Rarely will you explore a home in which each room has its distinct style. That usually disorientates guests and owners alike, with a sense of visual dissonance making the entire home, however well decorated, feel a little odd and unsettling. As such, picking an overall style that’ll cover all of your rooms is an important first step in deciding how to redecorate or redesign your home interiors.
Sometimes, a home will be screaming out for a style to be applied to it. A converted industrial unit that’s now a set of flats will look brilliant with a minimalist style. A rustic interior perfectly suits an old cottage in the countryside. Other homes are more ambiguous, which means you have the freedom to pick and choose which style you’ll use in your home. Search interior design styles online to find inspiration for styling your home.
Colors
Meanwhile, the colors that your home uses should also be in some way cohesive. That doesn’t mean that every room should be painted with the very same color; it just means that you’ll usually select from a palette of similar or complementary colors to further enhance the sense of visual conformity in your home. Whites work with blacks and grays, for instance, and browns work with yellows and oranges.
If you’re conducting a thorough interior redesign, you’ll be able to pick your new palette from scratch. But more often than not you’ll instead be making tweaks or changes to certain rooms while leaving others untouched. In this case, you’ll already have your main color palette to work off, and you’ll just need to make sure you’re sticking to other shades that fit with your overall color scheme.
Shopping Style and Color
With style and color decided upon, it’s time to hit the shops—or online stores, of course. In the first instance, you’re not looking to buy anything. You just want to see what’s out there in the styles and shades that you’ve decided will work perfectly in your home. Take photos or download images of the items that you think are most aligned with your tastes. Note down prices too, if you’re particularly enamored by a piece of furniture.
With your scouting phase completed, it’s time to return home. Take the images that you’ve amassed, and make a digital or physical collage of everything you loved in your exploration. In this way, you’ll quickly be able to see which items work perfectly together, and which may clash when they’re put together with other items in your home.
Layout
In the above process, you’ll have narrowed down your redesign to get an understanding of what kind of items, paints, furniture items, and decorative twists you’re interested in adding to your home. But where should they go? Which new purchase should you put in which room? This is where a sense of interior design can go a long way, helping you to understand where it’s possible to add a new couch, desk, or lamp to each of your rooms.
One helpful tool in this regard is software that helps you map out your room digitally so that you can view in advance what new purchases and layouts may look like in each of your rooms. You can search for the best floor plan software in online articles.
Some are designed for professionals—the likes of architects and experienced interior designers. Others, though, are easy to access and use as a layperson. You can spend an evening on these apps, carefully inputting room dimension data before toying with the design elements you want to bring into your home.
Structural Projects
It might sound scary, but structural damage doesn’t necessarily mean the house is ready to collapse. Some homeowners have lived in houses with foundation damage for years. Foundation problems can threaten the safety and integrity of your home. Over time, they may even become more complex issues, so if there is any sign of foundation damage – contact a professional foundation repair company for inspection.
Some home revamps include the knocking through of walls or the building of extensions. This is extensive work that you’ll do alongside a team of builders and surveyors. This team could be supplemented with an experienced interior designer or architect, who’ll be best placed to help you think through the structural changes you’re making to your home.
Some changes are a no-brainer, though. Small and stuffy rooms tend to be unpopular to modern tastes and are being rapidly replaced with airy, open-plan rooms that give a sense of space and luxury to interiors. So deciding to knock through a wall in your home, connecting your dining room with your living room, for example, can help transform how you feel when you’re at home.
Over time, concrete slabs, including sidewalks, pool decks, and driveways, can become un-level for various reasons, including invasive tree roots, drainage problems, and problems with expansive soil. Concrete lifting via polyurethane foam injection is less expensive than replacing sunken concrete, and you can walk on the slab as soon as the repair is done.
See Also: Natural & healthy living with solid wood furniture
Sources of Inspiration
If you’re still struggling to decide on how to change your home, that’s fine. It’s a big decision, and it’s always advisable to think hard about how you might feel in certain interiors before you go ahead and buy materials and furniture. If you need a little more inspiration to push you over the line towards redecorating, here are some alternative sources for you:
- Think about your favorite hotels, and imitate the design that they use in their rooms
- Purchase housing or interior design magazines and brochures, which are decorated with many pictures and price guides
- Use the internet to search for interiors that are along the lines of your style preferences
- Contact an interior designer, who you can pay on a consulting basis to help you think through changes to your home
With all of these sources of inspiration at your fingertips, it’s unlikely that you’ll end your search process without a good idea of where you want to take your home’s interior; and that’s fantastic news for the future of your home and the new-found comfort you’re soon to experience whenever you open your front door.
