How To Get A Cohesive Look When You Decorate

Use these easy tips for creating a cohesive look when you decorate any room in your home.  Your friends and family will think you’ve hired a designer!

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Say you’re all ready to decorate a room in your home?  Use these tips for creating a cohesive look to help you get it right from the beginning.  Or, maybe you’ve already decorated the room, but something just seems off to you.  Often times, the problem is that while all of the individual elements might be pretty on their own, the room just doesn’t look pulled together.  

 

Step 1: Where To Start?

Before you can even begin to work on your room, you need a starting point.  Pull some of your favorite pieces of clothing from your closet, along with tear-outs from magazines and online images.  Lay them out together and take some time to examine the entire collection to see if you can identify a unifying color or theme that speaks to you.

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Step 2: Brush Up On The Basics

If you aren’t already familiar with the basics of home decorating, I highly recommend that you take a little bit of time to do some reading on color, scale, texture, style and pattern mixing and furniture arranging.  Don’t worry – I’m not talking about signing up for an interior design class.  You can search for and find any subject online these days.  Once you’ve educated yourself a bit, the difference will show when your room is complete!  

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Step 3: Select A Cohesive Color Palette

Choose a color palette from the largest piece, that has a pattern to it, that you’ll be using in your room.  It could be a rug, sofa, the fabric, a large piece of art, etc.  Pull the three main colors that you like from that piece – this will become your palette for the entire room.

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Step 4: Follow The Rule Of Three

To get a cohesive look, you should use three main colors in your room.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t use any other color in the room – it just means that you should concentrate on those three main colors.

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Step 5: Sort It Out

Once you’ve chosen the three main colors for the room, use the rule of 60 – 30 – 10 to use those colors within the space.  That means that 60% of the palette will be the dominant color (such as the walls), 30% will be the secondary color (such as the furniture or rug) and 10% of an accent color (such as accessories and/or artwork).

To select a neutral wall color, look toward the tones of white, gray or beige that are used in the larger pieces in the room.  

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Step 6: Most People Don’t Get Everything Right The First Time

Don’t put a lot of pressure on yourself!  Even professionally trained designers don’t always get it right the first time.  Make sure to keep up with receipts and not remove any tags from purchased items in case you need to return something that doesn’t work in the room like you thought it would.

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Step 7: Give Yourself The Grace Of Time

Putting a cohesive room together doesn’t happen in a day!  Probably not even in a week!  Give yourself some grace by accepting the fact that it might take you months to get the room looking exactly the way that you want it to.  Trust me, you can tell when a space is just thrown together.

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Let’s put it in a little list to make it easy to remember!

• Determine your starting point.
• Brush up on the basics.
• Select a cohesive color palette.
• Follow the rule of three.
• Sort it out: 60 – 30 – 10.
• It’s okay if you don’t get it right the first time.
• Be patient with yourself!

I hope you’ll find these tips valuable when it comes to decorating your own home!  I’ve talked to many, many people and I believe that putting together a room with a cohesive design is one of most common problems that we home decorating lovers struggle with.  How about you?