The Value of Consulting an Interior Designer on Your Floor Renovation

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When you think about renovating the flooring in your home, it might seem sensible to begin at a floor covering business for ideas. However, there are many new trends in interior décor, and on your own, you might miss some of the more interesting options. Browsing is a great beginning, but continuing with your research, be sure to take advantage of the expertise of a designer.

Consulting with an interior designer will allow you to avail yourself of a wider realm of products and techniques than on your own. The training that your design professional has received is advantageous in that it allows you to have an outside eye consider not only your flooring but also your entire decorative scheme, whether you are redoing a single room or the entire home. A professional perspective from an interior designer will allow you to take into account wall coverings, furnishings and floor accents.

An interior designer generally has extensive sample materials available. A visit to the office of your design professional will allow you to personally express your preferences, which will allow that professional to produce samples for your consideration. You will be able to decide together on flooring materials that suit the decorative style you want to achieve. Your interior design consultant will be able to target products within your budget, as well, finding products from different material groups that provide similar decorative appearances. With an ample decorating budget, you might consider hardwood flooring, but on a meager budget, you might need to select a laminate material that is made to look like it is wood. The design professional will recognize the alternatives that are cost effective for achieving a preferred effect.

An interior designer is skilled in all elements of home décor, able to provide very basic services or very involved assistance. If your goal is to do the renovation on your own, your interior designer will be able to assist you in finding flooring materials that are easy to install on your own. The design consultation will provide direction in terms of eliminating difficult materials to work with. On the other hand, the interior designer is able to coordinate your entire project, finding the right tradesmen and material companies to provide every service and product need you will encounter. The designer may not necessarily participate in the installation of your new flooring, but that professional will oversee the quality of the installation and interface with those who work in your home.

If your budget is sufficient, your interior design professional can assist you with choices in furnishings and accents to complement your new flooring. If you are replacing your carpet with hardwood flooring, for example, the design professional can assist you in finding coordinating accent rugs that will bring out the rich nuances of your new floor covering. Your interior designer will know how to achieve exceptional color combinations with furniture and flooring accents. At the outset of your project, your consultant will consider these angles, and will adjust as the project moves along in order to accommodate your interests.

The skills of your interior designer are extensive enough that your decorative imagination can be accommodated at various expense levels. The design professional can help you to break your project up into manageable phases, and will provide as much or as little oversight as you desire.

By Candice Rhodes
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Posted in Interior Design

Timeless Decor and Furniture Pieces: Interior Design That Lasts

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Like in the fashion world, trends in the interior design world come and go. Of course, just like in the fashion world, there are certain pieces and decorating ideas that are timeless. Fortunately though, trends in the interior design world tend to last just a little bit longer than they do in the fashion world. These classics come back year after year and never look dated or out-of-style. Plus, these pieces can be mixed with current trends to keep your overall look updated and fresh without having to remodel entire rooms or reupholster existing larger pieces.

Furniture

Furniture tends to be the largest purchases you make for each room, excluding the kitchen and bathroom. Therefore, it’s important that you make furniture purchases that will last you several years.

To do so, interior designers everywhere, including those big-time New York interior designers or San Francisco interior designers, recommend choosing furniture that feature clean, simple lines. This means choosing sofas that feature clean lines or tables and chairs that feature simple, clean lines. It’s all about the lines!

Then, you can pair your timeless sofa or dining chairs with funky new prints on pillows or seat cushions for a fresh, unexpected twist. This is how you create a room that always seems up to date, despite the fact that you may have purchased that sofa 7 years ago. Remember, good decorating ideas aren’t spur of the moment–they’re planned and well thought out.

Color Balance

Timeless interior design also features a good color balance between neutrals and color trends. To do this, your large main pieces should be in neutral colors. This allows you to choose accessories in different colors and even paint your walls bright, funky colors. Remember, a gallon of paint typically costs less than $20, so it’s not too expensive to replace those bright pink walls. It is, however, expensive to reupholster a bright pink sofa.

For example, your sofa could be black, white, beige or any shade of brown. These colors will work best when you change the paint in the room from turquoise blue to poppy red. Neutral colors will also hep you make your color trend of the moment pop when it comes to the accessories you’ve chosen.

Personality

Last but not least, remember that you need to infuse your own personality into the space. The truth is that timeless pieces and decorating ideas are simply that: ideas and concepts. Without infusing a little of your own personality, the space may feel boring and in some instances, a little dated. Good interior design works with you, not against you! So, be functional, be visually appealing, be timeless and be yourself.

By Mob Jarrock
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Posted in Home Improvement

Old World Modern

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When Mariana and Jack White moved into their 1988 center-hall Colonial in Fairfax Station, Virginia, they loved their home’s spaciousness and bucolic setting. Over time, however, their aesthetic changed and they began to feel that the house lacked the visual impact they wanted. The family room was dark; the living and dining rooms were a mishmash of colors. “We had what I called an Easter egg house,” Jack White recalls. “It was full of Colonial colors like blue and pink.” The Whites wanted to lighten the space, to create a more sophisticated palette. They also wanted the house to have a sense of architectural detail, yet feel fresh and modern.
To accomplish this challenging list of goals, the couple turned to McLean, Virginia-based interior designer Barbara Hawthorn, whose work Mariana White had seen in the pages of HOME & DESIGN. “I said to Barbara, ‘I need light,’” Mariana says. “She said with the right colors it would be sunny every day.”
The Whites put their faith in Hawthorn, who devised a plan that would emphasize the home’s classic lines while infusing it with a modern flair. As the designer explains it, Jack White had gone to Oxford and loved the ornate woodwork inside its venerable buildings. Hawthorn was inspired to create a space “reminiscent of Oxford, with a sense of Old World craftsmanship, but do it in a modern way.”
The result is an interior in which intricate millwork and architectural finishes such as moldings, cornices and friezes all figure heavily into the design scheme. At the same time, clean-lined, simple furnishings communicate a more contemporary aesthetic and offset the elaborate backdrop of walls and trim.
The architectural finishes are particularly prevalent in the entryway, a two-story space that feels both airy and elegant. To achieve the effect they wanted, Hawthorn and her clients pored over catalogs, choosing a mix of Greek-, Roman- and Victorian-themed cartouches in the shapes of grape leaf clusters, flowers and acanthus leaves. “Each cartouche is different,” Hawthorn says.
All the decorative moldings in the entryway, and the door frames, were handcrafted by Warrickshire Woodcrafters of Reston, Virginia, using Indonesian mahogany. Hawthorn added large-scale dark-stained frames to the wide doorways leading into the living and dining rooms, integrating the existing window transoms above them into the design with faux-paint treatments. In fact, the interior doors in the foyer area are all “plain old builder doors,” says Jack White. Rather than replace them, Hawthorn saved money by having them faux-painted to look like heavy mahogany with an inlay of lighter fruitwood. “I had to find just the right value that was golden and had depth,” Hawthorn recalls. She turned to decorative painter Paul Levy for the job.
Though the designer carried the Oxford theme into the rest of the house, the living and dining rooms were transformed largely through paint (trading the “Easter-egg” colors for soft creams), upholstery and new, more modern carpets. “We took the traditional furniture and reupholstered it in modern fabrics,” says Hawthorn. “They have beautiful pieces that weren’t showcased enough so I created vignettes with the furniture and their art to draw attention to them.” Decorative wood moldings over the fireplace in the living room were shadowed and glazed to bring them into relief.
The family room, which adjoins the kitchen, underwent a major transformation. “We wanted to lighten the space and make it feel bigger,” Hawthorn explains. She replaced the traditional fireplace with a wider, more contemporary one, which has the effect “of making the room seem stretched out.” The new fireplace surround is made of eye-catching honey onyx and Walker Zanger glass tiles, and the hearth is limestone. Columns to either side are actually pull-out-drawers that hold videos. Laser-cut lattice doors above conceal a 62-inch TV.
The walls were painted a soft yellow and woven Conrad shades replaced the draperies so as not to obstruct the natural light. Wherever possible, Hawthorn installed LED lighting.
Prior to the remodel, knee walls had separated the kitchen area from the family room. Under the auspices of Cabin John, Maryland, architect Robert Wilkoff, these half-walls were replaced by columns, which served to open up the room. The door to the powder room was strategically moved out of kitchen view and tray ceilings trimmed with architectural accents were added above the dining and kitchen areas, along with chair rails and crown moldings to connect the family room and kitchen with the rest of the house. Wilkoff drew up an elevation of the family room area to show the Whites how the room would look.
Back in the entryway, a huge chandelier hangs from the second-floor ceiling. It epitomizes what Hawthorn was trying to create: a perfect balance of old and new. “It had to be simple so as not to interfere with the moldings,” she says. In its elaborate setting, it is simple and elegant and a little bit modern. “At night,” says Jack White, “the chandelier disappears, and all you see is lights.”
By Julie Sanders
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Posted in Furniture

House Painting – Home Interior and Exterior

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It’s easy to think of interior decorating as a low cost minor renovation to your home. Of course everyone thinks they know how to paint, and some do but most don’t. There’s a lot of little things (knowledge of paint, paint colors, types of wall paint whether it be acrylic paint or oil paint, brand of paint-preferably Benjamin Moore, ways to apply, etc. etc.)

Paint home – it’s a good time to paint interior of your home when you start getting mildewy looking blemishes over the surfaces of your home. I have seen mildew on both inside and outside. And another good reason to paint is when your color starts fading. Peeling paint is even worse than color fade since no one knows really what the color was but they know it shouldn’t be peeling.

Wall paint – this is where most people start painting, it gives you the biggest bang for the buck when you change the color of a room you have changed the looks of the room. And this is a part of interior decorating because the wall colors greatly affect the rooms atmosphere and can either in hands or take away from the furniture you put in there. And that would be part two of your interior decorating process choosing your furniture.

Interior decorators – if you’re at a loss on choosing paint colors for the home interior you might want to consult with a interior decorator, you can show him the home interior and the rooms you would like to paint or decorate and the furnishings that you will be using and they can assist you in selecting the appropriate paint color.

Ultimately – it is your decision since this is your home what to do about your paint colors on your walls and trim and even your ceiling. But sometimes some outside opinions could spur some great ideas that you wish you would’ve thought of before.

By Vic Nagy
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Posted in Home Improvement

Best Way to Paint a House Fast!

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When you have an investment property, it is very important to spend the extra money to make it look nice so you can keep it rented. An empty house is a negative return on your investment.

I had a tenant move out at the end of last month. I got a call from our property management company last Friday saying they had someone who wanted to move in this Friday! Not bad having a property sit less than a month. The property management company had a list of items that I needed to either pay someone to do or do myself, but fast either way. One of those items was repainting the interior of the house because the last paint job was bleeding through and looked spotty. We got a quote to paint the house. It is not a large property…just 1112 sq ft. They wanted $1950.00 to paint the house. We decided this was far too much to pay and that we would do the work ourselves.

We completely repainted the interior of the house in one and a half days. The “we” was me and a friend. The tools we used were varied. We used old fashioned rollers, a roller that had a reservoir that you pulled the paint into and then painted until it needed refilling, and an airless contractor series paint gun with the roller attachment.

The airless gun worked well, but was heavy and required two people to move from room to room without making a mess. It also took twenty minutes to clean. I like this tool for fast exterior painting when you can afford to have overspray, but it wore me out for interior painting. Still, it gave excellent results. I do recommend cleaning the roller after each room.

The tool with the reservoir worked well and was less cumbersome. Because we bought 5 gallons of paint in one can, it required we have a smaller container to put the paint in to before sucking it into the reservoir. Overall, it worked well.

Then, the old fashioned rollers…they worked well. You had to keep going back to the tray for more paint. They took the least amount of time to clean as you could either rinse the roller to use later, or just throw it away and start with a new roller later.

The first day, we tried to paint room by room. Things were going pretty slowly and we were worried that we might not finish in our allotted timeline of being done that weekend. After two rooms, we realized this was not the most efficient method and we decided a new approach.

We decided that framing each room was the most time consuming part of the job. We both started painting along the ceiling line and around the doors and outlets. We did the rest of the house and called it a day. A very long day…

***Important note! Only frame the rooms that you have enough paint to complete. If you are low on paint, go buy more and start fresh on the next room. Otherwise, you could end up with extra work on your hands when you realize that the paint does not match perfectly.***

The next day, we went back and finished the house in just a few hours. Because we only had to focus on painting the large areas, the painting went much more quickly. After finishing, we left the house for a while we allowed the paint to dry and our eyes to adjust back to seeing normal things. When we went back, we looked for any spots that needed to be touched up and happily found that there were very few to touch up.

By John E. Grey
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Posted in Home Improvement