DECORATING TIPS AND DECORATING AXIOMS
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axioms & other wisdoms
tips
"I would walk into a room and know instantly if the people who put that room together were going to be my lifelong friends. Call me a snob. I do believe that we are not what we buy. We are how we make it all work together and it has far less to do with money than most people realize."
The Late Roddy McDowell
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Lighting your rooms with halogen has never been easier. Hardware and lighting stores now sell halogen bulbs that do not require a special lamp. The bulbs screw into regular light sockets. This is a real coup for all of us who have old-fashioned light fixtures on our ceilings. Make sure you install a dimmer (rheostat) on the on/off switch so you can control the intensity of the halogen bulb.
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Use strips of velcro and create an "all stuck together" pillow sculpture. Arrange the pillows in your sculpture just as you would arrange them loosely on your bed. Every night when you are ready to turn down the covers, all you have to do is remove the pillow sculpture and place it on the floor or on a bench. Next day, when your bed is made, pick up the pillow sculpture and place it on your bed. My husband came up with this one and we tried it. So far so good.
Claire the Dragon Queen
Denver, Colorado
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If you purchased a new area rug and don't have an underpad, or, if you don't like the thin, waffled rubber ones that are now being sold, use old towels. If your rug is not that large, you may be able to just use one bath towel but even if you have to use more than one, lay the towels down carefully on the floor, even attaching them with double-faced tape. Make sure they lie perfectly flat and that the edges are flush with each other. Lay your rug over the towels. We began doing this last fall as an interim solution but it works so well we now use discarded terrycloth towels under all our area rugs. A couple of times a year, just throw them into the washer and dryer!
Melanie
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People will be far more intrigued by your art collection if you hang nothing on your walls at all and just keep your paintings and prints in a fabuous industrial type print rack for anyone who wants to peek at them. Try to get a cool old one on wheels. If you can't find an old one you like you can't beat those wooden slatted ones they sell in the art stores. You could do this in one of the rooms of your house and keep that room very clean and minimalist.
Stephanie
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"I have tried to stay away from the color red. I have almost had therapy over my passion for red. Oneday I just gave into it. I can't live without red. I won't. I must never. I have learned that it is one color that speaks as eloquently in small amounts as it does in large amounts. Red is my life."
Zsa Zsa Gabor
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You don't need a lot of money to make your windows look sensational. Stitch a hem along the end of an ethnic tablecloth (The Tibetan ones are nice). Scrunch it up nice and tightly onto a small tension rod for the window inside your door frame or for any long narrow window you might not otherwise
have considered decorating. Be real "French" and stitch a hem along the bottom as well for another tension rod. That way you can pull your curtain panel nice and tight and get a pleated look.
Cost: rods $15.00 / cloth $20.00
Audrey Regan
(who just tried it using a batik tablecloth from Nepal)
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"The only thing worse than not taking care of your special things or family heirlooms, for passing down to your children, is not knowing they are special things."
Joan Rivers
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"I love garden gazing balls but I don't like the stupid pedestals people use to display them. It ruins the beauty of the gazing balls. Instead, my husband and I just place a gazing ball here and there in various spaces we have sort of cleared in among our flowers and plants in the garden. We don't place them strategically and they look as though they rolled into the flowers, almost by accident. It is best to do this in the flower beds that people don't tend to step in or get too close to."
Marilyn Boyd
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Place a sculpture or something really interesting in the very center of your bathtub. Like a statue or a Buddha. Or a glass bowl filled with bars of soap in the shapes of fruit. Or real fruit, like lemons and limes which you can squeeze into your bath water. Of all the receptacles in your bathroom, isn't your bathtub the "opening" that could do double duty as a display area? If it seems like a pain in the a__ to have to remove it everytime you want to enjoy a bath, then you are not the person I am talking to here. I display a tall, wooden Buddha from Tibet in the middle of my bathtub. It weighs very little.
Christine
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"My husband asked me the other day why I seem to have given up shopping in stores for shopping on the web. I told him that shopping online gives me the chance to copy the pictures of things I like into a folder and look at them the next day, or repeatedly, before I make up my mind. And you could never see as many pairs of curtains, for instance, in stores as you can on the web. In your accessible neighbourhood, there might be six places at most where you would actually go to look at curtains. On the web you have thousands of curtain websites and they are from all over the world. The only downside to this is that one ends up spending hours sitting at a computer, which as we all know has it's disadvantages at the physical level. The second downside is that we all tend to spend more when shopping online than we would in a store. When I sit down to look for a specific item or even if I am just casually looking to see what's out there, I set the timer on my stove every fifteen minutes to bring me back to reality. I must get up and turn the timer off and this keeps me from hitting "buy it" as many times. I tend to lose control. God, it's fantastic!"
Katia Moore from an article in "Woman's Day".
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Hang something beautiful in your laundry room or wherever you keep your washer and dryer. Have you noticed that even the most fabulous homes tend to forget about laundry rooms? As they are often not very spacious rooms, why not paint or wallpaper the walls? How about a wonderful rug? We had an old chandelier that wasn't too big and we almost discarded it. One night, my husband and I hung it right in the center of our laundry room. That was it! Next day we painted the walls in a muted shade of coral and now we are waiting for the carpet installer to lay wall-to-wall synthetic sisal. The synthetic sisals look just as good as the real sisal but won't mildew if the washer should spring a leak. Our laundry room just became part of our house.
Irene
(from Decorating Madness)
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..... more to come
