Whether for your first apartment or for the first-time home buyer, home decorating inspiration and ideas can be found in all sorts of places! You don't have to have a degree in interior design or decorating – or a lot of money - to create awe-inspiring and comfortable surroundings in your own environment. Successful decorating comes from knowing what you like and what works, experimenting with what you don’t know, and being game to try new things.
If you’re decorating your first home or apartment, you’ll find challenges galore! There may just be particular areas that you need help with: “How do I arrange furniture in a room has too many doors and windows?” “I love color, but I’m scared to use it on my walls!” “How do I hang wallpaper?”
Fortunately, there’s tons of help out there to help you get comfortable with decorating. Inspiration is everywhere! In addition to the countless home decorating magazines and the online do-it-yourself sites that also offer helpful decorating tips and tricks, there are some other places where you can get a first-hand look at how the interior decorating experts do it:
- Furniture Stores: The great thing about furniture stores is that they’re tight on space! The higher end stores often have in-house decorators who know how to use the tightest spaces in the most amazing ways. Upscale stores like Sutton’s Marketplace in Queensbury NY (one of Rachel Ray’s favorite places), are experts at this. When you go to these stores, pay careful attention to the angles used for furniture arrangement, how and where the accent pieces are used, and the clever manner in which they use rugs, artwork, and color to create a particular focus.
- Catalogs: One of the best ways to be able to study a room is with a catalog you really like. Pottery Barn, for instance, has a great one, filled with ideas on the latest furnishings, window treatments, and decorating accents for the entire house. Note how they arrange artwork on the walls, and how their pieces seem to mix both traditional and contemporary styles.
- Model Homes & Open Houses: Whether or not you’re house hunting, model homes are some of the best places to go for great decorating ideas. Typically a builder will invest a great deal of time and money into creating a showcase home, and you can get a great hands-on experience with how they use space, color, and light. (Also, you learn how they dress up the more traditional spots in your home, like the mantle, the foyer, the half bath, etc.)
- Wallpaper Books: Sounds strange, perhaps, but those wallpaper sample books in your local hardware store or decorating center provide great ideas on home and interior design, and decorating inspiration that knows no bounds when it comes to using color and texture in your home. Spending some time with them also makes choosing your wallpaper easier.
Once you know where and how to look for it, you’ll find inspiration everywhere! After spending some time seeing how the professionals do it, you'll find that you can adapt those ideas to meet your own needs and accommodate your home, style and budget!
