Decorating Your Home One Item at a Time

When you have more than one room to decorate in your home at a time things can get tricky and you might be constantly getting sidetracked. By focusing on one piece at a time rather than one room at a time, you can keep your mind abreast of your needs rather than jumping around from thought to thought.

Decorating your home doesn't have to be one of the enumerative tasks that only seems to create more to do as you go along so that you can never get anything done. Of course you've heard that saying that work finds a way to fill the empty space and time.

You probably have heard that you should focus on one room at a time and then you find that it's difficult to do that because you always find the perfect area rug, couch, table or lamp for the room you're not currently working on decorating. If you stick to the rule of one room at a time you might miss that excellent sale or clearance, or gasp!-forget where you last saw that perfect piece!

Never fear. I won't tell you to ignore the pieces you find that are perfect for what you are thinking of. Rather, I'd tell you to start with one item at a time and purchase them all for all your rooms. For instance, you might choose to start with area rugs. If you pick the perfect area rug for each of your rooms, you've got the perfect starting point to build a beautifully designed room around the rug, if you want that to be your focal point. Or perhaps you want to focus on the tables and chairs that will be available in each room of your home. In that case, start there and work your way up.

But say you start with tables and chairs but find the rug of your dreams for your living room. You can either stray from the process slightly or you can write it down in a little notebook and come back for it later.

If you decide to purchase that beautiful modern area rug for your game room before you've moved on to area rugs, just use this simple decorating rule: store it. That's right. Store the rug in a closet or in your basement in its original packaging until you are at the area rugs stage of decorating. That way you already have what you've been searching for, but you have two unique advantages. One, you don't have to worry about it getting in the way of following your pattern. And two, if you get to the area rugs stage of your redecorating and find a more perfect area rug than the modern area rug you've already chosen, it's still neatly packaged in its original plastic and can be returned to the store.

But why follow such a pattern in the first place? The reason I say to go by pieces rather than rooms is because you can have a room on the mind and get sidetracked by pieces, but if you have pieces on the mind, then you're already abreast of what you're thinking about. If all you have to think about is area rugs, then you'll more easily be able to decide between braided area rugs and jute area rugs.