Start with the most used rooms in your home (living room and bedrooms). If you're the type who prefers to only focus on one room at a time, then do that. In my experience, most people like to pick away at rooms as they figure out what works and what doesn't work and this creates a more organic design in the end.
Make a Game Plan
It can feel daunting to think about decorating your house from top to bottom all at once. Instead, prioritize the rooms that you use the most often, and start there. To keep the process fun and stress-free, try not to focus on more than two or three rooms at a time.
Take your living room; the furniture should take up two thirds of the area, leaving enough floor space for easy traffic flow like in the photo below. The painting you hang behind the couch, table or above the fireplace should be approximately two-thirds the width.
Begin at the ceiling, painting down by about an inch onto the walls to give yourself a neat edge. Once you paint or wallpaper the walls you can cover this line but it's important to give yourself a bit of space to work with.
Designers are in agreement that not every wall in the home needs to be decorated. With each individual interior design, the aim is to always ensure that there is a feeling of harmonious visual balance; for some spaces this may mean adorning every wall with beautiful decor, whereas for others, empty wall space triumphs.
Following the 80-20 color rule is really simple. It states that the majority of your room – 80% – should be decorated in neutral colors, such as whites, creams, beige or pale pastel hues. The remaining 20% is where you can let your creativity shine, opting for statement colors and patterns.
The 60-30-10 rule works like this: 60 percent: The main color you choose should represent 60 percent of a room. 30 percent: The secondary color should represent 30 percent of a room. 10 percent: The accent color you choose should represent 10 percent of a room.
Foyer/Entrance Hall
They are the first rooms you see when you come inside a house! And, because the foyer is directly between the outside world and your personal sanctum, you should take extra care with what you put in it.
Start with Art, Wallpaper, or a Textile to Begin a Decorating Plan. It's easier to start planning a room with one of those three items before anything else. That's because it's much easier to match a paint color to a fabric pattern (like an area rug), wallpaper, or art than the other way around.
Groupings of items in odd numbers tend to look dynamic and more natural to us. Whereas, things that are grouped in even numbers tend to look stale, “staged,” and cold. Three seems to be the magic number for interior design, but the rule also applies nicely for groupings of five or seven.
You've heard of the Golden Rule, but what about the Golden Ratio? Although this term technically comes from mathematics, it's often used in the design world and, in a nutshell, means approaching your space in either one-third or two-third sections, rather than breaking it up into halves or quarters.
It's a classic decor rule that helps create a color palette for a space. It states that 60% of the room should be a dominant color, 30% should be the secondary color or texture and the last 10% should be an accent.
Clutter can make an otherwise clean room look messy. Just because you have the space doesn't mean you need to fill every nook and cranny. Home stagers at MHM Professional Staging recommend leaving space between furniture and fixtures.
A general rule of thumb is that you can cover 60% of the area with wall art and must leave 40% of the area blank. This rule applies even when you are hanging a single piece of art or a cluster of frames (known as a gallery wall) behind your couch.
Leaving a wall blank can create a sense of balance and breathing room in a space that's filled with other decorative elements. It acts as a visual pause, allowing the eye to rest and prevent the room from feeling too cluttered or overwhelming. A blank wall can also act as a backdrop for other focal points in the room.
Stripes can work wonders!
Thin stripes give the appearance of stretching, vertical stripes will make a room appear taller and horizontal stripes will make a room look wider. Consider applying striped wallpaper to not only create an illusion of more space but to create a simplistic feature wall.
When hanging your pictures, always hang them in relation to the furniture sitting below. With your couch off-centered on the wall, focus on hanging your painting centered above the couch to create a great focal point for your living room.