As promised long ago, here are just some of the makings of a colorful, cheery bedroom. While I do like the stark white kitchens and bathrooms, pretty much everywhere else in my house needs to be absolutely saturated with color. I had our paints picked out long before The Beard and I closed on our house, and the first order of business upon closing was to start prettying up the walls. Being that I already knew where my decor was headed, I had no trouble re-purposing what we already had to fit the new scheme.

I did, naturally, have to flesh the whole works out with some fresh things, if only because we were moving into a totally different space…at least that’s what I keep telling myself!

I love the chair, but I don’t know that I could find a place for it in the pale green sanctuary of my own bedroom. But the radio? Bring it on!

A while back, I talked about using tools to help you plot out a room’s worth of furniture. Software is just one option. There’s always your handy dandy graph paper. I even knew one guy who’d cut out little pictures of couches and end tables and move them around the miniature room he’d sketched out.

But here’s an option I never realized existed…

Yep, that’s right. It’s pre-fab flat paper “furniture” that lets you guesstimate the footprint of your stuff and then move it around until you find a configuration you like. Move it without giving yourself a hernia, I mean. Back when I was in high school I would move my bedroom suite around every few months, never taking the drawers out of anything or the mattress off the bed. I’d shove, shove, shove until I’d gotten everything just right, probably ruining the carpeting in the process. Sorry, mom!

At about $30 a room, the sets are fairly cheap, which is good considering that they’re basically heavy duty paper. You could go to your local arts and crafts emporium, get a bunch of off-the-roll paper, and DIY, but art supplies tend to be pretty expensive and you may end up spending just as much. The upside of sourcing your own paper is that you can cut it to match your actual furniture instead of having to rely on someone else’s standards.

Before the official launch of the blog, I wrote about shopping your home when you need a decor pick-me-up. What do you do, though, when you’ve found all of the perfect new furniture for a certain room in your house or apartment, but you have no clue how to arrange them? When I find myself facing this conundrum, I put scissors to paper.

I could explain myself in my own words, but Seeds of Knowledge wrote it out so succinctly:

1. Measure your room. Draw it to scale on graph paper which you can find at your local discount store. Use a 1/4 in. equal 1 ft. scale. If you can’t figure out how to draw out scale, ask your know-it-all teenage son!

2. Mark anything on your room drawing that will affect the arrangement of the room. Outlets, telephone, cable, light switches, windows, doors that open in, the space between windows, and the height of the window sills are all things that should be measured and noted.

3. This is the fun part! Make scale paper cutouts of your furniture (just like cutting out paper dolls!) Use the cutouts to arrange and rearrange the furniture in your room until you are satisfied with the result.

That’s it — without breaking a sweat, you can be sure your old rooms with their new furniture will look wonderful in their new configuration. Even if you find drawing tedious, it beats asking your friends, significant other, or “know-it-all teenage son” to help you move your couch over and over and over again.

A happiest of holiday to you and yours! If, unlike moi, you have a Christmas tree somewhere in your home, tell us about it. Real or faux? Little or sprawling? Fresh and green or plastic and pink?

I’d happily trade all my family gifted dinnerware and kitchen accouterments for the same pieces as designed by Jonathan Adler if I happened to have the excess dough lying about. Sorry mamman! Sorry dad! My most generous relatives can breathe a collective sigh of relief, however, as it turns out I’m just not solvent enough to replace my kitchenware at this time… no matter how wonderfully beautiful that Jonathan Adler pitcher is.

Give an Ikea ISIG to lifestyle guru Matthew Mead and you’ll end up with something lovely. I found his easy-peasy DIY directions through ikea hacker, a blog devoted to finding the most interesting and innovative uses for boring old Ikea flat pack furniture.

Go and check ikea hacker out, then come back and tell me about your most creative Ikea furniture hacks. After all, just because something came from Ikea (or the Goodwill or the Dollar Tree) doesn’t mean it has to look like it did!

When The Beard and I moved into our new house, we didn’t exactly have a lot of moolah left over to dedicate to decor. Our apartment was of course nothing like the house, and I’m big into decorating to suit a space. I could have just settled and saved–to some extent I still am–but who wants to live in an uncomfortable habitat? Not me, that’s for sure.

I feel good and work well in spaces that have a nice homey quality to them. Had I just moved each room of the apartment to the corresponding room of the house, I would have gone crazy. Maybe it’s just an obsessive compulsivity that drives me to want everything to be in its rightful place, but I knew that I needed to make my house into my home as quickly as possible.
(more…)

I found this pic via the Uncluttered Workspaces pool on Flickr. This particular space belongs to Timothy Andres, a master’s student and composer with a real flair for color and design.

As you’re going to discover, I have the serious hots for sparse interiors, which probably explains my sudden inclination to rabidly exorcise my own cluttered office after scrutinizing this pic.