I never thought I would be writing a post on home decor. Even though I’m an artist, decorating my house eluded me for the longest time. How on earth did I get my home to look as matching and complete as the ones in magazines? It took me several years to grasp some general ideas about home decor and getting a house into shape, visually. And it’s a whole lot simpler than I thought it would be.
Okay, so my home still does not look like the ones in magazines, but it never will and that’s okay. The first tip of home decor is that your house needs to fit your needs and lifestyle. We have a young child and two dogs, so this obviously influenced what our surroundings look like. This means that we do not have a ton of decorative items like vases, breakable figurines, and candles perched on every available surface. What we do have for decor is always child safe where the toddler plays and everything else has a purpose or sentimental value. Plus, I don’t have the time to constantly fix a coffee table arrangement or sweep up broken glass. Those model homes, although beautiful, are usually filled with a whole lot of items that are really only there to look pretty. I’m talking about mounds of pillows, a table with a lamp in every corner, and hundreds of little knick knacks that serve no purpose. I can’t imagine trying to track down all the little decorative rope balls that my toddler has thrown around just so I can have a bowl full of them to make my table look “complete”.
My second tip of home decor also has to do with needing a home to fit my life. It’s basically to have a home free of clutter. Even if you don’t have matching furniture or perfectly placed pictures on the wall, a clean home always looks nice. Most of the time my frustration with how my home looked had more to do with the clutter and less to do with the decor. After my last big “Marie Kondo” purge, I went back and did another. We have a whole lot less stuff and it’s been so much easier keeping the house in tip top shape.
Despite wanting a functional and clean home, there are a whole lot of items in my home that serve no purpose other than to look nice. However, these are all items that I love, that say something about the personality of my home’s inhabitants, or bring us joy. A good example of this is the bookshelf in our living room. It may not be as nice as something you’d see on Pinterest, but it’s neat and it contains items that we either love or use. It has books that bring us joy and represent our personalities, toys for the toddler, and a stack of photo albums of our life together. With all that said, my third tip for home decor is to decorate to your personality. This also means that if you don’t like the way window treatments look on every single window, you don’t need them, despite the recommendations of home decor authorities.
Now the fourth and final tip is my favorite: there really are no rules to decorating your home. If you still love your Beanie Baby collection, put it out there for all to see on your bookshelf. Your furniture doesn’t have to match, your wallpaper doesn’t have to be trendy, and you don’t need to choose conventional color schemes. Just being in an environment is completely true to you is better than having a magazine worthy home.
That’s it. Simple, right?
