Non-Professional Decorators Take Heart – 8 Home Decorating Tips for Amateur Home Decorating Enthusiasts
If you’ve ever stood in the paint aisle staring at the rows and rows of paint color cards wondering where to start and how to choose paint colors for your home or you’ve scoured local furniture stores trying to figure out what your style is and how to unify your home’s décor and design – you’re not alone!
You want your home to look it’s best. You’ve scoured home decorating magazines and websites for ideas. Maybe you even have a general idea of your overall style or how you want the room to look when you’re done, but something is still holding you back. Remember: It’s only paint. Anything you do can be undone or redone, and the only way around is through. Here are eight home decorating tips non-designers can use to get the look they want.
1. Assemble the Main Players Before Picking a Paint Color
If you start with a favorite paint color you’re likely to drive yourself crazy trying to find furniture and accessories to match it after the fact. For any room in your house you want to redecorate, assemble the major players in the room first (furniture, area rugs, linens, cabinets, bold accessories, etc.) and choose a complementary wall paint color afterward.
2. Pick a Single Focal Point
Anytime two or more divas are gathered together, there is sure to be unpleasant drama. When making home decorating and design decisions for a room in your house, decide which feature, piece of furniture, artwork or other item will be the “superstar” and think of the remaining items as backup singers in the band. Decide what you want people to see.
3. Use a Unified Color Scheme
Every major paint company has color cards showing unified color schemes for every preference, whether you love bold colors or are scared by anything not neutral. They have already had designers in the mix, you can trust these pre-selected color schemes and work from them with confidence knowing that your ensemble will feel like they belong together.
4. Showcase Your Personality
Rules, shmules! You’re going to be happiest in a home decorated so that it reflects your personality and sets the moods that make you feel positive, comforted, safe, inspired, and so on. Instead of trying to mimic the style of someone else, trust your instincts and surround yourself with the colors and objects that make you feel good.
5. Design for Flow and Function
Think about the space you want to decorate in your home in terms of what happens in that room on a day to day basis, and where people are most likely to enter and exit. This can help you select the right furnishings and accessories and design a floor plan that aligns with the way people will use the room.
6. Brush Up on Your Architectural and Period Style Savvy
Is your home’s general style Craftsman? Mediterranean? Cape Cod? Colonial? Contemporary? Mid-Century Modern? Load up on knowledge when it comes to the furnishings, fixtures and décor that typically accompany the architectural style of your home – or the architectural style you most prefer. There are no rules stating that you have to decorate your home’s interior in the manner of its architecture; however, understanding the type of home decorating and design elements that typify a particular style can help to ensure you make harmonious choices and give your home’s interior a distinct, unified style.
7. Learn Designer Tricks
One of the best home decorating tips for non-designers is to learn the visual tricks and hacks they deploy. For instance, to make a room look taller, choose lower-stature furnishings. To make the ceiling look higher, paint it a lighter hue than the walls. Remember that cool colors recede and “warm” tones seem to visually advance. And minimize, minimize, minimize! It’s often unnecessary clutter – the accumulation of furniture and accessories that naturally occurs over time that leads to a room looking crowded or out of sync.
8. Avoid Mistakes
There are loads of articles with advice from professional decorators willing to share what works – and what doesn’t work so well. Sometimes you have to forge ahead with an idea to see whether it will work, but in some cases you can avoid mistakes with a little research. Here are a few that might help you out:
- 10 Common Color Mistakes to Avoid – ApartmentTherapy.com
- 8 Decorating Mistakes You Might Have Already Made – ApartmentTherapy.com
- 25 Biggest Decorating Fails and Fixes – HGTV.com
