6 Tips for Decorating Your Home

1. Define your personality

What do you want a room to feel like? Here's a tip to help you define your personal style: Take a look at what you have in your closet. Do you prefer fitted clothes or items that are more relaxed and comfortable? Do you have a preference for certain colors or patterns?

Another technique to figure out your style is to come up with a list of keywords that describe how you want a room to feel. Do you want something sophisticated, formal, or classic? Playful, amusing, and inviting? Monochrome, sleek, and contemporary?

2. Take design inspirations from all aspects of your life

Recall a hotel or restaurant where you've stayed or dined that particularly piqued your interest. It could have been a minimalist setting from your vacation to Japan or a New York clubby bar with faded leather chairs.

Determine what you don't like. It is much easier for people to communicate their dissatisfaction. By incorporating dislikes into the equation, we can exclude particular things and focus on others. A large-scale print, for example, can remind you of anything from your upbringing that you don't want to see in your home.

A wingback chair, on the other hand, may conjure up images of being sent to time-out for pulling your sister's hair. Similarly, a particular color may conjure up images of a prior design trend that you wouldn't want to repeat. These feelings and reactions are extremely personal and one-of-a-kind, but they also influence our choices.

3. Design a space that is functional for you

The importance of space planning, which has an impact on scale, cannot be overstated. People frequently utilize furniture that is either too big or too tiny for the room. The large-scale furnishings that fill today's rooms can be partly blamed on a certain retail brand. Build your area around the furniture you actually have.

Consider the balance of a room. Consider creating zones for different activities in larger rooms, such as a conversational seating area, a television viewing area, and a workspace with a desk or table for crafts or games. Making everything symmetrical sometimes makes things feel overly forced. To balance out a room, consider the visual weight and distribution. In any design, proportion and scale are crucial.

4. Take a paint sample

One of the most significant and cost-effective decisions you can make is which paint to choose. Proper paint selections bring areas together in a pleasing manner. Take a peek around the entire house. If you paint one room at a time, you risk creating fragmented spaces. Consider how colors influence your mood. Colors may make individuals feel happy, tranquil, or angry. For contrast against crisp white walls, you may paint interior doors an intense black.

When considering possibilities, try out actual paint colors on your walls. Examine them in natural light, in the morning, and at night. A favorite hue that worked for one project may not work for another. The paint store chips are a good place to start, but what appears beautiful on paper may not translate well into your home.

Try a few different hues on the wall with white paints, paying great attention to the undertones. Pinks, blues, and yellows can be used as accent colors. The warmth of the light is heavily influenced by its surroundings. Plants and the sky can create green and blue reflections on your interior walls.

5. Use a combination of high and low price points

Whether it be dogs, furniture, or art, superiority isn't always implied by pedigree. Consider buying art or furniture from an “unknown” artist or designer based on shape, comfort, and how well the art or the furniture fits your needs. The most insignificant objects in a room can have the greatest soul and be the most beautiful. It's not a bad idea to mix high and low price points. Everything does not have to be valuable to be noteworthy. Splurging on something you truly enjoy has the opposite effect.

6. Start from the ground up

It's easy to become overwhelmed by design. People usually inquire as to where they should start. The answer is, start from the ground up when designing a room: Decide on the floor covering. It makes little difference whether you desire hardwood floors, area rugs, tile, stone, or wall-to-wall carpeting. How you think about your floor at first will affect how more items are layered in the area. You have more color and upholstery possibilities if you choose a neutral tone or natural fabric with little pattern or color. If you start with an antique rug, you may create a color palette by drawing colors from it.

It's critical to design these events in concert; otherwise, you'll wind up with the circus effect, where there are too many activities going on, and the room as a whole doesn't work together. Starting with a sofa or upholstered chairs immediately limits your design. With dozens, if not hundreds, of options, something like an area rug provides additional freedom. This is where you may choose your options and begin layering items. Making your ultimate floor covering option first, then layering, is a much easier strategy.

Last but not least, you need to take your time when it comes to home design. You'll come to know your new home better as you spend more time there. There's no need to rush as you may have fresh ideas about how you want a room to look and operate in a few months.

This article was written by Melissa Hansen, a seasoned writer with contributions to niche BC outlets like Epic Firms, Forever After, and Bridgewell Group. When she is not crafting content, Melissa enjoys her time with a hot cup of coffee in one hand and an inspiring book in the other.