You might love your house, because it was an amazing offer in terms of price, quality and its rising value over time. However, just because you love a house, that doesn’t yet mean you see it as your home. The key to achieving that is to make it your own. Maybe the interior design is outdated and worn or modern and beautiful, but none of that matters if it doesn’t suit your personality and your ideal vision of how your home should look. This is about more than aesthetic appeal. This is about you feeling at home in your own home.
Sometimes, it’s okay to throw the rule book out of the window. Sometimes, it’s okay to choose a different way of looking at interior design, using unique and perhaps even peculiar ways of looking at the layout of your home, including the types of furnishings, colors and general themes prevalent through the property. If you’ve been dreaming of giving your home a makeover for a long time, here are some tricks to getting started.
The focal point of each room.
Something that many people fail to realize when they conduct a little DIY interior design, or TIDY as I’m calling it in this article, is that there’s an artistic element to the process. We all have creative brains to some extent, and we all, perhaps only on a subconscious level, react to certain colors and designs within our home in much the same way as we would if we were looking at a painting. In much the same way as a piece of art, then, there must be some captivating element of each room in your house; a focal point.
The nature of the focal point for each room does not matter. All that matters is that you choose something which sets the scene for its surroundings and that it blends in with the theme of your home as a whole. An ice sculpture of the family in the middle of the kitchen, for example, might look a little out of place. Still, who am I to judge? Personally, I think the best options are aesthetically-beautiful furnishings which still serve a highly practical purpose. The best designed homes, in the modern age, are minimalist in layout. If you don’t want to be over-cluttering on useless junk, then turn that useless piece of junk into something useful. Almost anything with a flat surface can become a side table, for example. Get creative with your own home, and turn the things you love into things you need.
Storage space.
As grand as your imagination may have been when you moved into your current house, perhaps your dreams and creative ideas for a wonderful and unique design were quickly washed away once you realised just how many possessions you owned. Yes, the most difficult part of designing a minimalist home, which offers bountiful open space, is that you end up filling that open space with all the things you own.
Don’t panic. My solution isn’t going to involve throwing out all your old possessions (although, we do all hoard a little, and it might help to ditch some old things that are unnecessarily cluttering your home). Instead, I suggest that you use your imagination and your personal ideas for how you’d like to design your home to create storage facilities which are unique pieces of eye candy, rather than messy, stress-inducing spaces.
For example, you could ditch those overhead kitchen cabinets and instead use some open shelving units for your plates, bowls and glasses. Not only will this look much prettier, artsier and a little more unique, just like you, but it’ll make it so much easier to grab things when you need them. Better yet, and this is likely the dealbreaker, you’ll no longer be walking into all those cabinet doors you’re forever leaving open.
The bedrooms.
For many, the bedroom is the most important part of their individual home life, even if it isn’t the main focal point of the overall house. Whether you live with a partner or an entire family, each of you will see your respective bedrooms in a different light and each of you will want this room to reflect your individuality and personality more than any other room in the house. If you like minimalism, then you need to keep this room clutter free; if you like art, you need to cover this room in ridiculous, weird art pieces; if you like oak panelling, then… well, you get the idea.
You could look into some new bedroom furniture and completely overhaul the existing look of the bedroom or bedrooms in your home. Of course, if you share your room with a partner, the aesthetic decisions need to be made jointly. No, I’m not going back on my word. It’s still your choice. Compromises may be made at some point, but all that matters is you are the ones who make the decisions when it comes to the appearance of your home. You don’t have to settle with the way your house looked when you bought it, and this certainly applies to somewhere as personal as your bedroom.
If you’re going to repaint, choose your furnishings first.
This is a weird one which confuses most people, and maybe it’s an opinion which won’t stick with all of you, but even we creative designers must let loose a heavy sigh from time to time, admit defeat, and accept that there are some logical ways to do things. Choose the paint coat after you’ve sorted everything else. Picking a color for your home, before you’ve decided on a unifying theme and the specific furnishings for each room, is a risky move. You don’t want clashing themes and concepts throughout your house.
Whether you’ve planned your layout or not, of course, you should choose a neutral color for your walls anyway; if not white, then a light creamy shade with perhaps a hint of blue or pink, depending on your rough idea for a theme. It’s always better to start with a white coat, because that gives you a blank canvas on which you can attempt other creative ideas later.
Turn boring necessities into fun, quirky, aesthetically-pleasing additions to your home.
Those irritating, messy cables running like snakes across your living room floor can be tamed. You could coat them in fairy lights or hide them behind a miniature, decorative picket fence. There are all manner of creative ideas out there on the internet, but the beauty of this being your home and your DIY design is that you can reinvent your home however you want.