Make Your Home's Style Unique With Mix and Match DecorWritten by Kathy Burns-Millyard
You see it all time in retail discount stores: Color coordinated decor for just about anywhere in your home. And some of designs are quite pretty. In fact, some people become obsessed by them. They're usually really cute, come in a variety of colors, shades, patterns and designs, and they just plain make decorating easy. There's no guesswork - everything is matched for you automatically. But there's also no unique style. No sense of "you" in finished style. If you mix and match styles up a bit though, you'll end up creating something that's just right for you, your home, and your style preferences. Here are a few tips on doing that. 1. It's ok to start with a "cookie cutter" design style, pattern, or color theme you've found in a general store. These are actually great starting places for getting new decor ideas. 2. Try choosing just one or two matching items from store. For instance, let's say you plan to decorate your bathroom in a sea green color scheme. You'll find plenty of really nice shower curtains to fit this color scheme well, so choose one you like. If you just can't resist... go ahead and get matching accessories too, such as toothbrush holder and soap dish. 3. Now most likely ready made design of your shower curtain has traces of other colors mixed in. It's common for instance, to see blues, tans, yellows and oranges in a sea green coordinated bathroom set, because these colors tend to be seen when you're actually at sea or ocean. So they compliment each other. And this is a key decorating point: Your room colors don't have to match exactly. They should simply compliment each other. So in our sea green bathroom decor example above, it would be perfectly natural to add a set of solid tan colored towels, burnt orange wash cloths, and a throw rug with touches of blue in it. If blue doesn't seem to fit quite right for your tastes, then try a deep forest green colored rug instead.
| | When is it time to call the professional? Written by Robert Kempe
For most Do-It-Yourself (DIY) home project managers, most difficult decision is to know when to give professionals a call to come complete a task and when to complete it yourself. The reason we like to do our own home upgrades or an addition is always a pretty internal and selfish reason. We want to save money and we want to be able to say, “I did it myself.” How many times have you been to a friendly dinner party and topic of home improvement projects come up? Ultimately, it becomes a barrage of sentences that all contain these simple statements, “I did it myself.” or “We did it ourselves.” I must confess that I am also guilty of this. This is why we always have more informative conversations with people at local hardware and supply stores. Both parties in conversation understand need to DIY and communication process flows without any issues. Have you ever had complications with a project and wished you had called someone instead of finishing it yourself? I have, here is an example: My wife informed me that dishwasher was broken, I answered her by saying, “Let me have a look at it before you call anyone, okay?” She would humor me and let me look at something I have no idea, other than basic theory of operation, how it works! I want to be hero in my mind, all knowing of my own kingdom. I don’t want to let someone else come into my own kingdom and fix something! However, eventually dishes would pile up waiting for washer to be fixed and I would be letting a few informal adjectives slip out of my mouth as I looked for tools, only because I didn’t know how to fix it, let alone, find problem. My wife, good woman that she is, would then politely call, after a period of pre-calculated time on her part, a repair man and schedule to have washer fixed. She would then inform me at a later time that day of future repair schedule for appliance. Timing is everything in that situation isn’t it? Now back to my original statement, “the most difficult decision is to know when to give professionals a call.” Well answer is simple, when we are over our head and out of our league in a project. The definition of previous sentence is a difficult trial in our own mind set along side our egos for DIY home project managers. My wife, in example, followed definition to that sentence and didn’t realize it. As you read rest of this article, place yourself in your own project and ask yourself questions in each of these steps. The first step is to remove your self from project and evaluate it from an outside prospective. This must be done. If you have trouble accomplishing this, ask yourself how your spouse or good friend would view this project. What is real objective? In example, my wife just wanted dishes to be washed in dishwasher. My objective was to fix dishwasher to be able to handle loads of dishes. The difference is that she had true objective, to wash dishes in dish washer. My objective was to fix appliance. So you see that removing yourself from project and evaluating situation, can help you define true objective. In addition, make sure that project will not void or compromise any existing warranties. Do you have a clear objective of project looking at it from an outside prospective?
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