Moving to a new home can be an exciting time to start fresh. Many people choose to shed some of their clutter and larger pieces of décor when they move, often for practical reasons. Travelling with more oversized furniture and décor can be a more challenging and costly experience, especially if you’re moving long distances or abroad.
After you find your ideal home, stylizing it from a clean slate can be a bit overwhelming, but not to worry, decorating it from scratch isn’t impossible and can be fun!
Here are three tips for decorating your home from scratch.
Pick Your Style
An excellent first step in decorating your new home is to pick an interior style you want. This will help you search for things like artwork and large furniture pieces, and accent items such as rugs, pillows, and table runners.
If you want cohesiveness to your home, try to stick to one design style, whether it be modern, farmhouse, retro-mod, minimalist, or transitional. Of course, sticking to one style isn’t for everyone, and many choose to combine design styles and create styles like a modern farmhouse or retro minimal.
There are no rules when it comes to your home’s décor, and combining these styles can also help each room feel unique. If you’re going for a combination of styles or for a different one in each room, try to keep at least one or two reoccurring themes in each one; this could mean a paint colour or another unifying accent element to help pull the styles together and feel less disjointed.
Plan Room by Room
One big reason that decorating a new home can get overwhelming is to buy for the entire house at once. Doing this makes it hard to focus on what items are meant for what room, and it can get easy to lose track of which items you even need.
Make a cohesive plan for each room, whether a list of items or a visual mock-up. Prioritize one to two rooms at a time in order of importance to you. For many, the “big three” rooms are the living room, kitchen, and the main bedroom, so they are often an excellent place to start. For others who work from home, rooms like an office or study may be the priority, and those with children may focus on a playroom.
Once your priority rooms have been addressed, you can work your way through rooms like the bathroom, dining room, and spare bedrooms, rather than try to juggle them all at once.
Start With the Big Piece
A great design tip is to build a room around a focal point or statement piece. Usually, this means the largest item in the room or the most expensive, like a piece of artwork. It’s good to start your design for a room around your focal point since it’s the center of your design.
In the dining room, this is likely to be your table. In the living room, it may be your sectional sofa or an architectural piece like a fireplace or built-ins. Bedrooms are usually built around, well, the bed!
