Home Decorating: Less Is More

With the huge boom in interior designers and home decorating stores and businesses it is easy to feel unqualified to take on the decoration of your own home. The only thing is, people have been decorating their own homes for years, it isn’t until recently that we suddenly needed the help of interior designers and such to make our homes look like we want them to. You just need to know what you want and then think like an interior designer.

You first need to pick a space or a room that you are going to work on decorating. Only do one at a time, spreading your time over several rooms may lead you to become frustrated since the progress will seem very slow. Once you have your area choose a color that you like. If you are going with a bold or bright color it is better to make that an accent color rather than covering the entire wall. An entire room of bright red or deep purple can make the room hard to relax in since your eyes will constantly be trying to adjust to the extreme colors.

After the color, find yourself a theme. It doesn’t need to be anything crazy like cowboys or space ships, but decide if you want the items in the room to be modern or antique. Then head out and find a few items that fit into that theme. It is necessary that you don’t cram the room with figurines. Once you try to fit too many things in one room, whether it be too many colors or too much stuff or more than one theme the room just looks messy and unorganized all the time.

If you can’t come up with any ideas for what to put in your home, walk through a dollar store or craft store or simply search the web for interior decorating ideas.

How to Plant a Cutting Garden

Grow a cutting garden and enjoy flowers indoors and out

If you feel guilty when you cut flowers in your garden, worrying that you’re destroying nature or leaving gaps in your flowerbeds, it may be time for you to plant a cutting garden, says the American Association of Nurserymen (AAN). A cutting garden is designed to provide flowers for indoor arrangements, and it will give you a new perspective on removing flowers from your garden.

Choosing the Right Flowers and Plants

As with any garden, the first step in planning your cutting garden is to select plants that grow well in your part of the country. Ask the experts at your local garden center for their suggestions, and keep in mind your soil conditions, the amount of sun or shade your garden receives and how much it rains.

Selecting a Color Scheme

After you’ve decided which plants will thrive at your site, choose a color scheme, whether bright and vivid primary colors, soft and muted pastel shades or dusty earth tones. Since the purpose of a cutting garden is to grow flowers to use indoors, think about how flowers of certain colors will look when you place them in main rooms of your house.

Finally, plant flowers and plants in such a way that no one will notice that you frequently forage for new material for your indoor bouquets. One way to achieve a continuously balanced look in your cutting garden is to group your plantings by color, so that when you clip several blue flowers one day and several yellow flowers another, the overall appearance of the garden is still one of continuity and growth.

You can also fill in around your flowers with shrubs and larger, bushy plants that can easily spare a few leaves or berries, as well as plant a mix of perennials, annuals and bulbs so your garden will bloom all year ’round.

Home Decoration Ideas – Make The Neighborhood Envious!

When you think about changes to your home interior, whether it is for a couple of rooms or for the entire house, your first thought is of color. As would everyone, you too would tend to choose your favorite colors generally, or colors which match your furniture pieces. However, a majority of people miss out on the most outstanding basic color combination – white and black – when looking for home decoration ideas.

These two colors, white and black, create a sensation in home decorating. White and black together create drama and pizzazz. A dash of black can beautify every room. This is an anchoring color and it grounds a room. It is eye-catching and speaks of a sophistication all its own. If you are using this color for enhancing your decor, you may like the idea of choosing accessories of this color such as furniture, trim or light fixtures. Black is the only color that creates a focus in a room, standing out boldly and making its own statement.

Use of white and black in home decoration makes an impact by creating a fresh, clean and elegant atmosphere. Any room in the house can benefit from this combination, creating a sophisticated space. Contemporary home decorating ideas often use this combination of white and black and in French Country Design, it is used to enliven other colors. Though it is difficult to imagine, there are a lot of wonderful ideas of home decoration with the use of only these two base colors.

Home decorating takes a great start if you focus on the flooring first, making a beautiful checkerboard pattern using white and black vinyl tiles alternatively laid. It really looks fantastic and elegant. Another wonderful idea is to use black marble flooring and accentuate it with wide white baseboards. Or you could paint the floor white or black and decorate it with stencils of the opposite color, or use black bordered white ceramic tiles to create a great effect.

Can you imagine anything more perfect than pure white walls? White walls or even an off-white color makes an ideal background for artworks framed in black. What a striking effect it would have! An aura of sophistication is created with elegant black treatments for windows or black shutters against a pure white wall. Perhaps black chairs lying around a glass-top black iron-trim table would complete the picture.

It would be lovely to decorate a bedroom using white and black. Iron bed-frame in white or black, covered with a comforter with white and black stripes; all white or all black pillow shames, with opposite colored cushions thrown in would be outstanding. The corner of the room could have a lovely white or black leather chair to accentuate it. For a contemporary feel, a piece of artwork elegantly framed in black handing on white walls would suffice. The pure white walls could provide a great background for the neat and tidy black furniture. The room could be jazzed up with silver candlesticks, pewter or vases and jugs. With a little color to enhance the beauty of the room, a bold colored cushion or throw in gold or red for the corner chair in the room would complete the picture.

There are numerous ideas to decorate a home. The trick is to find the one that suits you, even though it is great to do something radically new. After all, you must be able to really enjoy living in it day in and day out.