Archive for the ‘Home Decorating’ Category

Tips for Decorating the New Home of Your Dreams – Space & Furniture

Decorating Your New Home – A Series from South Pointe

We know that decorating the house of your dreams can be a big job, and in order to enable yourself to love the place as much as possible and really feel at home, you want to do it right. Therefore, in order to help the new home owners in our Gainesville community and throughout the country settle into their space in style, South Pointe has put together a blog series dedicated to sharing home decorating tips. The blog post titled, Tips for Decorating the Home of Your Dreams — Color, was the first part of the series, and this second installment will discuss the next two important features of the house to address: space and furniture.

Space

Work with the scale of the room.

Your new home will look more inviting if a substantial amount of space in each room is filled. Keeping about three-quarters of the room addressed in some way, whether with a color, texture, or object, will produce the feeling of having properly fulfilled the purpose of the space. Particular design styles will adjust the fill levels according to their own definitions, but remembering that your house is a home, not an art gallery or a storage shed, will render each area more relaxing.

Places for humans to function within the room are essential, so do not cram each corner with mammoth chairs or shrines to your favorite collectible. Conversely, spaces stripped down to one item per wall with great canyons between the furniture will cause chilly drafts of anxiety to wash over your guests.

The moral of the story is: decor needs to adjust to the size and scale of a room while still affording personal expression and communal coziness in order to engender love for your living spaces.

Test out different options for furniture placement.

When you first start placing furniture in your new home, organize each room in a way that works and seems most convenient at the time. If you have the space, put the furniture in the middle of the room and move toward the walls. This technique creates more complexity and visual appeal to a living area.

Later on, after your move-in is complete, try a new take on the layout every once in a while to see what more comfortable combinations you can come up with for the furniture. You may start to really despise a room if the furniture is not placed properly, so exhaust your options slowly over time until you arrive at the perfect arrangement.

Furniture

Pick pieces of furniture that spark your interest and speak to your personality.

Even if your pocketbook allows, prevent yourself from buying everything at once so that you do not end up duplicating the showroom floor in your new home. Allow yourself the time to see how your family will occupy a space and in which direction you find your personal style drawn. Also, privilege yourself with a limitless amount of places to buy from: neighborhood boutiques, eclectic antique shops, nationwide chains, thrift stores, and local or online garage sales.

Accept secondhand pieces and inherited heirlooms with ease, knowing that you can alter them all you want to pull them into the future. Mix, match, redo, and repurpose to your heart’s content in order to develop the unique look that you love. Blend high-end pieces with bargain goods and create a one-of-a-kind tribute to your independent tastes.

Opt for cozy over showy.

The home you love is not only about looks: it is also about making your surroundings feel familiar and welcoming to you. Therefore, go for pieces that connect with all of your senses.

Buy the chair that feels best to your back; indulge in leather if you love the smell; find a rug that keeps the flooring quiet. Aesthetics can play a big role in your decision-making, but just remember that furniture should address the needs of both comfort and style. If you can’t picture yourself really sitting at that desk or breathing in that bowl of potpourri, then don’t buy it. If coziness is the main goal of your home, then compromise on appearance every now and then.

Love what you can when you can.

Don’t forget that furniture is the one thing you can bring in and out of the room; therefore, you never have to be stuck with it. Furniture can be the most transitory or the most permanent component of a space depending on how much you like it. You don’t have to hold onto something you don’t love forever: if you have to buy discount dining room chairs in the beginning of your time in your new home just to have somewhere to sit, resolve to save up and replace them with higher quality versions later.

However, if you really cherish a piece, you can make it last. If you ever find the couch of your dreams from which only death would you part, keep the rest of the room fresh around it by repainting the walls and complimenting it with more modern accessories every few years. Over time, you will find yourself drawn to new pieces sporadically, so determine to let your budget and your contentment keep you focused when it comes to furniture.

Next Phase:

With the first three features — color, space, and furniture — appropriately managed, the house will be very close to completion. Just two more factors to consider remain: lighting and texture. Read the third part of this South Pointe blog series to discover how to handle these subjects and finish the process of creating the home you love.

Tips for Decorating the New Home of Your Dreams – Color

Decorating Your New Home – A Series from South Pointe

If you recently purchased a new home from South Pointe in lovely Gainesville, Florida, then you probably felt the South Pointe sensation: the feeling that comes when the accommodating designs and superior craftsmanship of our pristine houses beckon buyers to start settling in at first sight. The desire to start and finish the move-in process with the greatest of haste is a strong temptation, but we can guarantee two things that should help you handle the pressure. First, South Pointe homes are built to last, so you can count on living in one for a very long time, and second, because of their durability, there is no rush. We want you to ease into the affair of decorating so that you can create endearing memories with your new home. You probably already know that this is love, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take the time to develop the deepest level of commitment and companionship with your personal piece of South Pointe property. Your relationship with your South Pointe residence will be the real thing, so you can look forward to collecting all the warm fuzzy feelings you want by adorning every room in your new home to your exact specifications.

Even though it takes time, decorating your new home really can be fun. However, while your new place is the perfect blank canvas for capturing the creative depths of your personal style, anxiety might set in the longer you stare in confusion at all those white walls. You may be wondering,

“Where is everything going to go? How am I going to make it look good? Where do I start?”

If you fear that your uninformed efforts will only make the space worse, then check out this new blog series from South Pointe that will provide some crucial decorating advice on how to really start living with your South Pointe new home. Decorating your new place may seem like a very involved task, but in the coming posts, we will break down the decorating approach into the manageable aspects of every room and direct your perspective to see how they can all work together to create something beautiful and habitable. This first post in the series will focus on the one detail of every room that must be determined first: color.

Important Steps for Properly Decorating with Color

1. Determine a color scheme.
   In each room of the house, start off the decorating process by choosing a color scheme. This step is crucial to achieving a mood for the room with which you are most happy and content. The wrong color palette can really offset the comfort levels of a living space, but the right palette can enliven anyone who enters. Also, you have options has to how much you employ a particular color scheme: you could carry the same palette through the whole of your new home; you could repeat certain colors while adding new ones in each area; or, you could come up with a completely different color scheme for every room in your house. Only you can say how much color you can handle!Furthermore, your color palette can be unique to you: you do not have to choose a preset combination from the paint store or a home magazine. If bringing different colors together sounds confusing to you, remember that the easiest way to simplify the process is to find inspiration. A source of color that intrigues you can usually demonstrate which colors look good together already, and following the color scheme of your inspiration should ensure that you will actually enjoy the environment that your palette creates. Good moments of inspiration can come from places like nature, your geographical location, the view from the room’s windows, a work of art, a piece of fabric, an accessory, etc. There is no rule about what can inspire you; the only command for the colors of your room is that you have some! Choose colors first and choose colors you love.
2. Use color to tie everything together.
   An effective and simple way to dictate the tones of a room is to paint the walls. This move is not expensive, but it can be formative in drastically altering the atmosphere of a room. Painting the walls gives you the exciting option of spreading different colors all throughout your new home, as well as the ability to balance out bright colors with calmer ones in each room to help you keep your sanity. Accenting boldly colored walls with muted furniture and accessories can enable all of the colors to reach the full potential of their impact, and you can even transform a vibrant color into a harmless neutral by applying it to the room in diverse amounts of depth. Bathing a room in actual neutral colors can evoke a sense of calm and serenity while obtaining the opportunity to highlight textures. If you don’t want to paint the whole room, you can take smaller steps to anchor the room in color, such as painting or wallpapering an accent wall, or simply putting up some fun wall decals or stunning works of art.
   
3. Use color to change the size of the room.
   Strategically placed color can change your overall impression of the dimensions of a space. A lighter color on the walls can make a room seem more streamlined and spacious, while darker colors tend to bring the walls closer. A lighter tone of the same color on the ceiling can make the walls look taller, and a darker version on the ceiling can optically broaden the room. Repeating the same color, such as white or beige, on the ceilings, walls, and floors can enlist and unite every surface for the purpose of transforming the room into a empty canvas to be punched with color in random places. This technique can make the room feel more sizable. On the other hand, stuffing in a greater range of colors and textures can bring an oversized room down to scale and accomplish more coziness.
4. Integrate complementary accessories.
   Rugs, pillows, pictures, lamps, and other decorative pieces help make the correct color statement in the room when they are found nestled here and there in the appropriate hues. Everything does not have to match, but it does have to coordinate: look for items tinted in variations within the same range of a particular shade, and offset the main color in a room with a pop from the opposing side of the color wheel. Balance light and darkness in a room by bringing in equal amounts of warm and cool colors. A helpful hint regarding the amount of different colors to use throughout a space is 60-30-10, which means that one color should dominate 60% of the room, usually the walls; a secondary color should be appear in 30% of the room, and the accent color should only be mentioned in 10% of the room. This formula will keep the color scheme of the room agreeable and will prevent you from accidentally constructing a kaleidoscope in any space in your new home.

Next Phase

Once you have chosen your color palette and roughly mapped out how you will use color in each room of your new home, you can move on to planning the next set of decorating particulars in part2: Decorating Your New Home: Space and Furniture.