Stark white walls.......reassurance and canvas help please

[Lizzylou]

Eek, we are having our living room and dining room redecorated after a flood and the paint I've chosen (Dulux Light and Space, Frosted Dawn) to lighten and brighten our room is very white! Which shouldn't come as a shock I know.

Please tell me I've made the right move, I am useless at interior design! It is a newbuild and we live in gloomy lancs, so am hoping it'll make the place seem bigger and brighter.

Also, our dining room has been a playroom before so was plastered with the DC's artwork. Where can we get reasonably priced canvases/prints to inject some colour?
We have a lovely one in the lounge but that cost a lot more than we can afford at the moment!

My mum haunts charity shops looking for nice frames - she then frames kids pictures, family photos etc. You can also repaint all the frames in the same colour to make them look consistent, and hang them as a large group.

A good cheap way to brighten up a room is using printed colourful fabric (the larger the print, the better) - you can stretch it on a frame to make a sort of large hanging. Much cheaper than proper printed canvases and easy to do.

Oddly, Ikea have quite a good fabric selection (and is v cheap) or you could try your local John Lewis or wherever for upholstery fabrics. Or even buy some plain fabric and get the kids to help you decorate it with fabric paint and potato prints!

Oh, and don't worry about the walls - they won't look stark once you've filled the rooms with your crap lovely furniture

Sorry, didn't mean to imply your furniture was crap! But if you're anything like me, you'll have so much stuff the wall colour will soon be hidden anyway

Lol, our furniture is indeed crap!!!

That will have to be replaced next year though.

Thanks all, will have a look at the fabric option and also lots of photos artfully arranged, we haven't got enough of the boys on show to be honest.

ikea

You'd be amazed at how different it looks with crap vital family stuff in it. We just started putting stuff back into our nearly finished kitchen, and it's astonishing how the crap stuff conceals a multitude of problems.

Phew, because at the moment it just looks WHITE
We are not a minimalist family

we are also repainting our dining room in white, and it does look a bit bleak at the moment, as we've not got all our furniture in and pictures up. we had white in our last place though, and once all the finishing touches are in it really does look fab.

tate gallery does prints on demand from its collections.

A couple of pictures on the wall and some curtains will make your room look beautiful and colourful. By choosing white you'll achieve what you want, a light room with a feeling of space. Whatever you choose to accessorise the room with will inject the colour and will of course go with the walls.