~All pieces available for sale can be found here~
Welcome to week three of my humble decorating series! If you are new or missed the beginning, you can take a few moments to catch up if you'd like: Intro, Part 1, Part 2
At this point in the series you may have a defined idea of your style. Remember, it doesn't have to fall in one genre. Your style may be a pie chart that incorporates multiple elements. Now it's time to get a bit more specific!
Look around your space, mainly 'public' rooms: entrance/foyer, living room, family room, dining room - the places you would invite guests. Think realistically about how you live and how each room would best accommodate that. To borrow a line from Domino: The Book of Decorating, "You may fantasize about a formal living room where you can hold fancy parties, but if a) you don't entertain all that much, and b) you end up with a set up that doesn't accommodate the things you or your family enjoy, like watching movies, then someone's going to be unhappy." (page 16). This is such a great example of why it's so important to be honest about your lifestyle!
And your lifestyle now could change someday. You may dream of fancy entertaining in your living room, but your current lifestyle may not allow you to do so, (young children, full time student with a full time job, etc). Decorate appropriately for your current lifestyle so you can enjoy this stage of life and save ideas for when things change. An example of this for us was when we were furnishing our newly built deck. We talked about doing an outdoor living room of sorts with love seats, comfy chairs, a coffee table, etc. BUT, we really like eating outside with our kids, and our kids are very young, (well, they were when we had this discussion over a year ago). It's a bit easier for our toddlers to sit still and eat when they're in chairs, so we opted for a large table and a bunch of chairs. We still took the time to find the style and colors we wanted and had a blast mixing and matching our own set, (IKEA Falster table in grey, and Roxo chairs in yellow).
Once you've considered the most ideal function of the room, take a good look around at what you've got and just list each item, (big and small), in a notepad, (Domino recommends photographing each item, which is a great idea, just not realistic for me). Then "sort your pictures, (list of items/pieces), into four groups: keep, change (paint, reupholster), give away and sell." (page 17)
We moved into our home with all hand-me-downs which we were so graciously given from friends and family. When I really narrowed in on our style, I realized that not very much of what we had really fit with that. We have a great Craigslist up here in Northern Virginia and I was able to sell every item that wasn't right for us. We had an empty home for a little while, but it was nice to start from scratch with some extra cash in our pockets.....which brings us to one of next weeks topics of setting a budget, (along with starting the process of buying).
So, we leave off this week with a few tasks:
1)Think about how you live and the best function for your space
2)Make a list of every item in your room(s) from furniture to art and everything in between
3)Keeping your style, lifestyle and ideal function in mind, place each item into one of the following four groups: Keep, Change/Refinish, Give away, Sell
Thank you for reading! I hope this has been fun for you because it's been a great refresher for me!
~Chelsea
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