From Bleak to Beautiful
An Interior Design Beginner’s Guide to Identify Your Style and Transform Your Living Space
Refine the Function
This chapter is to identify the function of a specific space and how your design elements should tie into the space to create a functional area that meets your needs. This will also encompass finding ways to have multi-functionality in rooms.
Determine the Mood
The purpose of this chapter is to discover and decide what type of mood or feeling you are trying to achieve in your given space. i.e. are you going for a relaxing and calm space, a lively and bright space, or a space dedicated to accomplishing work?
Uncover Your Style
The idea behind this chapter is to show the ten main types of interior design styles and align them with the design that meets your space’s function and feel. You will be encouraged to create a physical or digital vision board, of what this style looks like to you. You will identify recurring commonalities to identify what kind of furniture pieces or themes you will be looking to incorporate in future steps.
Prioritize Key Pieces
This chapter is designed to help you outline your budget for design, figure out which piece/s of furniture in each room will be the highlight, which ones will be used the most, and the items that should be budgeted for first. There will be questions to help you decide the priority of purchases for each item in each room. At the end of the chapter, you will create a prioritized list of furniture that needs to be purchased.
Research Reaps Rewards
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss factors that will affect what you end up buying such as fabric and material selection (based on lifestyle), visiting local furniture stores or online stores (that are in alignment with your style), actual furniture availability, and finding customer reviews of your key pieces.
Define Your Space
The basis of this chapter is to understand the importance of defining a specific space and how to tie different spaces together. This incorporates measuring your workable space, identifying where windows, doors, and lighting are, etc. It also discusses ways that open-concept floor plans can be defined.
Depth By Design
This chapter talks about how everything you have purchased has created the backbone of your space but now you will need to find the unique items and artisanal pieces that resonate with you and complete the story of your space. These meaningful items can pull in different textures, convey emotions, create familiarity, have intrigue, or portray nostalgia among other things.
Purchase With Patience
Here we discuss actually going out and purchasing your pieces according to your plan. We will also discuss having patience in the process of going to multiple different stores, not feeling pressured to buy specific pieces, and making sure you see all the different options that meet your criteria as well as financing options. We also discuss other factors to consider such as time of year, holidays, promotional periods, loyalty rewards, etc.
