houzz interior design ideas Redesign Your Space in 20 Minutes! | Janelle Erickson Design | Janelle Marie Erickson

Redesign Your Space in 20 Minutes!

Here are a few quick things you can do in your home to give it a fresh, re-designed look:

1) Are your walls lined with your furniture, leaving a big space in the center of your room? Consider pulling your furniture into conversational groupings! In general, 12 feet apart is a good distance for a conversational grouping. 

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Notice how the chairs have been pulled away from the walls to create a conversational seating area? 

2) Next, take a look at your walls: do you have pictures that are floating high above the furniture, between the ceiling and your sofa (for example)?  In reality, you should tend to hang artwork and pictures just above the furniture, approximately around 6-9 inches. Rather, when you are looking at the piece of art, your gaze should fall in the middle of the piece, not staring up at it!

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Example of Pictures Hung Too High!

3) When placing a rug in your room, the rule of thumb is to have either all pieces of furniture just on the rug or all pieces off the rug. This provides visual balance, as the rug grounds the room. 

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Notice how one of the sofas isn't touching the rug, but the other pieces of furniture are? This makes the room look unbalanced! 

4) A Final word about artwork and pictures: cluster pictures for stronger impact. They needn't be spread evenly to cover a wall - bring them closer together to make a grouping. 

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Clustered Frames give more impact than if they were spread out!

5) Matchy-Matchy furniture, fabrics, and paint colors are something to be wary of. You want your furniture, fabrics, and colors to coordinate - not perfectly match.

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This mix leathers, fabrics, glass, and light and dark woodwork works because the colors coordinate and have balance. 

6) Less is more! … More to come on decluttering design in future blogs :)

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This photo may be a little extreme, but notice how beautiful this sitting space is with only two pieces of furniture!

Question for Readers...

What have you done in your own design experience that you now get a good chuckle that you did "wrong"??

"Personally, I was so proud of purchasing my first living room furniture: I had a blue sofa, matching blue loveseat, a braided blue rug, and I hung the pictures much too high! … Now I just smile at my first attempt at design, over 25 years ago." -JE


© Janelle Erickson Design 2012