Staging Tips to Sell Your Home Faster
June 12, 2023
Redesign Your Home to Create a New Look
June 13, 2023Redesign on a Dime
I am going to show you step by step what you can do to transform a living room without spending a fortune yet still buy quality furniture. This room has not been updated in years. My client wanted to give her living room a face lift. She was aware that the room had to be updated and redone. After talking to her I found out she did not want to spend a lot of money to redesign a room that she does not use that often. That information makes a difference when you are purchasing furniture. I had many other questions to make sure I was creating the room she wanted. First I had to identify the room’s assets and problems.
The paneled walls are so dark that they close in the room. The ceiling is so dark that it gives the illusion that the walls are short and the ceiling is hovering over you. The curtains are outdated and worn. The curtains and collectables are covering up the windows and not allowing the sunlight to enter this already dark room. The furniture is old and worn out. The pictures are scattered and do not have a purpose or a unifying decorating style. The placement of the furniture is not positioned in the best way to make the room more inviting. The positioning of the couch gives the illusion that it is a visual barrier to the room.
Solution
This is a very rare situation where I remove everything in the room and start over with a few furniture exceptions. The homeowner and I talked about what look she wanted in the living room. My job as a decorator was to ask the right question to insure she was getting the right look and feel for her home and her living room. I wanted to make sure we were choosing the right decorating style and color palette that would make her and her family feel comfortable sitting in and enjoying the room
She already had a picture of a couch that she loved. We built the room around the colors of the couch. I made a step by step plan of what we were going to do to transform the living room. We decided how much furniture, window treatments, lamps, accessories and pictures we would need to complete the room. The couch and chair that were chosen are good quality. After the couch arrived I choose a paint color from one of the colors in the stripe of the couch. I knew I had to have a light color of paint because the room was so dark even during the day time. The painter had to use Kilz on the paneled walls before the proper paint color could be applied.
As the painter was painting my client and I went shopping for fabric to have window treatments made that would coordinate with the couch which was the basis for our color scheme. The fabric that the couch was made from was not available to purchase. We found the perfect fabric and the perfect window treatment style for her new redesigned living room. I needed art work to pull out not only our color palette but also our decorating style that had been chosen for the room. Finding the right pictures for the right price was important. We needed larger pictures to go over the couch.
The picture we choose to go over the fireplace was perfect to size and scale for the size of the fireplace. My client found the end tables and they fit perfect in the room. The lamps and accessories were purchased on sale and look great. I wanted to pull the window treatment fabric into the room again so I added pillows to the chairs to accent the window treatments. The room was completed and ready to show off. It was no longer dark and depressing. The pictures that were purchased at discount prices added color and life into the room. The new custom made window treatments added that finishing touch to complete this new redesign room.
