Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Designing Your Life

As the year progresses, I realize that I am just not posting as much as I wanted to. I think about design in all aspects; my home, my rooms, my wardrobe, and in the work I do every day. The more I contemplate design and blogging, the more I have to say
- there is one important thought I had, that I have to share...
- we should spend more time designing our lives than we do designing our surroundings -

What I mean by that is we need to think about what kind of life we want to lead, what is important to us as individuals, what kind of "footprint" do we want to leave behind, to be remembered as, to be known for. Although it is great to surround ourselves with nice things, beautiful furnishings and decorative homes, our foundation, our core, is who we are as people.

In these hard economic times we find ourselves reflecting on life. Most of us know someone who has lost their job, had benefits cut back at work, or just find themselves stressed over the entire global situation. It is easy to fall victim to being down and blue. I feel it is important at this time to re-evaluate what and who we are, what our dreams were, and how we can go about accomplishing them. Possibly reaching goals that we might have set a long time ago.
Re-design your life!

Take on a new hobby, or learn something you always wanted to know - with the internet, and the help from Youtube, there are millions of lessons online for all sorts of things from faux painting to learning to play guitar, how to plant a successful garden to composting. Join a community group to help others, give of yourself to your community, friends and family. It is wonderful to work on your home, paint a room a new color, change up your surroundings, but it is not the only way to re- design.

Focusing on your dreams and helping others acquire their dreams will ultimately lead you to more beauty in your own life. The glass is half full - design away!

Thursday, January 1, 2009

A New Year! Keeping a House Design Diary for your Home

We all look towards the new year ahead of us with hope and sometimes, if you are like most, new ideas; resolutions. Some vow to finally fix the gutters that are hanging off the house, or paint the family room a new color. Others make resolutions to themselves not to procrastinate projects around the house that they, or their spouse, have wanted to address. Sometimes it is just to touch up the paint in the stairwell, or the basement play room. If only you could remember what the color was, or the brand...

Here is an easy way to organize your home design, a house design diary. This is as simple as picking up a spiral or composition notebook, you probably have a partially used one lying around the house somewhere. Get yourself a few post it notes, a pen, and you are ready to get started!
• put the post it notes a few pages apart, like tabs on the side of the notebook paper
• label them with the names of each of the rooms in your house; for example the dining room, family room, or little Lauren's room.
Now you are ready to record.

Making a diary of the paint colors used in your home will be a great reference tool. You can store the paint colors, paint brand and paint finish in this booklet. As you give a room a new coat of paint, write it down in your handy diary. How many of us look at the stairwell in our homes, where everyone's hands ride up the wall, and wish we could remember the color used so we can touch up the area in the middle where you can see all the fingerprints?
How about the many times you see photos in a design magazine that would work great in your house? Tear these magazine pages out and paste them into the section of your new diary to save the ideas for future reference.

There are many ideas you can store in this diary :
• paint chips/ brands and finishes - for future touch ups
• images of furniture you own in each room - to help you when shopping for other items to add to the decor
• magazine pages of looks you love - to help you create the same feeling in your home
• lists of the furniture in the existing rooms and their dimensions- wood finishes, colors which will aid in adding items to the room
• room dimensions- great to use when figuring out how much paint is needed, or wallpaper
• window and door dimensions- also helps with figuring out how much paint or wallpaper is needed, as these dimension will need to be deducted from the total room dimension - but also great when shopping for window treatments!
• even a graph paper layout of the room!

A house design diary is a great reference tool!