Out with the old…in with the new.

…a phrase that we hear often at this time of year. Are you considering a change this year, perhaps a new home or just perhaps tired of looking at the décor in your present home but the big question that is consistently asked is. Where do we start? Well it starts exactly with the title of this blog…Out with the old. Don’t panic that necessarily does not mean lets hire a skip and bin the entire contents of the room, it just means sit down in the room that you are going to be working in, with a piece of paper and a pen, and write a list of the items that you would like/or require to keep, and I mean everything from sofas to pictures to pot plants. Some of these items have sentimental value and it doesn’t matter how ruthless you are feeling at the beginning of the project you will wish to keep some personal items from times gone by. A point to bear in mind to is that if you don’t keep some personal mementos the interior begins to look like a show home…beautiful as it may be…it is very impersonal, and therefore it doesn’t feel like your home. At the beginning of the project include these items and plan them into your new room.

Everything else is like cookery; you require a good recipe book, fine ingredients, a lot of planning, patience and some appropriate garnishes to complete. If only life was that simple! Well it can be…and here’s how:

Prepare for Chaos.

Any building work or redecoration work is messy time consuming and disruptive. Make sure other rooms are sealed off during the messiest bits with polythene and parcel tape. Enjoy your project.

Have patience; bearing in mind the process will be more or less nasty, the start can be very pleasurable as this could be the beginning of decorating dream and also months of planning. The best tip I could give anyone is don’t start unless everything is waiting to be installed is in your possession…keep the mess and disruption to the minimum period of time possible, even if that requires delaying your start date. What are another few days or a week when you are possibly going to be looking at this room for years to come?

Make the best of what you’ve got

Don’t ever think…if only. If only I had more space…if only…I had a bigger budget….if only…I didn’t have to keep. Be positive, instead of using these as limitations build the project around them and use them as features. Every design decision is an opportunity, not a problem.

Cross the road…stop, look and listen.

Read magazines for ideas, moods, and colours…anything that catches your attention. Look for ideas when you are at work, out for dinner and sometimes the best place is when you are on holiday. Discuss your thoughts with other people and be prepared to listen, do not dismiss everything that is said, mull it over and even extract small pieces of it. Often someone that is not living in the house has more and usually braver ideas that you may not have thought of.

Eventually there will come a time when the planning will have to stop and action will have to be take place or we could be planning forever.

If you engaged a professional like me, this is how we would start to tackle the project, having discussed your brief, and planned, planned and planned. It isn’t a quick process but the results of all the planning, discussions and selecting of samples is all worth it when you see the final results.

Consider using a professional, it is so easy to lose sight of the purpose of interior design and the whole process to become a major worry. Will the new carpet wear well? Does it go with the sofa? How deep should the pelmet be and what sort of lighting should I have in the room. Mistakes are likely to be expensive or at the least very embarrassing, and rather than the project totally failing it could possibly be just less than exciting, having  already spend a lot of money on it.

Style is an area of great debate and choosing one for your home can cause dreadful dilemmas but could also set you off on a wonderful journey of discovery.Enjoy!