Tag Archives: Interior Decorating Minneapolis

Light Up Your World!

I was working with a client a few days ago who had just purchased a new home. The home was built in 2000 and she wanted help in making decisions for updates. When buying a new home that is older, you may want to update a lot of things but financially you cannot do them all at once.

I was asked, ” what are the 2-3 things I can do to make the biggest impact for the money.” The answer was easy, especially in this home. Paint and lighting.

 

The home was built in 2000 and many of the features showed exactly what decade it was built. Burgundy and yellow paint colors, lighting with amber frosted globes.

 

Keep this in mind when buying a home as well as taking a hard look at your current home.

When purchasing a home, are the bones of the home great and you just need to make some cosmetic changes over time? Are there big updates needed to flooring, trim, or even opening walls that can be done later? Or maybe you just don’t want to tackle them at all and you want a pure move in ready home.

In your current, home has it been a while since you have updated things? Do you need to start considering making some changes that will make  your home more marketable when you are ready to sell, plus you can enjoy them now?

 

 

Even in homes I am working on to get ready to sell, paint and lighting bring the largest Return on Investment, the biggest bang for your buck. Use paint colors that are fresh and modern which right now is light paint colors. Make sure your light fixtures are current, making your home light and bright with updated light bulbs. These two things will bring an instant change!!

 

 

 

So light up your world by bringing in light and on trend paint colors and new light fixtures with bright bulbs and clear globes. Light up your world literally!!

 

 

 

Continuity and Flow in your Home

Just the words “continuity and flow” makes you want to take a deep breath doesn’t it? To just be calm. And that is what your home should be, a calming place that your shoulders drop down a couple inches when you walk in the door. This calming factor is important to keep in mind when selling your home as well. You want the potential buyer feeling a sense of calm as they walk through your home. Not chaos or a sense of being unsettled.

There are many ways to create that feeling of calm, one way is with a “less is more” approach with your decor and large furniture pieces.

But the single easiest way to create continuity and flow in a home is with color.

To do that, have a touch of the same color running throughout the home, especially in the main living areas. You can have a different accent color mixed with this main color in a small amount, but that main color appears in all the rooms as you walk through them.

The best way to explain this is with pictures. For the home in the photos below, the main color I chose was navy blue and I used it to create a flow throughout the home. This does not mean it has to be strictly navy, it can be different shades such as smokey blue or even a more vibrant shade.

In the living room I used navy blue pillows and accent pieces of blue on the coffee table.

 

I added a touch of blue on the dining room table:

 

 

The mudroom has blue accessories:

 

 

In the primary bedroom I have blue on the bed as well as a blue velvet chair in the corner:

 

 

In the lower level family room I brought in a bold statement of blue to create a focal point with the color.

 

 

Continuity and Flow is about connecting your rooms, that they seem to work together not against each other. There are some exceptions. Kids rooms can be different, fun and full of color. Laundry rooms can also be a bit fun. The goal is for things not to seem random but rather well put together, every piece has a purpose.

P.S. Did you notice in the first photo I used the gal is sitting in a blue chair? Creating continuity and flow can work in many places!

 

 

How to Create Balance In Your Room

In my previous post I started a ‘training’ session of sorts on how to create a well put together space in your home. I used to train and certify Home Stagers and many of the things I taught them applied to a home for living as well as a home for selling. My previous post focused on focal points (pun intended)! 😊 Now lets take a look at balance.

How do you create balance in a room? It can be done through the placement of your furniture, accessories or even with color. Many times it is all of the above. I really think balance is about the feeling you get when you are in the room. Balance does not mean you have all items perfectly symmetrical because you will never have the exact same items or size of items on both side of a room; nor would you want to.

 

 

A perfect way to describe a room out of balance is when all the large pieces of furniture in a room are set up to face the TV.  What happens is that all the heavy pieces get lined up on one wall and the TV sits alone on the opposite wall. The weight of the room literally feels like it is tipping to one side. You want to arrange furniture so that it is not all about the TV all the time, then use other furniture and accessories to balance the visual weight within the room.

 

 

There is also a sense of balance you get with bookshelves or the mantel of a fireplace. Again, you don’t want everything identical on each side but you don’t want, for example, all books on one side and all accessories on the other. The side with all the books would obviously feel too heavy. You want to disperse items amongst the shelves using varying heights to create balance as well.

 

 

Let’s take a look at this room below:

 

The chair floating to the left of the TV creates balance so that the right side of the room doesn’t feel heavy with the weight of the fireplace and chair. It also counters the weight from the other direction because if the wall had just the TV and fireplace it would feel light with all the heavy furniture on the other side of the room. Do you feel how that would be?

Also let’s take a look at the fireplace, there are not tall items on both the left side of the mantel and the right side. That can be done but it may also be boring. The tall vase with reeds on the floor to the right of the fireplace brings balance to the whole area. The floor lamp behind the chair on the left brings in height to counter the height on the right side. Do you see it?

So for me, I just did this without thinking. It is ingrained within me because it is what I do and do it all the time. It is just automatic and took me maybe 10 minutes to pull together visually. That’s me. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get it balanced on the first try. Play with it, pull in things from other rooms and see how it feels, move things around, experiment. When will you know it is balanced? It will feel just right, like the Goldilocks nursery rhyme, you keep trying until it is just right. 😊

I hope you learned a little bit about balance and if you want to check out my previous post about “focal points” click the link. My next blog will be all about creating Continuity and Flow!