There are several things the professional interior decorators do that you can learn to do. They are not difficult or expensive – just time consuming. And time is what you are paying for when you hire a professional. You are paying not only for the time they work for you but for the time they have spent to learn their profession or trade. So if you have more time than money here we go.

Find a magazine that most represents the style of home interior you would like to have and subscribe to it. Now put some effort into choosing a magazine – spend some time at the book store perusing many decorator magazines and pick the one which has the most “decor items” and “room pictures” which make “your socks roll up and down”(means you love it and can’t live without it). You will not do everything in the magazine nor only things from the magazine but it will give you a starting place.

Now pick a room or a space in a room you want to change. For our example we will pick the bathroom. Look through the magazine and look for bathroom pictures of things you like which will fit or work in your bathroom. If you need a new towel bar, find one which will fit in the space you like and which makes your socks roll up and down. If you can’t find one in the magazine but something there has given you an idea go to the web and start searching. Don’t get frustrated it takes some effort to find something which is awesome and it is worth the time. Once you find the perfect towel bar, compare prices, both at your local stores and on the web. Then just buy it and install it.

Do the same thing for colors – when you see a room in a picture which you would love to have, try to copy the colors. If you see a decor item such as a sculpture for a table or a lamp you love, check to see if you have a space for it. Don’t buy “stuff” you like unless you first make sure you have an appropriate space for it. This will save you a fortune – we all have extra stuff sitting around which we cannot use.

If you have a space in a room that needs decorated, try to find a picture of a room or space in a room similar to your and check out how it is decorated. I decorated an entertainment center by looking at a similarly shaped one in a magazine picture and then filling my spaces with approximately the same size and shaped items as the professional decorator who got the picture in the magazine had used. It worked – mined turned out very pleasing to the eye and it actually looks like I knew what I was doing.

In picking a magazine, I was very specific. I loved southwest decorating and chose the southwest magazine which best matched my love of wild colors and extreme decorating.

For more on all of this check out my before and after pictures.

http://www.decoratetechniques.com Marsha Hansen