3 Interior Design Tips For Decorating A Whole House

Redecorating your ENTIRE home can seem a bit… overwhelming to say the least. BUT, with so many people buying a new home or just wanting to feel more comfortable in their current home after spending so much time there over the past year, many homeowners are redoing not one, not two, but EVERY room in their home. I’ve seen it here in Western Massachusetts, but I know it’s happening all over the U.S. SO, I thought I would share a few tips to help the process feel less intimidating.

Last week I had a consultation with a client who had just bought their house. It’s a brand new house to them and they’re going to work on it on their own, which is totally fine. We do a lot of consultations with clients who are going to work on the project on their own but call us in to help generate a plan and figure out where to start. Their new house is a bit dated but has great bones, which is fairly common nowadays because a lot of people who are selling are not doing the updates that people used to do before they sold their house.

But, just like most people who are redecorating their entire home, this client was feeling a little bit overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. SO, I shared with them these three main tips that will always help when decorating an entire home:

1. DO ONE ROOM AT A TIME
The first thing I always tell clients to do if you have a whole house that you need to work on is to do one room at a time. A lot of times people will pick an area rug for one room and paint for another room and some throw pillows for another room. Which leads them to never having one complete space, right? Because you’re working a little bit on each room. So what I recommend to clients is to do one room, start to finish! Focus on that one room. That way you will have at least one room that you’re totally in love with in your home.

Usually I say to do the room that you spend the most time in first. I know a lot of people don’t like to work on their primary bedroom because they feel like they are the only ones that see it… BUT I would counter that and say to DO your primary bedroom! You spend the most amount of time in there AND what better way to end the day than in a space that YOU LOVE!

I’ll admit that I was guilty of this too. I didn’t do my own bedroom until last year during COVID. AND now I love it! I love to hang out there. it’s calming, it’s a place to retreat to and chill. It really feels like ME. Now, if you don’t want to do your primary bedroom then I’d work on your family room or just get right into your kitchen if you’re wanting to do a full kitchen renovation. Those are probably the other two rooms that you spend the most amount of time in.

2. DON”T DECORATE BASED ON SOMETHING THAT IS GOING TO CHANGE
The second tip is don’t decorate for something in the room that is going to change. For example, we were in this client’s kitchen and they were talking about eventually doing an update on the kitchen: painting cabinetry, changing countertops, etc. However, this countertop was a granite that had a specific color in it. SO… I was saying to them, don’t choose your lighting or paint or things like that based on that granite.

Say that you have wood trim in your whole house right? AND you know that eventually you’re going to paint that wood trim… You don’t want to choose your paint colors and your furniture and things like that to go with that wood trim because you know you’re going to change it! So in that case, I would assume that I was going to paint that trim an off white and I would decorate to go with that off white.

So I said to this client, don’t decorate your kitchen to go with that granite. You’re going to decorate with what you know you’re going to eventually put in. Here is where you can see that having a complete design plan for your home BEFORE you start designing and decorating, is REALLY helpful. You know what you’re going to do in this space and you know what is going to work and what isn’t.

3. YOU WANT YOUR HOME TO FLOW
The client was asking me about paint colors for her kitchen and I said well, standing in your kitchen I can see your fireplace room, your dining room, your mudroom and your family room. SO you want the color in that kitchen to go with what’s in all of those other rooms. So take into account what rooms you can see from the room that you’re decorating!

Because you want your house to have some flow, you don’t want it to have a navy blue family room and then a hot pink dining room and then a bright green kitchen. You want it to have some continuity which we discussed a little in the blog a few weeks ago: 4 Ways To Make Your Home Feel Better.

SO, those were my 3 tips for decorating an entire home. As I was saying at the beginning, you can book a consultation! We do online consultations if you’re not in the local area AND we do in person consultations. Like with this client, we do consultations for clients who are going to work on their home on their own but need a road map to work through. We call them a one off consultation. It’s just a consultation. They’re not hiring us to do full service design for them. They just need to know a direction to work in. Of course we also do consultations to start full service design projects! AND if you’re not sure what you need, but you’re sure that you need some assistance, book a free 15 minute phone call with us so we can figure it out together!

We LOVE when you PIN our blog, that’s why we give you this cute little Pinterest pic!

We may earn a small commission from the products we have linked. Click the pictures for the links.