Decorating Your Home With Your Family

Photo courtesy of “The Inspired Room”

As a family, one of the most exciting decisions you get to make in picking out your first house and deciding on who gets their own rooms and how to decorate them. As fun as it seems, it can be quite stressful and daunting, especially without the right preparations.

Moving into your first home can be a fascinating adventure! It is one of the biggest decisions you’re ever going to make. Choosing a suitable location, picking a reasonably sized house, and settling legal and financial matters, is a tedious process. You get caught up in the buzz and forget about the next big step: decorating your home.

The house you just bought is sparse, and it needs to be furnished from top to bottom, as well as inside and out. When sprucing up your home, you won’t have everything figured out immediately, and that’s perfectly reasonable. Decorating a house is an investment that takes a lot of time and dedication. It will be an exciting, overwhelming, not to mention, stressful journey.

As scary as it all sounds, don’t fret! After a bunch of research and planning, you can now turn the empty shell of your house into a home. You can even use this moment to bond with your family. You can help each other out in shopping for furniture and choose color palettes for the different areas of the house.

To save you from the trouble of worrying about what to do, here are five factors that you need to consider for you to choose the perfect home decoration for your family and pets.

Budget

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Money is a common source of conflict amongst married couples, and in decorating a house, the expenses will only continue to accumulate over the years. To solve your money matters, talk to your spouse and agree on a budget. Find out what you’re both willing to spend for, and learn to compromise.

Decide on what you want for your house. A lot of couples lose sight in trying to achieve the perfect magazine-worthy home, which ends up costing them a hefty sum of money. Agree on a common ground for you to start. Know how the cost of your house factors into the grand scheme of your relationship and family dynamics.

Setting your mind on the six-bedroom, three-bath mansion with a pool and automated car park on the hill can set you up for failed expectations if you don’t agree on a fixed budget. Take a closer look at your finances and work from there. If you don’t get that house on the hill on the first try, it’s okay. You can always save up for renovations or a new house, even!

Thrift Store Galore

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In decorating your first home, it’s easy to get lost in a haze of “I want this,” and “I need this.” There’s nothing wrong with knowing your wants and needs, but when you’re trying to be practical, it will be helpful to list down the things which you need to buy and the things that you can probably reuse from your old stuff. As I said earlier, be open to suggestions and compromises.

One of the most helpful pieces of advice is to thrift on your bigger pieces of furniture. Rifle through your parents’ hand-me-downs and look for furnishings that you can reuse in your new home. Your parents might have an old china cabinet laying around which you can use for storing your tableware, or you might find an old toy chest which you can use for keeping linens.

As they say, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” You can never guess what treasures you might find in hand-me-down furniture.

Be Precise

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More often than not, homeowners find themselves wasting money on buying furniture that doesn't fit well in their house. Measure your space carefully before you go furniture shopping. Take note that furniture displayed in showrooms appear bigger when compared to your actual living room area.

Measure everything! No kidding. Window panels, door frames, staircases, etc. Take a steel tape measure and list the dimensions down. Remember that you also have to allow a margin for error. Too much precision might leave you with barely enough space to move your furniture around. Allow yourselves an allowance of about a few inches or centimeters.

Put things into perspective. That picturesque Monet painting may be the perfect addition to your living room since it matches your furniture pieces, but it may look too large or too unnoticeable when mounted on the wall. Not only it will cost you thousand of dollars, but you also won't even get to use it.

One Step at a Time

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Don’t buy everything at once! Talk to your spouse. Which rooms would you like to prioritize? Should you focus on furnishing the basement or the kids’ rooms? The right principle would be, “Less is more.” When starting out fresh, evaluate and prioritize. This trick will help you cut down on clutter and save you from purchasing too many storage bins.

The first place to skimp is on accessories. You don’t need to splurge on accessories immediately. Throw pillows, lamps, mirrors, rugs, and vases are some of the most common accessories. You can save on these by recycling unused items or by buying them from your local handyman.

As tempting as it is to buy everything at once, but it’s better to live in your house for a while and find out what works and what items won’t work. You will soon find out that you probably did not need to have that many decorative vases or synthetic plants around your living room. The antique china set that you once eyed doesn’t seem that appealing anymore.

It’s the Little Things

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If you want to save up for the long run, don’t skimp on the smaller details like plumbing, lighting accessories, switches, and paint. Couples tend to forget about these minute additions, but it’s always good to invest in proper fixtures and save on replacement and maintenance charges in the future.

Think of it from this perspective. What if you decided to scrimp on lighting fixtures and now you have to change your light bulbs once a month. Did it save you money? In the beginning, maybe. But in the long run, you ended up spending more on pesky light bulbs when you could have taken yourselves out on a family night.

The same goes for your plumbing needs. Did you know that the average home loses 14 percent of their water to leaks? In the monetary sense, you can lose up to $2,000 to $30,000! So don’t be too frugal. Spend your money well on high-quality fixtures.