How do you know how you want to decorate your living room (or any other rooms)?

[youngadult109]

DH and I are in the process of buying our first home. If all goes well, we should be able to complete by June. The owner has taken care of the place very well and we shouldn't need to do major renovation to it (it's a 6-year-old house).

We do however, would like to at least decorate the living room and really making it ours but how do we start?? I've seen lots of pictures online, Pinterest, Houz etc. All the pictures look great! But I really don't know where to start. Shall I decide on the colour of the wall first? Or choose the sofa first? How do I know if I want to paint or use wallpaper for a feature wall? Or is this not even necessary?

Many photos online also show they have colour coordinated top ups like cushions, rugs, lamps. Do people generally do this to their homes or is this just a gimmick for show homes or advertisements?

Share your story on how you started decorating your home! Thanks in advance! :)

I moved into my house 2 years ago and before that and always lived in much smaller rentals in Central London. I had already developed a style of what I knew I liked from looking at magazines, Pinterest and other people's houses. Do you have a particular style you like?
I would recommend that you create Pinterest boards of living rooms that you really love and then looks at the common themes that keep recurring. For instance, what colours do you love and do you like a traditional, contemporary, mid-century or super minimalist vibe. Buy an interiors magazine that suits your style (I absolutely love Living etc).

Then work out what you have to keep in the room - flooring etc might be too expensive to change and work out what furniture you can buy and which walls you can paint or wallpaper. Also think about the exact function of the room and who will be using it not only now but in a few years time. We had an expensive glass coffee table that we got rid of once we had our first child as it was an accident waiting to happen and took up too much floor space that is now used for our kid to dance and play around on.

I would also start off with doing the least expensive things first, such as painting as then you can change your mind if you don't like it. If you make expensive decisions first you might not be able to change them if you don't like them, for instance buying sofas. I would also be more conservative with expensive stuff like sofas if you haven't yet developed a definite style.

Make sure you look on eBay for cheap deals once you know the style of stuff you are looking for and if you can't buy a certain thing there, then you can make the investment and buy it new.

Don't be in a rush and don't buy stuff you don't really love. The negative side of having a lot of available cash is that you buy expensive stuff and regret it later! Good luck and have fun!

Remember, there are thousands of paint colours so match the paint to things in the room and don't try and match paint colours and start a fruitless search for curtains that match your paint.

I'm in a very similar position you Op. We're just buying our first house and have no idea where to start. The decoration in the house is all "fine" as it is so I think we are just going to get the basic pieces in fairly neutral colours /styles and then take it from there. I love flicking through pinterest etc but I am also quite lazy! And imho the most important thing about a home is that it looks and feels homely, not that the cushions match the tablecloth.

Having said that - I'm sure I'll be posting here in a few months asking for home decoration advice

This is our seventh home so we're old hands at it by now! When we first started out in the early 1990s we I had collections of 'things' I liked (back then it was some Art Deco ornaments and pre-raphaelite prints - a passion that developed from an art gallery visit when I was a student) plus a couple of inherited items of furniture from my grandparents' house. We kind of decorated around these and our 'style' just seemed to grow from there.....hunting out bargains at carboot sales progressed to auctions which in turn got replaced by searching online and now I'd say more than half our stuff house-wise, originated from ebay, lol!

Initially we picked some god-awful paint colours - pink and blue iirc - and flowery fabrics and I'll never forget our red and white kitchen, but our taste soon developed along more classical lines and because all our houses have been older ones, we've tended towards period colours.

Our collections have grown, although the Art Deco stuff was dumped ages ago and we now collect Art Nouveau/Arts & Crafts, so we have lots of mid-oak furniture and Liberty rugs etc.

We've never been ones to choose something to decorate/furnish our home because it's currently in fashion, we just buy what we love and choose things that make us smile. Often we set out to find a particular thing for the home and despite searching everywhere, can't find it - rather than buying an alternative we'll wait till the right thing comes along or create our own version.

Most people probably think our home is OTT - we're certainly not minimalists and we're not afraid of colour - but we'd rather have a home that expresses who we are as people, than one that looks exactly the same as the next person's......

Above all, I believe you should have fun creating your home - it shouldn't be a chore and you shouldn't be a slave to the latest fashion in interior design.....although I'm not averse to leafing through interiors magazines or checking out Houzz/Pinterest. My big thing is furnishing fabric - I studied fashion so can't resist checking out what's new on the fabric front!

Good luck with your new home OP!

I chose a wallpaper I loved, plus furniture I loved, then built it around that. After I sorted the look I wanted, then I just try to keep it in mind if I buy anything for the living room.

I think you just need to choose what you like, and pull it together around that. And there's no harm in being eclectic and having a healthy mixture of stuff. If you like it all colour schemed, then do it. If you like it more casual with a mix up, do that.

Basically, make it yours. I can now sit in my living room and look around and think "I really love this room" even after 9 months, so I'm happy at this point with it.

Id go for a sofa you love and work aroud that - generally it is the most expensive item in the room and lasts the longest. A relatively plain and neutral style will be the easiest to plan around.

Then decide if you want paint or paper (or a bit of each), hard floors or carpets, blinds or curtains (or both), and work from there.

We love grey, so chose a dark grey sofa in quite a modern style, as we knew we would always be able to make grey match whatever we did with the walls. We then added a very darl charcoal paint to the walls behind the sofa and did the rest of the room an off white as we dont gwt much natural light. I saw some mustard lampshades which look amazing infront of the charcoal wall,so we bought them and some matching scatter cushions. This way if I get sick of the mustard these are the only things I need to change.

Thanks everyone!! These are very useful tips!

We might be relocating in three years' time so don't think we want to get any expensive furniture for now. Ebay is a good idea! Will see what I can find from there. DH is sure that he'd like a L-shape sofa, don't think we'll go for leather sofas but what would be the general price? We won't want to get something too cheap that's low in quality too.

I'm still undecided between painting a 'feature wall' with something vibrant or having a wall paper. I've always liked the idea of a fireplace so am thinking of getting an electronic one for this purpose. Any advice on this? How do you decide if you want to paint or use a wall paper?

I just prefer paint. I dont really like wallpapers. So just whatever is your preference. It helped that we (had to) had the walls freshly plastered so paint was the obvious choice for our lovely new smooth walls.

Last year we wanted to replace an old leather sofa with something more cosy to snuggle up on. We scoured ebay and found a barely used John Lewis Chesterfield type in a crushed velvet (but without the buttoning so more contemporary looking) for £300.....retail price was around £2k so definitely worth searching there.

Also we previously picked up a Rangemaster Elan 110 (with electric hob) on Preloved for £350 after we agreed to leave our gas hob model behind for our buyers when we sold that house in 2011. Again barely used and retails at around £1800 iirc. When selling that house last year we sold the range to our buyers for the same price we'd paid on preloved three years previously........

Lots of nearly new bargains to be had out there!