It’s not hard to decorate like a designer. You can transform your home with many tricks and tips. We spoke to several designers, who gave us their best home decor tips. This article will provide you with home decorating ideas to refresh your home’s rooms on a budget.

Home Decor Tips for DIYers

1. Set the tone at the Front Door

Paint the front door a vibrant, fun colour. Lara Allen Brett, an interior designer in New Jersey, says that many cultures consider red a lucky colour. In early America, a red door was a welcome sign for weary travellers, and in churches, it is a symbol of safety.

According to Christopher Breining, a San Francisco-based set designer, orange and yellow are also becoming popular. Both colours are associated with warmth and joy.

An outdated screen door should be thrown out. Replace it with a Storm door that has full-length glass and can be replaced with a screen panel.

2. Paint walls in light and neutral colours

Paint a room in a new colour to create a dramatic difference. Keep your colours neutral, like beige and grey, on the first level, where it is most important to maintain flow. Breining says that you should minimize abrupt transitions. Neutral walls allow you to decorate with the most flexibility. You can easily change your accessories.

Read more about Home Decorating:

• The Living Room
• The Best Colorful Living Rooms
• Home Lighting Essentials
• Kitchen Lighting Schemes

If you have two rooms that are close together, painting them in the same neutral colour will make them seem larger. Allen-Brett suggests using a paint strip to change the colour of a room by moving up or down two shades.

It’s easy to change the colour of a room. You can match your new paint colour with the existing decor to avoid buying new accessories. Or, you could consider painting an accent to create contrast.

3. Check to Make Sure Your Sofa Talks to Your Chairs

Your living room is where many people gather, bringing family and friends closer together. Arrange your furniture to create a warm, welcoming atmosphere.

Michelle Lynne is a Dallas-based stylist who says that a conversation area with a U shape, where a couch and two chairs are placed at either end of the coffee table, or an “H” shape, with the sofa across from the two chairs, and the coffee table in the middle, would be ideal.

Avoid pushing furniture up against walls. She says that people push furniture against the wall to make the room appear larger.

4. Let the Sun Shine

Lynne says that if you have heavy, old drapes, it’s better to leave them off than cover your windows with ugly ones. Window dressings are meant to be both functional and elegant. Think sheers with full-length panels.

If your room gets a lot of sun, choose light colours. They won’t fade. Cotton, linen, and silk blends are the most popular lightweight fabrics because they hang well.

Window treatments are a great way to dress up your room without spending a fortune. To keep costs low, choose vertical blinds, roller shades or curtains. As mentioned above, your windows can be stripped and left bare to allow natural light in.

5. Install at least one mirror in every room

Breining says that mirrors can brighten up a room by reflecting light. Placing a mirror in the wrong place can be as bad as having none at all.

Mirrors should be placed perpendicularly to windows and not directly opposite. If you hang a mirror opposite a window, it can bounce light back through the window.

Tom Silva, general contractor at This Old House, shares his tips and tricks for safely mounting a large mirror.

6. You can scale up your artwork to fit the wall

Breining says that hanging tiny artwork too high up on a wall is ridiculous. The middle of the picture should be at eye level. If one person is tall and the other is short, average the heights of the two people.

Scale is important. If you have a large space, choose an oversize piece or arrange smaller pieces in galleries. If you choose the latter option, keep the distance between the images to a maximum of 4 inches.

7. Layer Your Lighting

Lighting is a key element in setting the mood and ambience of our homes. Each room should have at least three types of lighting.

• Accent: Accent lighting is decorative and used to highlight certain features of the home, such as artwork.
• Ambient: This type of lighting is used to provide overall illumination, and ceiling fixtures often offer it.
• Task Lighting: This type of lighting is usually found above a reading nook or kitchen island.

You should use at least 3 watts per square foot for a living area. Breining uses uplights as a visual trick. He says that placing a canister or torchiere at the corner of a room will make the room appear larger.

8. Anchor Rugs under Furniture Feet

Placement and size are important when it comes to area rug placement. Breining says that in a living area, the rug should be large enough to accommodate all four legs from the sofas and chairs. The carpet should also define the seating space. He adds that, at the very least, the two front legs of the chairs and sofa should rest on the carpet.

An 8-by-10 or 9-by-12-foot rug is usually required to accommodate seating in a living room with less-than-generous proportions. If you choose a rug that is too small, it will make the room look out of proportion.

9. Hire a Professional to Declutter

As you get older, you will see less and less of the mess. You may need to get a new pair of eyes. Hire an organizer to help you organize your bookshelves or closets. They are usually stuffed with double the amount of items they should. An organizer will cost you between $55 to $100 per hour or $522 on average per project. *

Breining recommends reducing the amount of clutter on your shelves to 50% if you want to do it yourself. Mix horizontal stacks of books among vertical rows and add decorative items, such as vases or bowls, between them.

10. Visual Tricks to Raise the Ceiling

Paint your low ceilings white to give the illusion of a larger room. Allen-Brett suggests hanging curtains higher than windows to fool your eye into believing the room is bigger. The standard curtain panels are 84 or 96 inches long, so you can hang them 3 inches higher than the window casing without the curtains being too short.

If you want your drapes hung higher, you’ll need to order custom drapes. Do you love patterned panels or curtains? Vertical stripes will visually lengthen your walls. A large mirror leaning against a wall will also help make the room appear taller.

11. Refresh old finishes

Have outdated fixtures? Refinish them using spray paint or inexpensive kits. Breining says that a 1980s brass lamp can be given a new lease of life by spray painting it in hammered bronze or satin nickel.

White paint and new hardware can update even old kitchen cabinets. If you thought Formica counters were hopeless, think again. Breining swears that Rust-Oleum countertop transformations are a DIY counter-coating product that looks like stone. It can make even the oldest 1970s counters look new.

Last, replace cracked or mismatched outlet covers and switch plates with newer ones that match. Lynne says: “Nothing brings down a newly refreshed space more than a dingy almond-colored switchplate.”

The Conclusion

Your creativity can transform the flow of your space. You can use a bright colour to brighten up your front door. Hang sheer curtains over a window and create an inviting living area with a U or H-shaped seating arrangement. You can decorate your home on a budget by painting your walls, decorating your windows and replacing your old area rug.