Katharine Kaye McMillan

Home decorating draws on your creative side, as well as your inner engineer. Whether you dabble in home decorating or make it a career, you get to play with color, texture, and pattern, in addition to tape measures, graph paper, and paint. Finding the furniture you want is important, and so is doing the planning that makes your decorating a delight.

Creating a focal point in a room without architectural elements (like a fireplace or beautiful window) can be challenging. A focal point makes a room feel inviting, provides balance, and is the basis for your decorating. Many newer homes have plain, boxy rooms that lack architectural interest. Establishing a focal point is worth the effort, because without one, a room will feel disorganized and messy.

Curtains and draperies work hard at blocking light, sound, and temperature. In addition to these functions, they’re also extraordinarily decorative, adding enormous personality to a room through color, pattern, and texture. When choosing a patterned fabric for a curtain, especially an unlined curtain, scrunch the fabric in your hand.

Shades, blinds, and shutters are hard window treatments, as opposed to curtains, which are soft treatments. When used alone, hard window treatments provide crispness to a Contemporary room. For clarity’s sake, we call the old-fashioned roller type (up and down) shades, and the newer verticals and horizontals (once called Venetians) blinds.

Whether you're redecorating one room or hiring a professional designer to revamp your entire living space, it helps you to understand the basics of interior design and what they encompass. A design is an orderly arrangement of five basic elements: Color, the creator of illusion and maker of mood Form, the overall shape of any object Line, the implied direction or boundary of an object Mass, the bulk of an object that occupies space Texture, the touch me, feel me of matter All artists, whether painters, sculptors, architects, or interior decorators work with these same basic elements to achieve certain effects, all of which must work together to form a unified whole.

When it comes to buying art, there is one main rule: Buy what you love and can afford regardless of the type of art. Don’t hesitate to hang different types of art together. The only time you shouldn’t mix fine, decorative, and fun art is when it doesn’t look good together. Following are some tried-and-true tips for selecting art: Buy art that speaks to you: Well, not literally, but something that makes you laugh, sing, feel nostalgic, or jump for joy.

The bed is the key piece of furniture in any bedroom, and it naturally becomes the focal point. Bedroom furniture is traditionally arranged according to a few general rules. For the most part based on common sense, here are some general guidelines for you to follow: Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/hikesterson Traditionally, folks tend to place a double, queen-sized, or king-sized bed against the center of the wall opposite the main door to the room.

Updating kitchen cabinets make tired drab kitchens look fresh again. Knowing how to update kitchen cabinets, can save you the cost of completely replacing them. Most cabinets, no matter how unattractive or outdated, can be drastically improved by following the tips below. Clean your cabinets. A good cleaning may bring new luster to tired but handsome wood.

Color can change a room by creating a mood, disguise flaws, and create illusions. Knowing how to use color in a room reinforces your design ideas. To make a room look bigger, use light, cool colors to create an atmospheric look. Paint all surfaces the same color and match the upholstery to the flooring. Add interest with contrasting textures.