Arranging your furniture becomes much easier once a focal point in your room is established. Your main furniture pieces are best directed towards your room’s focal point, keeping the major traffic areas open and easily flowing. You should aim to have a balance of furniture items around your room. For further key pointers about
good furniture arrangement, visit this section of my website -
Your favorite things and sentimental mementos tell the story of who you are. It’s about your life’s cache. It gives your home its personality, its style, its soul. • Display your collectibles in clusters or groupings to create a theme. Think big and display them en masse and make a grand statement. • A fireplace and mantel is a perfect place to display your family photos, collectibles, ornaments, a tall vase with willow or dramatic fresh flowers, or holiday decorations. (Visit the Holiday Decorating section of my website for some more ideas). • Whether it’s your exquisite fine glassware or quirky pieces on dining room or kitchen shelving, or stacks of your books and souvenirs in the study or home office, show it off, arrange it with style. It will look great!
• Don’t feel you have to follow perfect symmetry all of the time – a huge bookcase along an entire wall doesn’t have to mean books all upright in a row like little soldiers, or like a traditional bookshop, library or dad’s study or den.
Mix and match some harmony and some contrast – some upright, some horizontal. Keep some shelf spaces exclusively as center pieces for displaying special loved and meaningful items. Signature items that speak about you and your history. Perhaps a pen, a journal, a picture, or pictures, or your favorite collectibles. The things you love and enjoy to have around you.
9. Remember, you’re developing your own style –
Don’t be afraid to mix and match as long as there’s a unifying or integrating theme.
• Experiment with a mix and match interplay of colors and fabrics. Mix luxurious silks, soft and plush velvets, with more earthy rough textured cottons. Or whatever other fabric and color attracts and resonates with you.
• Feel free to experiment – you’re finding, collecting, and defining, or expanding your own style – Don’t be afraid to combine something Country, with perhaps something French or Mediterranean or Tuscan, or something English or even Asian, and throw in some Shabby Chic or Kitsch, or even a well chosen thoughtful ‘bad taste’ item.
• Give it some life. It’s important that you have fun and experiment. Allow yourself the freedom. A dramatic splash of red or vibrant purple can make a real statement! …
• Shop around – don’t buy all your items from one brand name, manufacturer or store. Hand pick your color paints, fabrics, wallpapers, borders and other trimmings to suit your overall vision and picture of what you want to achieve.
• Equally, mix and match your sofas, armchairs and single chairs. This is what gives your home decorating its individuality. There is no one else like you ...
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Sometimes rooms have natural focal points - places where your eyes travel to immediately upon entering a room - a fireplace with mantle, an enormous ceiling high, wall-wide built-in bookcase, or bay window with a window seat or view of the garden, or over a valley, lake, or the sea.
