Find Your Balance with Home Decorating

I’m not going to lie; my eye for design definitely needed a new pair of glasses before I learned the basics of home decorating. Every time I entered my home, though it was my home, it never felt as if it was “pulled” together, or matched, or… SOMETHING just seemed to be missing. Upon entering a paint store, I would become lost. Furniture and furnishing stores gave me a headache. Everything felt too busy, too bothered. I just never knew the basics of home design or how to make my home look “put together”.

That’s when I enlisted in the help of my home decorating friend to assist me in bringing more peace and balance to my humble abode. The first tip is the best that I think a lot of us can benefit from:

Get rid of the “Stuff”

Look around your room. Check out the amount of clutter every where. On this table alone, there are 3 magazines and a stack of mail that I really should take out to recycling or at least look at, but instead I choose to allow it to collect on my kitchen table, taking up space and closing me in.

Many of us also just have too much “stuff” in general. I would visit home decorating stores in hopes of finding something I thought “would go” with the other decorations at home, only to bring it home and see that it didn’t match a single thing. But would I return that item? No. Instead, I would go out and seek something else to match that item, or to match the paint color, or to match the picture on the wall, or to… (you can see where I’m going with this).

You will always want to maintain enough space around each object in every room so that you can easily walk through and with an extra few inches on both sides.

Keep it Clean and Keep it Simple

Have you ever stood in a doorway to a room in your home and felt that it was unbalanced? Not sure how to balance it out? There are a few simple tips that my friend gave me to help me balance out my own home.

First, if you have bought anything as a “couple” (side tables, couches, even rugs) then bring them back together. If you have two lamps that are the same, but you have separated them between rooms, get them back in the same room and place them in a way so that they are facing each other. Put them side to side or diagonally across to create a balanced effect.

Fake It

You can also actually “fake” pairings. Look for items that are of a similar color or material and see if you can make them work together. You can try to pair a chair and a couch together by adding small pillows that are the same color and/or texture of the chair to the couch. Adding book ends, candle holders, and even books with similar colors or bindings can also help pull a room together and add balance.

Changing lampshades on lamps that are made of similar materials can also be a very inexpensive way to create a “balanced” feel.

Some Last Tips

One of the most important tips I can give to help keep balance in your home is to keep space to walk around the sides and foot of the bed. Never push the bed right up into a corner so that one side of the bed is blocked off from walking around.

Keep all electrical items close to the socket itself so that you will not be forced to tie up or look at random cords on a daily basis.

One can bring symmetry to a room by adding paints and pictures with similar landscapes or designs on them.

Along with balance, make sure that the room is also functional. Side tables are side tables for a reason – they should be place next to a piece of furniture and not be left by their lonesome in the center of the room or be used as a coffee table.

photo by Samantha Villagran