Style your home like an interior designer

If you’d prefer not to spend your hard earned dollars hiring an interior designer to revamp your interiors, use the following steps to get the job done yourself.

Start surfacing

It’s time to start using your iPhone and iPad for more than just checking Facebook. The internet is a great source of ideas and is full of inspiring sites dedicated to nothing but interiors, 24/7. Whether you’re full of ideas or terrified of where to start, sites such as Pinterest, Interiors Addict, Fresh Home and The Design Files will inspire you through every stage of styling your interiors. The hardest part will be choosing a design direction to go in.

Colour schemes

The next part of the design puzzle is choosing a colour scheme. With 10 million distinguishable colours in the world alone, choosing the perfect colour for your interior is tricky. Look to the images you’ve saved from websites and magazines for inspiration. Which colour(s) dominate the most? Picking interior colours is a personal choice, so you can’t go wrong with colours that speak to you.

A general rule of thumb is to choose three main paint colours: one for the walls, another colour for large accents such as furniture, and a third one for smaller accents and decor. If bold colours aren’t your personal style, you can opt for one colour, but be sure to choose two other shades from that colour family to accent where it’s needed.

If the walls could talk

Along with painting your interior walls, hang as much artwork as you can get away with. Art is a great go-to for giving your space a more luxurious, unique feel.

Dress your windows

While not the most exciting feature to style, windows play an important role in the overall look and feel of a room. Adding luxurious curtains, trendy shutters or handy blinds to your windows can lift a room completely and tie all the elements of the room together.

What’s more, sturdy window coverings are indispensable in cold winters and hot summers. You won’t know how you lived without them!

Touchable textures

And now for the fun part: adding textures. The feel of a room is as important as the look of a room when creating a designer space. Adding touchable textures with cushions, throws, rugs, mirrors and even wallpaper is the finishing touch needed to create a feeling of luxe.

Styling your home like an interior designer will save you money and give you a feeling of satisfaction every time someone asks, “Who designed this for you?”