Your Scottsdale Home: Low Effort, High Impact Changes for Your Home

Guest post by Robyn Randall, ASID

In my last post I discussed a few things to think about as you consider new ideas for your Scottsdale area home for the new year. In this post, I am going to suggest a few ideas that will allow you to refresh your home quickly, without committing to a major project.

As for applying these to your project, it’s not easy to give an in-depth example for all my suggestions below. The suggestions are made simply as guidelines to make changes and improvements to a space to give it new life. It’s up to you to determine how much you think you need to change to make an effect.

Walls
I’ll start with Walls. As simple as it sounds, changing wall colors for most people is very scary. Truth be known…it’s the least expensive mistake you can make, but I always recommend painting 3 foot square sections of your paint color options on different walls of the space before you jump into doing the whole room. Leave the options on the walls and look at them over a day or two and see how they change during different times of day or night.

While changing color can be tricky if you have items in your space that have “dated” colors, there are many, many paint colors from a vast variety of paint manufacturers to choose. If you fail in getting the exact match,  you can have the paint company do a color match from a specific item, such as a fabric.

Artwork
Most homes have some type of Artwork. Maybe it’s collectible art, maybe it’s poster art…whatever your “flavor” is,  there are several ways for change.

One is to remove all your artwork and take a fresh look at the space without it. Maybe you engage a friend who is less subjective to join you in this exercise. Go back and place the art differently or in different rooms. Make a grouping and add a few new pieces. One of the things I have done successfully is to add additional framing to an existing piece. See if you have some art that has simple or uninteresting framing and add to it or replace it altogether.

Accessories
You can have  a house full of furniture but without Accessories that’s all you have: a house full of furniture. Accessories are what makes it a home. Do the same exercise with them as you did with your art. Remove everything and place it back into the room in different ways. Re-cover some throw pillows with a new fabric and pull a few new accessories in to accent colors from the new fabric.

Area Rugs
Area Rugs are a great place to get your inspiration. By either changing out what you have, or placing one for a new element, pulling color inspiration from the rug for walls, accessories or new fabrics for throw pillows can dramatically change your interior without starting all over.

The trick goes back to the principles and elements of design. Pay attention to these pointers and you should be successful in giving your Scottsdale area home a refreshed and “new” look.

Image Courtesy of Wicker Paradise