Mary Ann Young - The Complete Idiots Guide to Decorating Your Home, 2E

Be passionate about your style. Let your style loose! Indulge in the tastes that tempt you and experiment with the decorating techniques that delight you. Build your home around beauty: Showcase the lovely and beloved things you already have, and splurge on the one gorgeous thing that perfectly captures what you love.

Be practical and realistic about your style. Your style should be completely compatible with how you and everyone in your home use your living space every day. And it should richly express your personality, without necessitating that you be a rich person!

Be flexible about your style. Your style will change as your needs, your familys needs, and your resources change. Dont be afraid to get rid of things that no longer work in your life or appeal to you. Change is glorious!

Let your style break the rules. Most of us have gained a lot of conventional wisdom that dictates a conventional look in most homes. Forget the rules and the ironclad design ideas that you think you need to follow: Give your imagination and your intuition free rein! Put a dark color on your walls; put a sofa in the kitchen; combine checks and stripes; mix Victorian furniture and post-modern art. Remember, you make up the rules for your personal style!

Lets be honest: Even though successful decorating can be full of creativity, self-expression, artistry, and fun, it doesnt always feel that way. Designing and implementing decorating plans in the midst of busy lives can be a demanding and time-consuming task. Certain projects entail significant expense, sometimes more than you can afford. You may need to learn new design concepts and physical skills; you may need to assess your lifestyle and your needs in a new way; you may need to face limitations on what you can do with the space and resources you have. You may have to do some plain old dirty work. And you most definitely have to make decisions! Decorating is always a process of discovery and decision-making.

We have designed this book to help you make the many decisions you will face, so that you learn just what you need to know. You cant just jump into a decorating project. If you have never done home decorating beforeor even if you haveyou will want to do some creative thinking about yourself, the lifestyle you lead, and the design approach that suits you. Then youll be ready to figure out where in your home you want to start, what it is you want to achieve, the options for that project, and how much they will cost. For each of these steps, we lay out the questions you need to ask and the choices you need to evaluate, and ultimately help you choose the answer thats best for you.

Heres how we have organized the book.

Part 1, Making Your House a Home, is for all decorators, novice or expert. We suggest that everyone start here. We present the foundation for all decorating efforts: how to discover your personal style and how to plan, prioritize, and budget for every decorating project. We also present the basic tools that every home decorator needs. You will come back to the planning chapters again and again as you consider specific room-by-room projects.

Part 2, You Were Not Born a Decorator... but You Can Learn, is where youll gain a sense of confidence in your own design decisions by studying the principles of color, texture, form, balance, and proportion. Youll also become familiar with period styles and other fundamentals of interior decoration.

Part 3, Getting the Goods, points out that the smart decorator knows everything about all the stuff in the home. Get a grasp on your choices of furnishings, fabrics, floors, walls, windows, lights, and more.

Part 4, Tackling the House Room by Room, shows you how each room presents a host of intriguing possibilities for redecorating. Each chapter has a Master Planning List of possible projects and materials that you can use in the budgeting and prioritizing process. You may want to go right to the chapter on the room you know you are going to work on, or you may want to browse through this part first to check out your options.

Part 5, Quick (and Easy-on-the-Budget) Makeovers, will get your creative juices going quickly and help you make some satisfying changes in your kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom without spending a lot of time or money.

We highlight some of the best, simplest, and most important ideas throughout the book in the following types of special elements. Some of these are necessary for every decorator to know, whereas some are specific solutions for particular situations. They might not fit your circumstances exactly, but they may inspire you to come up with a brilliant design solution in your unique style.