STYLING TIPS
Seven Tips To Style Your Home Avoiding The Most Common Mistakes
1. Measure and Plan
The first common mistake is not having a plan and not measuring the space.
Measuring up is one of the first things an interior designer will start with.
Everything needs to be measured and noted, even down to where light switches,
vents and power points are.
The benefit of measuring means you can easily work out how much paint and
wallpaper you need, where you can place furniture to ensure there is enough space
to move around and to avoid buying objects that are practically too big or small.
Roughly draw the layout of the room or space you are measuring, and note the
measurements on the piece of paper. Measurements to be taken are:
• floor area
• ceiling height
• floor to under window sill
• window height
• height of top of window to ceiling
• the width of the window
• doorway width
• if there are things like columns or odd angles, you need to measure these as well
If you are building a new place, you should have these plans, but it is a good idea
to double check, in case between plan and implementation there hasn’t been any
changes - often there have been a few tweaks here and there.
It is also a very good idea to take photos of your rooms to pick up things you missed
or help you with incorporating some existing pieces into your new scheme, since you
can have them for reference when out shopping. Photos will also capture how much
natural light there is.
Once you have all the measurements roughly noted, then you can get a scale-ruler
and draw the floor plan, noting where everything is as precisely as possible.
To take it to the next level, you can draw elevations in the room(s). An elevation
drawing is the view that you would see in real life as you stand on the floor or ground
and look at the wall. You will have the measurements you need from the list above.
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