How to Make Life Easier on Yourself When Redecorating

When you set out to redecorate your home, it’s often true that you don’t know what you are letting yourself in for. Even if you haven’t started yet and have just entered the daunting planning stages, rest assured that there are some ways to make it a bit easier on yourself.

Here are some tips and suggestions to make your redecorating project less… traumatic.

Bought Furniture to Be Assembled? Get Help

We know what happened. You bought that furniture which needed to be assembled and then you never got around to doing it. There’re just too many other things to do with a redecorating project to stop everything to assemble anything.

Okay, so what are you going to do now? You can leave it to the very end when everything else is complete, but that’s kind of disappointing when you’ve paid for the furniture already. You want to see what it looks like in the space and not in the cardboard box. We feel you. What we’d like to suggest is getting help from the skillful folks at Edward’s Enterprises who are a dab hand at furniture assembly. Let them save the day, so you can focus on the rest of your decorating tasks.

Plan Big, Start Small

Plan out your home decoration project. Have a master plan for how you want everything to look. Then reduce that down to a plan for every room in the house or apartment. Once you’ve done that, schedule time to work on the first room.

We’d suggest not getting to work stripping off the walls and clearing out unwanted items in multiple rooms at one time. It just becomes too much when trying to bite a chunk out of a whole elephant like that. It’s all too easy to get bogged down, but then you cannot quit because you’ve started now and you have a bunch of rooms that look worse than before you started.

Use your plan to break down everything that must be done for the first room you’ll work on. Think of all the tasks that must be completed and what is necessary to purchase. Whether that’s tools required to strip the walls and pull up the carpet safely without cutting yourself or deciding what paint and flooring solutions you’ll be using.

Avoid Buying Materials Early

One of the biggest mistakes made by people who haven’t completed a serious decorating project before is jumping the shark when it comes to buying materials far too early. Plans change as you work the plan and see how it looks. For instance, you may initially want a color-matching scheme throughout the home. Only later might you realize that it’ll be a bit much to live in every day or make it difficult to put the home on the market later.

If you’ve already gone out and bought the new bathroom tiles and flooring to match the color scheme idea you’re abandoning at the last hour, well now you’ve got a problem. If your budget doesn’t allow for mistakes, indecision or last-minute reversals, then there’s trouble ahead. Probably sticking to your original plan becomes the only way through unless delaying the work until you can save more money to buy extra materials. Buy materials last.

Don’t Try to Be a Man/Woman Mountain

While you might want a sense of pride that “I made this,” the reality is more likely going to be that you “put this together from things other people made.” Getting all fixated on doing everything yourself is only going to demoralize you, exhaust your body, and delay completion.

It’s much better to make it a group project – whether that’s roping in a bunch of friends or adjusting household chores and shared tasks on the project with a partner – to spread the load. While you won’t be able to shout from the rooftops that you completed the project alone, remember, that’s not really the point. What was the point? To complete the redecoration of your home successfully. Period. No ego trip required.

Repurposing What You Already Own

To save on costs and avoid sourcing new materials for everything, look at what you already have in the home to see what can be repurposed. If you like a bit of woodwork, repairing or painting, then cabinets can often be reused in part or in full. For instance, old wooden cabinets can be broken down to become kitchen shelves.

It will give you a sense of pride if you do something like this instead of buying pre-made shelving in a package from a DIY store. Using your own reclaimed wood is also better for the environment too.

Whatever size of home decoration project, planning makes it all go better. This way, you don’t try to go too far or run too fast in the early days when things tend to go wrong.