Give Your Room a Makeover
Tired of your boring old bedroom? Your room should be a sanctuary of your own. A place where you can escape from all the drama in your life. If your room doesn't fix that description, then it's time you give your room a makeover.
Steps
Game Plan
- Clean your room. It's easier to imagine a new room if there's no clutter.
- Plan out your bedroom before doing anything. Without a game plan, there will be more obstacles than even the best interior designer can handle.
- Figure out your color scheme. Try not to choose your favorite colors right now, because chances are you'll get over them in due time. Pick colors that you've enjoyed almost all your life and that have been cherished almost from your childhood till now.
- Use a color wheel as a reference. Colors next to each other on the color wheel go well together. Colors directly across from one another contrast with one another. In other words, when they're put together the colors really stand out and seem to pop. A great trick for using colors correctly is the 60-30-10 rule. Even professional interior designers use it! The 60-30-10 rule explains to use 60% of the room in your main color. 30% of your room should be your secondary color. And 10% of your room should be in your accent color. This way divides up color evenly without going overboard by using too many different colors.
- Keep a theme in mind, while picking out your colors. You don't necessarily have to have a theme like the 1980s or baseball. Just think of what type of room you want to have. If you want a room that seems sweet and innocent paint your walls baby blue and furnish it with lots of white decor. But if you want to convey a funky feeling, use bright, vibrant colors that contrast, like orange, lime green, and bright blue.
- For inspiration, look to your favorite object in your room. You could base your whole room off of that one thing. For example, if you treasure your green and black lava lamp, then you could paint the walls green with black accents or have a 1970s theme. Again, don't pick some recent favorite that you might grow out of or get tired of in a few months; use something you've treasured "forever".
- Decide which walls are what color. Make sure to figure out what color the wall with a window will be, and all other walls.
- Be flexible with your color choice. When you take a trip to the paint shop, you might change your mind about your color scheme. So just be sure that you know what color you want.
- Keep your furniture in mind when you decide on your paint. If your furniture is extremely dull and boring, you may want to stay away from poppy colors.
- Try highlighting. Highlighting is when you paint only a small bit of your room, such as windowsills, in a very bright color when your main color is something plain, like gray. The colors will pop out and make a great accent to your walls.
- Measure the length and width of your room with measuring tape. Also measure the furniture you plan to put into your new room. So say your room is {{safesubst:#invoke:convert|convert}} by {{safesubst:#invoke:convert|convert}}. Cut a piece of paper, so that it measures 6 in. by 6 in. Do the same, except with your furniture. Label each piece with the appropriate name, for example, bed, desk, drawers. Now you can arrange your "furniture" in your "room" until everything is in its ideal spot.
- Consider flooring. Do you prefer carpets, paneling, or tile? If you don't like your floor, you can change it's color or material if you can afford it. If you want carpeting, you can also lay rugs on the floor for multiple colors and patterns on your floor.
- Think of the atmosphere you want to create. Atmosphere is how a room feels. This is very important when it comes to making your room just right. If you want a cozier feeling room for example, try just covering your lights to soften them, hanging and draping fabric from your ceiling, and use small lamps instead of ceiling flood lights to dim your room. Or for a dark, foreboding room, play loud, harsh music, and leave everything somewhat messy. Try to use colors that are at the darker end of the spectrum. Colors, materials, lighting, and music play a big part in the atmosphere of your room.
Paint
- Go to the nearest hardware store and gather all of your supplies.
- Primer. If your walls are already painted, but you want to repaint it be sure to get primer. Primer is basically white paint that prepares your walls for the paint and guarantees that the wall's previous color won't show.
- Paint. Look at paint samples and put all of your chosen colors together to see if they look good together. Remember you can easily change your mind about the color scheme until you start buying things. After that, each step makes it progressively more difficult to reverse your decision.
- Clear your room as much as possible. To make life easier, just move all of your major things like your bed and desk to the center of your room, away from the walls, and pile as much stuff as you can on your bed and take all your other stuff out of your room.
- Cover the floors with newspaper, plastic, cardboard etc, so you don't get any paint on your carpet or other flooring.
- Paint your walls with care. First use rollers to paint the big open areas. Then paint your trim, corners and edges of your walls with a brush. You can make an accent wall by painting a pattern like polka dots, or stripes. Be creative!
Finishing Touches
- Shop at your favorite furniture store for furniture and accessories. Remember that you don't have to shop at expensive furniture stores. Try to find bargains at places like Walmart, Target, or K-mart. You can even find good options at garage sales if you look hard.
- Choose Keep All Your Furniture Looking Great. If your room has no chairs or comfy things other than your bed, you may want to consider getting something to sit on and relax. You can use beanbags, stools, recliners, loveseats, or even couches in your room to give you a good place to relax. It doesn't have to be fancy, though. If you're on a really tight budget you can just simply pile pillows in a corner.
- Look for decorations. See if any lighting, paintings, or flowers go with your theme. A great way to showcase your flowers is to gather old, glass coke bottles, paint them a variety of colors, and use them as flower vases. If you added a design to your walls, be careful not to over decorate. Less is more!
- Stock up on storage. It's very important to get drawers and such, otherwise your belongings would end up on the floor. Storage can include book shelves, drawers, or even cardboard boxes. You can put gift wrapper matching your wall color to make you cardboard box attractive. If you don't want your storage to show, then buy big, but short, plastic boxes. Once you fill them with stuff, just push them under your bed.
- Be careful not to get lazy here—simply stuffing your things into your closet and under your bed will make it impossible to find things. If you're going to use the space under your bed for storage, make sure you have enough storage containers to organize your things in. Closets, dressers, drawers, shelves, cubbies, and storage bins can all be used to organize your things. Ikea sells many interesting storage solutions, although you will have to assemble the furniture yourself.
Tips
- Keep your room clean. It may be exciting when you first renovate your room, so be sure to keep it in tip-top shape at all times.
- If you ever get tired of your new room, you shouldn't immediately redo it. Change around your furniture, it'll seem a whole new room.
- Don't let bad odor take over your room! Be sure to have a potpourri or a plug-in air freshener in your room. You can buy spray-in-the-can room fresheners for fabrics or air. They neutralize the smell and fill the air with a fresh scent.
- Always make sure you never have any rodents in your room or your room is going to be a pest room.
- If you're on a tight budget, search up DIYs for your room decor instead of buying them.
- If you like drawing eyes to a certain point, you may like to try a accent wall.
- Keep your walls white. If you want to change the theme of your room again, the walls will match. For example, if you enjoy football and theme your room to football, when you like something else, you'll have much more work to do. This method saves time and money.
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