Decorating & Organizing Your Home

Women may not feel comfortable with a drill but women are confident in their ability to furnish and decorate their homes. We know how we use our homes and intuitively find ways to enhance day-to-day living with a tweak here and there. We tend to limit our projects though, to those we feel we can handle ourselves … like painting or hanging curtains.  That’s a great place to start but there are many other ways to personalize your home and make it fit you like a glove, supporting the wants and needs of you and your family.

Lifestyle Versus Decorating Style

As decorating can mean different things to each of us, it makes sense to start with Wikipedia’s definition for interior decorating. Interior design is a multi-faceted profession in which creative and technical solutions are applied within a structure to achieve a built interior environment. These solutions are functional, enhance the quality of life and culture of the occupants, and are aesthetically attractive. I really like the definition with one exception, the confusion between interior decorators and interior designers (and it’s really important to them).

• Interior decorators – work with the existing walls, focusing on function and aesthetics like paint colors, window treatments and floor plans to maximize the benefit you get from each room.
• Interior designers – address everything a decorator does. They also get involved in structural design like windows for natural sunlight, doors for better traffic flow and moving walls to redesign or expand living space. They’re not architects so they can’t give you structural drawings although they can provide floor plans.

How you use your home will evolve as you move through stages in your life from single homeowner, to parenting and eventually the empty nest when your children begin their own lives. I remember baskets in every room for picking up toys and the oak file cabinet that transformed our dining into Ryan’s craft room. Soon we had homework stations as nothing got done in their bedrooms. Now they’re grown and on their own, and I love my quilt room.

We welcome contributions from our homeowners to provide a richer experience for everyone. Simply send us your story in an email, along with some photos and permission to share your story, and one of our team members will  add your story to the library. People frequently talk about work-life balance, referring to where our time is spent … but it doesn’t end there so share your challenges and your success!

Functional Decorating Starts with Furnishing Your Home

Think about the home you grew up in and compare it with your home today. They’re pretty similar, a kitchen, dining room, bathrooms and bedrooms. Differences are whether you have an eat-in kitchen, a family room or great room and a  laundry room but these aren’t all that different from 50 years ago.

Today we look to Martha Stewart or Oprah Winfrey but women’s advice magazines started in the early 1800s with Godey’s Lady’s Book offering advice on decorating and housekeeping. That’s where you can learn more about parlors “…  nineteenth century plans for homes that included spaces, such as hallways, between rooms. These spaces provided a physical division between gendered spaces and clearly separated public spaces (e.g. parlor) from private spaces (e.g. chamber or bedroom).”

As furniture relates to the room where you’ll put it, you’ll want to scan the article categories (found in right hand column) under “Decorating and Organizing” to find those that match the topic you’re researching. For example, under Bathrooms and More, one of the articles you’ll find is Bathroom Vanities and Road Map to Remodeling.

Buying furniture can be an adventure whether visiting a store or shopping online. Make a list of what you need to buy before shopping. Take measurements so you know the right size, bring color swatches if you need to match paint colors or window treatments and photos can also help if you don’t find it easy to visualize a new piece of furniture in the room where it will go.

Decorating Tips for You and Your Home

Interior decorating is something you can do yourself and there are professionals who can help you. Quite often decorators will help you achieve the results you want faster and cheaper than doing it yourself because they know what furnishings cost and where to buy them. Decorating can be huge from color and furnishings, ceiling to floor, lighting, window treatments, artwork and accessories to fit your rooms and lifestyle.

Many decorating choices affect the entire house. When moving into a new condo recently, we tried out several (ok, we painted one wall 4 times) different blues until we found the one! It was important as we used different shades of the same blue in multiple rooms but finally had to get help from a decorator for a complimentary warm color.  These decorating choices include:

• Window style, materials and window treatments, i.e. sizes and wood versus vinyl. Windows and drapes play a role in room decorating, but don’t forget they’re also seen from the outside. Check categories under Building and Remodeling if you don’t find what you want
• Wall and ceiling colors and textures and picking paint colors is more challenging than you think so check out Paint Colors that Help You Sell Your Home and Help: What Paint Finish Do I Want? For those who want to decorate with wallpaper, we’ve got Wallpaper Frequently Asked Questions to help you plan your strategy.
• Interior trim like baseboard, trim around doors and windows plus upgrades like described in Interior Trim Can Add Spice to Any Room. The most important thing here is to pick one color for ceilings and trim.
• Light fixtures might be different for special rooms but deciding where to put ceiling fans and matching light switches are decisions that should be made for the entire house.
• Flooring choices involves multiple decisions from cost, to maintenance and how well the flooring will hold up to heavy foot traffic. It’s also important to consider the visual effect of one continuous material versus several.

We’ll save most of decorating advice for articles contributed by our interior decorating professionals. Here are just a few tips to get you started with a decorating strategy that will always work for you.

• Plan the overall design first so you know how things will ultimately come together and then you can break the project down into smaller projects, that are easier to start and complete quickly giving you the satisfaction and motivation to start the next decorating project.
• Weigh buying disposable vs lifetime products … tables, chairs, etc Buy products to last a lifetime
• Get help from a pro to avoid problems like the wrong paint color or more furniture than you need … or worse, discovering that the couch you thought was perfect in the store is too big in your living room.
• Build a long term relationship with a handyman to handle structural things like built-in shelves or custom closets. When designing my husband’s closet, I found 4 extra feet lost under the stairs which made a huge difference.

Getting Organized at Home

There’s no one organizational style that works for everyone. The organization strategy that works for you must integrate your personality with your profession, your lifestyle and your home. Getting organized at home also needs to include the needs of other family members to be successful.

For example, dealing with snail mail at my house isn’t fun so I ignore it while handling emails daily as they’re easy to reply and file quickly. Snail mail requires a trash can, paying bills so finding stamps and deciding how much paper to file. I prefer handling mail once a week but my husband visits the mailbox every day. This means what he doesn’t handle gets left on the kitchen counter all week … so we probably need the help of an organizer to find a win-win solution.

There are many approaches to getting organized at home. You can read books, articles and devise your own system for keeping control of everything you have at home. The challenge is staying organized as we love to buy and hold onto stuff! We’re all guilty, collecting things related to our passion. Some people love cook books, travel memorabilia or maybe an art collection. Collecting is fine as long as you can find what you own, when you want it.

The problem is we often we can’t find things we own, so we buy a duplicate because we need it today. At HomeTips4Women we’ll share ideas about de-cluttering, creating more storage space and getting/staying organized. We’ll provide tips on one of the most important tools, letting go of things we no longer use like … To Toss Or Not, That is the Question. When you gift your gently used clothing and other belongings to people who can really use them, you also feel good that you have more space and someone else has something they need.

• Get Organized: Ideas to Inspire You by Tina Gleisner
• Materials for Organizing at Home by Tina Gleisner