How to decorate 1980s house??

[mintyfresh]

We are buying an 80's house - red brick, dark wood, dated but functional kitchen and bathroom, horrible but good quality pink carpet which may have to stay for a while

Anyone have any ideas how we could update it so it would work with the age of house? I personally would have wanted an older property as suits my taste and furniture better but we needed a practical family home and this is the best option in the area.

I have no idea where to start - we won't have a lot of money to spend on it initially but really want to give it a bit of a facelift!

Any ideas? Anyone with an 80's style house that can tell me what works??

Cream painted everything?
Kitchen, doors, banisters, skirting etc. We are in an 80's house and have just started cream-painting things and it has really brightened it up.
I am a bit resistant to covering up good wood in some areas though.

The pink carpet could be put with creams/wheats and heathers, depending on the shade.

buy cheap rugs, who would buy a pink carpet what shade of pink?

replace internal doors with cheap white panelled ones if they are of the cheap nasty teak variety. makes a huge difference you wouldnt beleive

enormous amounts of magnolia.

what is the kitchen like?

Oooh thanks - was thinking cream/heather myself! Carpet is probably what you would call 'salmon pink' southeastastra!!

Kitchen is ok - in fact all fixtures and fitting are really good quality - just dated!

Salmon pink! Tough one - you may need to go with New Potato White, Pea Green and Lemon Yellow.

Ha ha wukter - might just work!!

Yes to neutral colours throughout which will brighten & modernise and you can always put down a few rugs to hide tone down the pink carpet.

Stick with the good quality kitchen - whatever you replaced it with would look dated in 5-10 years time anyway.

Paint the kitchen doors or replace them or I've seen painted doors with new counters and looked fab.

My sis painted the tiles in her dated-but-good-quality-kitchen and got those stick on LSDs for under the cabinets, it improved it (for the short term at least).

Gah! LEDs E E.
Though that may improve a lot of things in the short term.

I would put cream/ off white rugs and runners over as much of the carpet as possible. Paint the walls a similar cream colour to the rugs so the carpet fades into the backdrop. This would go nicely with dark wood/ antique pine furniture and frames on the wall.

We are in the process of doing up an early 90's house, we have painted almost everything cream/pale shades but in each of the bedrooms put one wall of nice wallpaper. This made the decorating reletively inexpensive & you can always easily replace the wallpaper when you get sick of it. I'm afraid to say we painted all the wood white, it was pine though & the place looked like some sort of chalet! It looks great now.

We too had a house of pine when we moved in. We removed what we could and painted over what was left. I like natural wood but bright orange pine is just wrong.
We also took down the dado rail and replaced the louvre doors in the bedrooms.

I am just roaring out the names of drugs on this thread, it seems. Best ignore my suggestions, OP

Hello, we have an 80's house and painted all the woodwork white and removed the dado rails, recarpeted in a neutral colour and painted the walls in nice Farrow and Ball colours. Everyone comments how light and bright our house is even though it was anything but when we moved in. We'd really like to do the kitchen and bathroom at some point but by doing all the other things first the whole house doesn't look so bad. Good luck, you really can make anything look nice.

Thanks all - will take advice about the light colours

Am also hoping that simple and cheap things like changing the door handles on internal doors and kitchen units might help update it in the short term. I like the idea of painting the kitchen cupboards Cargirl...

It really could be a nice house - loads of potential but most definitely a long term project!!