Home Decorating Ideas for Beginners

Decorating Guide for Beginners

Some of us just don’t have the talents that a top decorator has, but that does not mean we still can’t have a visually pleasing home. No matter how limited your design tastes or skills, there are some very simple ways to decorate your living space. Here are some simple home decorating tips for the style challenged.

Keep it Simple

One of the best ways to decorate is to maintain simplicity. This means decluttering your space before even attempting any decoration. If you have stacks of magazines that you mean to read some day, get rid of them.

If you have collectibles of some kind spread all over your home, winnow down your collection to your favorite pieces and feature them in one place. Decorative plates, figurines and similar placed willy-nilly all over a space are visually distracting and make a space appear cluttered.

Creative uses for Everyday Furniture

Create specific living spaces with your furnishings. Many people are tempted to keep their furniture along the outer walls of their home, leaving empty space in the center, space that easily fills up with unnecessary smaller furnishings, exercise equipment and generic clutter like newspapers. Group your furniture in your main living area, creating a seating area in front of a television, a reading area, or similar. Grouped furniture is a simple way to create visual harmony, and does not require keeping up on decorating trends, and grouped furniture creates easily visually identifiable spaces so that clutter does not creep up on you again.

As Easy as a Coat of Paint

Sometimes simple decorating, especially for those who are style challenged, can be as easy as a coat of paint. Many decorating magazines and television shows feature rooms with different colored walls and stenciled paint lines in the center of the wall, which can seem daunting to people unsure of their design sense. Instead of making things too difficult, pick a complementary paint color and stick to it for all four walls. Using neutral colors can brighten up a space without forcing you to analyze endless paint chips to decide which shade of teal works best. Paint is a simple way to spruce up any space.

Buy Investment Pieces

Buying furniture is hard when you are style challenged and can end up being an expensive mistake if a sales person talks you into something that does not fit your tastes or current living space. Unless you inherited all your furniture from relatives, chances are you picked out your current furnishings because something about them appealed to you, be it their lines or their comfort. Instead of forcing yourself to get new items, try new slipcovers to freshen up that old couch. Try new seating cushions for your dining room table. Try to stick to solids, and if they look too boring, add complementary colored throws or pillows to the couch or easy chairs for a splash of color.

Using what you have is both simple and economical. And if all your furniture is hand-me-down? Slipcovers are still a great way to liven up old furniture, especially that acorn-print velveteen couch your aunt gave you in college.

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