Living in a small space is tough, especially when you have to abide by the rental rules formulated by your landlord. Moreover, decorating options are very less, since you cannot experiment much with the limited space. However, you can make a small apartment look as beautiful and spacious as its larger counterparts. All you need is to create the illusion of space by arranging the furniture and knowledge about the appropriate lighting, color of the walls etc. In this article, we have given some of the best ideas for decorating small apartment. Read more…
Let’s talk a little about bedroom designs, of all the rooms in your house, your bedroom is the last space you would visit before you retire to take a good night sleep. It is where your body lies in deep solitude as it relaxes and rejuvenates the lost energy for the day. Hence, it is important to come up with a relaxing mood when conceptualizing bedroom design decorating ideas, here are a few pictures with bedroom designs that will help you to make an idea of how you want to style your bedroom.
A great bedroom is a place to relax and recharge, a stylish and peaceful retreat that’s as versatile as it is welcoming.
Sometimes your new bedroom decorating simply needs a change of atmosphere to make it more comfortable. Maybe you have a bedroom design that is immaculate, modern, and beautiful. But is it comfortable? It’s important that a room still feel like home, and an easy way to achieve this is by adding some creature comforts. Some personal bedroom decorations add individual character to a space and make it more relaxing. Here is bedroom inspirations for you that I’ve taken from http://freshome.com Read more…
In the past, living room or the parlor was the place with formal settings to welcome the honored guests. With times, it has evolved into a multifunctional room meant to welcome guests, sit and relax comfortably while reading a good book or watching TV, spend some time with the family, chat and gossip with friends and for entertainment. The most common furniture pieces found in the living room are sofas, love seat, sofa with chairs in different combinations, coffee table, end tables, ottomans, benches, shelves and perhaps a desk and bookshelves. If the living space is also used as a family room, you can also find TV and entertainment center in the room along with accessories, lighting, art and crafts on display and may be carpets.
An extra large living room may accommodate a piano, eating area complete with dining table, tennis or billiard table or even a number of plants, if your living space receives lots of direct sunlight. You may also shift am armoire to make use of the extra space for storage purposes. Living room can use maximum number of furnishings and it is a challenge to fit in all the desirable furnishings and accessories and coordinate them with carpeting, wall color, crown moldings, lighting style and window treatments among many other things. Usually, sofa or the entertainment center is the largest piece of furniture in a living room and since, placement of sofa will decide the view and focal point for the people seated in the living, room, use it as the starting point for living room decor.
Express your personality, your personal taste and decorating flair in the way you decorate your living room. Remodeling or decorating your living room doesn’t just mean to throw away items and add furniture pieces to the living room but how you arrange what you already have in the room. Arrangement mistakes can ruin the look of your room. Do not go wild with imagination. Some of the rules and traditional ways of keeping things and proper design must be followed to keep things sane. Creative and unusual living room decorating ideas should be limited by the comfort and usability of the room to make the living room more inviting.
Designing in innovative ways that ‘break the rules’ can be tricky, so is best left to professionals. Ensure that you maintain visual balance and harmony while displaying your accessories and should not look chaotic. For budget decorating, try to use what you already and then only opt to buy new things that you think are absolutely necessary. See, if rearranging furniture and accessories can achieve the effect you want. For a dream living room, it is not necessary to start from scratch. Make sure that you do not let your precious collection of art lie wasted or ignored just because you didn’t think of placing them correctly.
While decorating a living room, one must pay attention to the natural focal point of the room, lifestyle of the family members, functional placement of furniture, creating well-defined traffic patterns, creating close grouping and intimate conversational areas, visual balance, ambient lighting, color scheme of the room and fabric patterns of the curtains, window treatments and the upholstery. You must also watch out for organizing things, display of accessories, camouflaging architectural elements that are ugly, hanging art and wall groupings, proportion and scale of decoration, unifying factor of your decoration and most importantly, when to stop.
Create your own unique room design online
Redecorating a room? Or just love experimenting with color and design? Our new Design a Room tool is the perfect place to unleash your inner interior designer. This innovative point-and-click design tool allows you to choose the style and type of room (living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and more) and change the Armstrong flooring, ceiling, walls, and cabinetry until your room design is just right.
To create your dream room design, first select your room and its style. Then have fun changing the flooring, the wall colors, the ceiling types and colors, the cabinetry and more. Enlarge your design to take an up-close look, and save your finished room to your idea folder, where a personalized product list has been created for you.
Design Your Dream Room
Before you choose a single can of paint or upholstery fabric, play with wall color, flooring, cabinetry and more. Use Design a Room as the first step in your room makeover process.
How to Decorate a Small Room
Very few things are more complicated than decorating a narrow space. Such experience can make you spend a long time only to bring into the house all the things you need, without thinking to a way for them to look good.
Here are some tips that will help you in your attempt to decorate a very small room. First, you must know that the light is very important and the overall look of the room, especially the room’s size, depends on it. The mirrors reflect the light from a room and make it look more spacious.
Placed on the wall in front of the window, the mirror will have a greater effect.
Assess the degree of illumination of the room and examine well the room’s corners, taking care that they are not shaded. For more light, add lighting objects on the wall, preferably suspended. Also, make sure the windows are decorated in bright colors.
It is essential to keep cleanliness in a narrow space, although this can be a challenge: anywhere you sit down, the things seem crowded and the mess appears quickly. Therefore we recommend you to use furniture and accessories that fulfill several functions at the same time (a coffee table with drawers, as it has a storage space; beds with drawers).
It is preferable the furniture’s division in small groups, than using a large space that gathers all the objects. Also, the room will be more attractive if the furniture is placed at a certain distance from the walls and not stacked on them. Regarding the bulky furniture- the bed, the sofa, the desk, and the closet- it is appropriate that they be placed in angle in front of the wall.
Establish ‘tracks’ over the room and arrange the furniture and the other accessories around them. Let a larger space around doors and windows and try to always keep free the shortest way to reach them.
Finally, get rid of ornaments (try to use them in line and depending on the season), minimize the number of art objects, use a single color for all the walls of the room (preferably a light or a warm one), move the photo collection to a special place (such as the walls that are up the staircase, which leads in the room) and, last but not the least, use shades in the room that ensure a harmonious environment.
It’s no secret that every good parent wants to have a great playroom where a child can explore and imagine to his or her heart’s content. But so often this space ends up becoming nothing more than an eyesore to poor mom and dad! Many feel that in order to create a truly enjoyable room, they will have to spend a fortune. But that just isn’t the case! With a little creativity and ingenuity you can create an inspired play place. Here are some simple steps that anyone can take to ensure that the playroom lives up to its full potential.
Step 1: Customize! Each child is unique and has individual interests. Find out about them! If you have a few kids then see if there is a theme that they can collectively agree on and go with that. Creating a theme for a room can be as simple as a fresh coat of paint and a few strategically placed items. For instance, if your daughter is interested in fairies, find a playhouse that fits that theme and turn it into the centerpiece for the room. If your son is interested in jungle animals, frame some posters with that pictorial theme and hang them around the room.
Step 2: Organize. Most of the clutter in a playroom is due to disorganization. By creating some clearly defined areas in the room, children can learn to be organized from a young age. A delightful reading area can be created by simply placing a comfy chair and bookshelf on a colorful kid-friendly carpet. Action figures and dolls can be placed on one shelf while art supplies can have their own corner. All of this ensures a clean space that can be fully enjoyed by children and maybe some parents too! And don’t feel pressured to keep every toy forever. If your child isn’t playing with it anymore sell it or donate it!
Step 3: Think Ahead. We all know that children’s taste can change rapidly, so when planning your renovation, don’t get too carried away. Choose a color that will be able to grow with the child. Pale greens, blues and yellows have the ability to match a multitude of themes while still infusing some color into the room. Go for broader themes that don’t rely on a single character or show. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be included in the room; it simply means including them in a different way. Opt for a painting of them which can later be sold instead of a wall mural which will inevitably have to be painted over. The idea is to include elements that can easily be removed, but don’t look like an afterthought.
Most importantly: Have fun with it. Don’t try to compete with your local theme park when designing the playroom! The goal is to simply create an environment that encourages imagination. A little thought and effort will go a long way in aiding a child’s enjoyment of his or her special room. So, set aside one weekend and get to work!
If you are looking at interior design and decoration as a career or hobby, you must make yourself familiar with the basic elements of interior design. There are six basic elements used in interior design and
decoration. You must use all the six elements while decorating a home or room to get a well designed and functional unit.
Here are the basic elements of Interior Design and Decoration:
1) Balance - Balance is of two types - symmetrical and asymmetrical. A symmetrical layout has balance in design while an asymmetrical layout has disparity. Symmetrical layouts are used in formal room decorations whereas asymmetrical ones are used for experimental and funky layouts.
Balance also refers to weight of different objects used in the room. It could be the actual weight and size of the furniture (furniture units, entertainment centers) or it could refer to visual weight (patterns, colors, textures and so on). While designing, make sure that the weight (actual as well as visual) is distributed equally in all parts of the room and no part appears uninviting due to excess weight.
2) Color - Humans can see millions of colors. To make color selection easy, look at your favorite piece of art, rug or upholstered fabric. Then choose colors around that item based on “60-30-10″ rule. If your favorite rug contains blue, yellow and cream, you may go for yellow walls (60%), blue sofa (30%) and cream cushions (10%).
3) Focal Point - A focal point is the center of interest in the room, the area of the room where our eyes are naturally drawn when we enter the room. You must have a focal point in all rooms. Usually fireplaces, large bay windows make for excellent focal points but if your room doesn’t have these elements then you can create a focal point by hanging your art creatively or placing accessories on a bookshelf strategically. Once you have decided a focal point, arrange other elements of the room around the focal point.