Making a dull room or even an entire dull house seem more vibrant and animated doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg and you certainly don’t need to bring in a bunch of snooty decorating experts who will stamp their personality onto your home rather than tap in your own personality. You won’t have to go into debt to pull off these exciting home décor additions, but it will certainly help if you are handy in the garage. A basic knowledge of how to measure, hammer in some nails, properly use glue and saw an even line will be enough to get most of these home projects going, but how attractive they turn out will depend entirely on your skill levels. For that reason, if you do have access to someone who loves to work with tools, by all means draft them into the situation.
Faux Fireplace
You can buy high tech faux fireplaces these days that feature a very realistic illusion of a glowing fire. The cost can prohibit many from this avenue of decorating their home and you have to make sure the size fits your space. By making your own faux fireplace you get to decide exactly how large or small it will be as well as what the final product will look like. If adding a faux fireplace to your home immediately seems like a project well outside the boundaries of your skills, keep in mind that when it’s boiled down to essentials, what we’re talking about here is really nothing more complicated than a few pieces of wood attached to a wall in the shape of fireplace hearth. How you decorate the interior within that frame is entirely up to you and can range from painting a trompe l’oeil flame and kindling to creating a tile mosaic to simply adding some decorative wallpaper. If you can find the studs behind the walls, measure correctly, apply some glue and work a drill to create a secure mount, the hardest part of the job is a done deal. The materials for the fireplace frame can be purchased as a ready made kit or you can get creative by heading to a flea market or junk store to buy cheap wood or molding.
Columns
Few things scream out high style, wealth and classic grace better than a simple column. Adding a column is going to be much simpler than you fear. Go to a home decorating store and pick out a column of your choice to install inside your house. These columns are available in a variety of styles, sizes, colors and materials. As for expense, don’t think you have to go with a marble column like you see in a museum. Today’s columns for the home range across the board in affordability based on whether you choose one made of wood, metal, polyurethane or stone. Since the columns are manufactured in standardized sizes, you will likely have to do some cutting so pick a material that you are comfortable using a saw on. Your basic hacksaw found in most garages can do the job with polyurethane, but if you have access to a saber saw you can get the job done quicker and more efficiently. Since the key to installing a column inside your home as a decorative addition is making sure that it fits right in the location you desire, measuring is of the utmost importance so make sure you are absolutely certain about the specs before you start to put the column into place. Another handyman’s skill to consider is your ability to property screw mounting brackets in place and to apply thick adhesive glue that gets the job done without getting all over everything.
Magnetic Chalkboards
You already be familiar with chalkboard paint that lets you turn a wall into a blackboard overnight. What you may not know is that you can lay down a primer before you use the blackboard paint with the result being that you are left with not just a wall on which you can write messages, but on which you attach things using a simple magnet. The only hardware skills required for this home decorating project are the ability to apply primer and paint and a little bit of creativity and imagination to use these materials for something besides a simple, boring rectangular or square message board. Take advantage of this 21st century innovation to move beyond the obvious and incorporate the medium as just an additional element at work in your overall decorating theme. This means that if you are going to apply the magnetic chalkboard in your kitchen, try something like applying it to the wall in the shape of your favorite foods. A home office worker could significantly increase productivity by blanketing an entire wall from top to bottom and side to side for use a calendar, planner, to do list and reminder that will be impossible to overlook or allow to slip your mind. Bedrooms of sports fans could feature magnetic chalkboards in the shapes of equipment or team logos. All this extra creativity will require more effort than simply slapping some primer and paint onto a wall, but the result will be a decorative addition to the house that not only looks good but is quite useful.
New Life to Old Lights
Lighting should be integrated into your home décor scheme to match up with the rest of the decorating ideas, but too often people are satisfied with the simple overhead light that bathes the room courtesy of a simple flick of the switch on the wall. Wonders of decorating on the cheap can be done so that you still get the same amount of light, but you get the bonus of that illumination being provided by decorative additions. A chandelier that must have been something before electricity can go from boring to soaring by spray painting it a shiny new gold or silver or by utilizing one of those spray paints that give a surface the look of texture. The same deal goes for any lamp in the house, but an even better option is to head to the yard sales, flea markets or junk stores in order to snatch up a lamp that is already a piece of art but has fallen on hard times. As long as you don’t need to mess with the electrical wiring aspect, you can transform someone else’s useless flotsam into a highly decorative source of light with spray pain, the addition of new and more artistic shades and even something as ridiculously simple as painting it yourself for a one of a kind designer lamp.