Home Improvement
Accessories are the finishing touches of any room – the vases, throw pillows, knickknacks, pictures, lamps – those treasures that personalize your home. They convey your style, your personality and set the tone for the room. Using accessories to redecorate a room is not only a quick fix, but a low budget makeover as well. You don’t even need to go out and buy new accessories, although to me that's half the fun, to get a new look.
Just by rearranging the smaller items in your room, you can have a new look for that same old room for just a fraction of the cost. If you use the following tips, your room can take on a professionally decorated look - if you randomly have accessories placed around the room, your room can look cluttered. Try these accessory decorating tips to give your rooms a more polished look:
Starting from Scratch
Start with a clean slate – take out all of the accessories and just start over rather than rearranging here and there – you won’t believe how much of a difference just removing clutter can make in the room. Try leaving all the smaller items out of the room for a day or two, you’d be surprised what ideas you come up with during that time!
Defining Your Room
With the accessories out of the room, take stock of the room style. Is it modern, country, primitive, European? Do the accessories you’re going to be putting back in fit with that style? If not, you can always move them to another room and buy a few more pieces, there are so many places to purchase quality accessories today, that you can invest in a few nice pieces to fit right in to your room.
Here are some decorating tips for first time buyers:
Adding Your Accessories
Start with the largest accessory first, then work your way down to the smaller items. Analyze each accessory addition and do not over-accessorize. Stand out of the room and look in to get the first impression of your room. If an item doesn’t seem to quite fit the style, or the room is beginning to look cluttered, be prepared to either move the leftover pieces to another room, or put them aside to go to a consignment shop or a yard sale. Follow these tips for proper accessory placement:
- Use odd number groupings – one, three, or five. Don’t make the grouping too large, or nothing stands out and it looks cluttered. Even number groupings, such as a pair or group of four, tend to make the group look over-decorated – save that look for the more formal rooms in your home. The decorating rule is - you can use symmetrical arrangements, such as pairings, in formal rooms. In more casual rooms, use asymmetrical arrangements of both furniture and accessories.
- When displaying family photos, whether on the wall or on a table, they look best when they have a common design element throughout the grouping – you can do this by having all the frames in the same finish or color, or even having all of the photo themselves a sepia or black and white as the common element.
- Place accessories within an imaginary triangle – high, medium and low - to add interest.
- Do not hang artwork, photos or display shelves too high, this is one of the most common decorating mistakes homeowners make. Most wall accessories should be at eye level.