Tips for Furnishing Your Home Intelligently
This article will take you through a step-by-step process of choosing your decor and choosing and buying your furniture to place in your home and how to make your furniture work with the decor.
Furnishing your home can be a daunting task. Many people like to have an interior design plan and like to have furniture that fits the decor of their home's interior. Before buying furniture, you might want to do some research, go to furniture stores and do some window shopping first.
You can do all kinds of different things and use certain objects to mix with real furniture pieces to have an interesting design. Some of you probably like the antique look or like to mix antique pieces of furniture with modern furnishings.
Color
Color is very important in choosing the right furniture for your home. The best colors that work for your home and home furnishings are complementary colors. Complimentary colors work the best because these colors provide sharp contrast and make the entire room more appealing to the eye.
Complimentary colors are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. As a rule, all complimentary colors make brown when mixed together. Some good color combinations that work together are listed below.
1. Blue and orange is a pair of complimentary colors that work great together. For those of you who like sharp contrasts and bright colors, you can paint your rooms with shades of blue and have furniture that has orange upholstery. Also add orange window dressings. Furthermore, this color combination can involve different combinations of shades, tints and hues of blue and orange.
For example, if you have bluestone tile in your foyer, use terra cotta grout with the tile. Paint the walls an earthy orange, or you can also paint your walls a bittersweet or terra cotta color to compliment the bluestone tile floor. The ceiling can then be a light day glow color, which is more a yellow-orange color.
For the furniture that is to go into the foyer, you have plenty of options. You can have a nice armoire with a bench that is made of oak or cherry with a stain that brings out the reds and oranges in the wood.
You can also have an armoire for your coats and shoes painted a nice royal blue and a matching bench to sit on when putting on your shoes that is painted a royal blue with bright orange cushions. Other ideas for other rooms that would work well with the blue and orange can be your kitchen, bathroom, or living and dining rooms.
2. Purple and yellow is a color combination that works great for your formal dining room. For example, if you have the dining room painted maize yellow, you should look for window dressings a deep burgundy color. As far as furniture is concerned for such a color combination, wood that is very dark works the best.
If you cannot find the properly stained dining room set for your dining room that is of this color combination, buy unfinished furniture and do the finishing yourself. If you choose to go this route, choose a stain that makes the furniture look dark. A very good stain is a merlot color. Merlot might make the wood look too red if it is a light-colored wood.
Before staining your unfinished dining set, ask the furniture store where you bought the set for a scrap piece of wood that is the same wood that the dining set is made from. Use this piece of wood to test certain stains to get the desired color. For example, if your furniture is made from aspen, which is very light in color, a combination of stains would be needed to get the desired color.
The best combination of stains for an aspen dining set for a room that has maize yellow walls and burgundy window dressings is a mixture of red oak, merlot, and walnut. These three stains can give the furniture a beautiful dark purple-reddish color. The color is enhanced if you use a high-gloss spar urethane varnish.
Spar urethane is actually a varnish that is used outside and even on wooden boats, but it is very durable and lasts a long time. Table cloths should be a burgundy color or another shade of a reddish purple and gold threaded embroidery. Napkins should be of a yellow or golden color.
3. Red and green can usually be associated with Christmas, but this makes a nice color combination also. The Chinese use red and green all the time in their traditional design. For those of you who like the oriental style, this color combination is a must. Reds and greens also work well with dining rooms and living rooms.
Positioning your furniture
Positioning your furniture is also very important. You want the furniture to be in flow with the room. Try not to have divans block or divide the room. Divans work the best when they are against the wall.
In the more open areas of the rooms should be mostly kept open, however, some seats can also be positioned in the open areas, but closer to the walls or where other pieces of furniture are, such as tables and snack stands. The proper way to furnish each room and how to position the different pieces of furniture in each room is as follows:
1. The bedrooms can be one of the most difficult rooms to furnish. Beds and their components such as mattresses, head boards and spring boxes are often cumbersome and difficult to handle. Furthermore, they take more that one person to move and position in place in most cases.
The beds should be placed more towards the center of the room with the head board up against the wall. Do not place the head board up against a window if the window is lower than the height of the head board. Night stands should be placed on either side of the bed at the head board end.
The purpose of a nightstand is to have things that you need for the night, therefore it would make perfect sense to have them at your hand's reach. Dressers and mirrors should also be positioned against the wall where there is no window. Bed spreads should be color coordinated with the color of the paint or wall paper in the bedroom.
2. The formal dining room is a bit easier to position the furniture than the bedrooms. The formal dining room is the room where special meals are eaten, during holidays and other special occasions. This room is not intended to eat in on a daily basis. That is done in the kitchen dinette usually.
In furnishing the formal dining room, you should first place the table and the chairs. The dining room table and matching chairs is best positioned in the middle of the room. Other pieces of furniture that go into the dining room include hutches and possibly some sort of sound system for entertaining. Hutches should be placed against a solid wall.
You can also get corner hutches that fit nicely into a corner of the dining room. Likewise if you choose to have a stereo in the dining room, you need a stereo cabinet that houses the stereo system and some shelves to store CDs.
With today's technology, however, that can also be obsolete because you can get sound systems that you can plug your iPod or other portable music players into. These sound systems should be concealed in a nice cabinet that matches the rest of the furniture in the dining room. Speakers should be installed in inconspicuous areas in the room yet be the least visible as possible.
3. The living and family rooms are complex rooms in the house where the most action in the home takes place. The family or living room is a room that is designed to be for the whole family. This is the room that has the TV set and other things for the family to be entertained.
Usually the TV sets of today are large plasma screen TV sets and are incorporated with other components of a home entertainment system. The Plasma screen TV should be either affixed to a special entertainment center cabinet or you can also get plasma screen TVs that can be hung from the wall.
The wall mounted plasma TVs often need to be hard-wired into the house's electrical systems, though now you can get some TV sets that can be connected wirelessly to the satellite box, DVD players and DVRs as well as the sound system.
If your TV and entertainment system comes with surround sound, the small speakers need to be positioned in various places of the room where the best sound effect would come from. The woofer should be in part of the entertainment system cabinet but should not be covered.
The entertainment system cabinet should be placed against a windowless wall that everyone in the room can comfortably face, especially if the TV is incorporated in the cabinet. Divans and love seats should also be placed against walls. Coffee tables should be placed in front of the divan.
Armchairs can be placed in open places but out of the way of daily traffic. Most armchairs are recliners, so the wall might prevent the armchair to function properly. Therefore armchairs are best in open places. Shelves and bookcases should also be placed against the walls.
4. The home office is usually one of the easiest rooms to furnish. The home office usually consists of a computer desk or regular desk, a seat at the desk, shelves and bookcases and file cabinets. The computer desk is a rather large piece of furniture.
Most computer desks are designed to serve as both, a regular desk, where you have a place to write notes or letters by hand and a place for all the components for your desktop computer. Usually the typical computer desk has a cubby hole for your computer's monitor and at the bottom a cabinet for the tower case of your computer.
Your computer's keyboard and mouse are usually placed on a flat surface that slides in and out like a drawer. Your computer desk might also have other cabinets that are above the computer's monitor to store disks and other computer or work related items.
This piece of furniture should be placed against a wall. If the seat that comes with the computer desk is a swivel seat with wheels, you should have a special mat for that seat, especially if the floor in your home office is carpeted.
For those of you who have laptop computers instead of desktop computers, a regular desk should be sufficient. Shelves and bookcases should also be placed against walls and out of the way.
There are many different ways to furnish your home. If you really want to be wild and eccentric, there are many different websites that show unique ways on how to furnish your home.
Furnishing your home with boxes can be a unique way to furnish your home and can also give your home an interesting style. One website even shows how you can furnish your house with FedEx boxes. You can even build beds, divans, and even computer desks for as cheap as three to five dollars per box. This can sure beat spending thousands of dollars on expensive furniture.
Though having look like a FedEx box may look off the wall or "poor," you can also be more creative. These boxes can also be painted. If you are the artistic type and do not have much money, you can take packaging and moving boxes, which are made from strong enough cardboard that can hold computers.
You can even find paints that can give the boxes a waterproof coating and keep the cardboard from deteriorating when you spill a drink on your cardboard furniture.
There are many different ways you can furnish your home. Every person and every family is different and has a different style. This article provides you with some of the basics on furnishing your home. The above paragraph is just one example of how innovation can come up with unique money-saving ideas to furnish your home on a low budget.
Some of you, however, like to spend money and like to have furniture that looks sharp and tasteful. What ever your financial situation is, there is a way out there that you can find to both furnish your home and make it your home sweet home.
Did you find this article informative? If yes, you can subscribe to Shivraj Ghorpade's blog http://www.problemsolvingarticles.com/ through RSS feed or through Email by just typing your email address. You will receive many such informative articles in your email box.
(C) Copyright-Shivraj Ghorpade. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
