8 Easy Home Design Tips

You might think that you have to hire an interior designer to decorate your home, but there are actually a number things you can do yourself to make your dwelling place a little more visually pleasing.  This will especially benefit you and everyone else who lives there.

Here are eight easy design tips that you can do yourself.

1. Paint the Town

You won’t believe the magic power that’s latent within a fresh coat of paint. A simple coat of color can totally change the vibe of home. You can create a warm environment with shades of red, yellow, and orange, or cool environments with shades of blue or green.

When it comes to nurseries, a classic color scheme differential that’s been used for as long as most people can remember is pink for girls, blue for boys, and gender neutral colors like light green or yellow if you’re not sure what’s on the way.

White can work as a default setting for your home’s interior, but paint can really change the feel of your home in a dynamic (or restful) way. Even better, you can use the color palette to indicate transitions between spaces or give your home some pop. For example, you can paint the lower half of the wall a darker shade of whatever color you’ve chosen, and the upper half a lighter color.

2. Accessorize and Coordinate

If you’ve painted the walls, another great way to add decorative value to your home is to accentuate the rooms with special touches that fall within the same color scheme. You may not realize it at first glance, but you can really get detailed with this one.

Curtains are an easy way to start. Just remember the rule of shirts-and-ties: patterned ties go with solid shirts, and solid ties go with patterned shirts, otherwise the whole ensemble just gets too busy. A similar principle applies to the interior space of your home.

If your walls are a solid color, try out patterned curtains within or complementary to the color scheme of the walls. If you’ve used wallpaper or texture on the walls, consider getting solid colored curtains.

There are plenty of other small opportunities to accessorize each room, like doorknobs, light switch panels, and knobs and handles of dressers (you can find a surprising variety of these at stores like Target). Color coordinating little details and tying everything into an overall scheme yields a super sophisticated look, sort of like when your tie and socks match.

3. Themes

Another great way to really get the interior of your home to stand out in a positive way is to select a decorating theme, whether it’s the beach, the woods, a sports team, or a particular culture. Write down your overall theme, and do a little research into the things that you might use to decorate your space. Go on a scavenger hunt at outlets, department stores, and possibly even garage sales to find pieces that match your theme.

For example, if you want your theme to be nautical, buy some paintings of ships, and maybe a ship in a bottle to put above the fireplace. If you find an old ship’s steering wheel at a garage sale, hang that baby up. Helpful hint: to avoid getting tack with your theme, don’t overdo it. Make sure it’s an accent, and not a bombardment, otherwise your home will start to look like one of those restaurants with a bunch of random stuff on the wall.

4. Get Seasonal

When it comes to decorating, embracing the season is another great way to style your home, and it’s super easy too because seasonal decorations are available pretty much everywhere. If you don’t feel like such a Martha Stewart yourself, and you’re not sure how to sprinkle gourds around the home to maximize the feel of Halloween, many stores sell pre-assembled centerpieces that you can leave on a dining room table or a side table in the hall or living room.

These pieces are seasonal, and the color schemes they come in also vary based on the time of year, providing you with timely, easy, and good-looking accents for your home.

5. Catalog that Furniture

Many stores send out catalogs of their furniture selection, and you can also find them online. One mistake people make is that when it comes to picking out furniture for their home, they just sort of let whatever they’ve accumulated over the years build up, creating an eclectic (at best) or eccentric (at worst) mixture of pieces in a variety of colors and styles that never would have been together until now.

If you’re ready and/or able to upgrade your furnishings, try thumbing through a catalog for some ideas. The designers have paired furnishings and accessories together to create very pleasingly, eye-catching arrangements that you too can have in your home. Leverage these free catalogs for ideas and inspiration.

6. Gestalt

Gestalt psychology is all about the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Whether that’s wrong or right, it’s definitely noticeable in design through the use of patterns or repetitions.

You might think that hanging up three of the same thing on the wall would look strange or even just boring, but you’ll find it looks good because repetition is an almost universally embraced element of good design. You can also create patterns by alternating decorations, such as a painting and then a wall candle, repeated several times.

You can make arrangements a little more complex by keeping colors consistent, but changes shapes, for example, hanging up three paintings in a similar color scheme and style, all within three different shaped frames.

7. Rugs

If you live in a home with hardwood floors, you probably appreciate that they’re easy enough to clean with a simple sweep. You may have never considered putting carpet down, and you definitely don’t need to, but placing some rugs throughout your home can have a huge effect on the overall ensemble of each room, by enveloping it in a more decorative sensibility.

Rugs that match the color of the wall, or provide an interesting texture or pattern can really give a room a unique appearance. Make sure the rugs stay within your color scheme, otherwise the end result might be a bit too loud.

8. Plants

Few things can bring life to the interior of your home like…plant life. There are many varieties of indoor plants, and some don’t require so much maintenance, water, or sunlight, making them perfect for busy people who want a new look for their interior without sacrificing time.

If it’s still too much work to get an assortment of real plants, try mixing and matching the verdure residents your interior biosphere with some fake plants, which are available in many different places and can look quite convincing—just don’t eat them.

Even better, you can often get plants that match the decor of your home. For example, if your home has a southwestern vibe, you could get a small cactus garden as an accent to place on a table. If your home has some Asian decor, a money tree, a rubber plant tree, or a bonsai might provide nice accents.

Home Improvement in Milwaukee

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