Decorating your home may not be as easy as 1, 2, 3, but we can give you a three step plan to get started.

1. Add color. And to add color you have to choose color which is right for your home. It is best to stick with just two main colors when you are doing a complete redecoration as this keeps the shopping, the painting and the coordination the simplest.

Your colors should consist of one base color and one accent color, plus any neutrals you add through flooring and furniture colors. Choose colors you love, and ones which are personal, rather than a combination which is trendy right now. Collect everything colorful which appeals to you and you’ll soon see a pattern emerge.

For our 1, 2, 3 step example, lets choose a charcoal color as the base and yellow as the accent. A neutral base means it’s easy to add and change almost any accent color if you tire of yellow.

Where is it that you get your passion to decorate your home in the style which is both the most modern and chic, but also undeniably ‘you’? Do you rush out each month and buy up all of your favourite fashion and decorating magazines, to search for new ideas, new trends and new ways to show off your personality in your home?

Or do you take careful note of how your friends, family and colleagues decorate their homes for the best mixture of style and substance – the perfect blend of the trends and the best practical designs. After all they may have seen a mag this month which you missed!

Or maybe you are more altruistic and look to nature for inspiration, taking your cue for your bathroom tiles from the rippling surface of a lake, for example.

Or do you make sure you check out the latest additions to the homes of your favourite celebs? And you’re not cooing over their newest kid are you?

Share your inspiration with us on where your decorating styles and ideas are born from.

Everyone has something in their life they are particularly passionate about and that can often come through when you decorate your home. Some people live and breathe colour and so will spend the bulk of their decorating budget on choosing the best quality paint and doing endless research into color matching and decorating techniques.

Other people enjoy having the best of everything and so will splurge on their furniture – they want to sleep in the best bed, watch TV from the best sofa and eat at the best dining table, while other people are passionate about cooking and entertaining so their decorating budget will be spent primarily on a kitchen makeover.

Still others are passionate about something deeper than all that and so will direct their decorating finances towards purchasing a house full of wall art which is meaningful and speaks to them, evoking feelings which are important to their lives.

So what is the most important part of your home decorating plans? And why?

When you are redecorating your home there are certain pieces of furniture which you immediately decide to keep or to ditch. There are the pieces of furniture which will fit with your new style and color scheme, pieces (like your couch, ottoman or arm chairs) which can be reupholster to fit in, and there are others which can be sanded back or repainted (like your coffee table or side board) for a fresh look.

Generally that is where the furniture retention ends though as the final category is things which can’t be updated, or are just too much trouble – ‘throw away’ items like lamps which are not that expensive to replace.

However, if you are looking to plump up your budget at every opportunity, don’t over look your ability to revamp an old lamp. A simple sanding, a lick of paint and a new shade, or even just a reupholstered one, can bring your accessories into your new scheme too.

Art for your walls can take almost any form and you don’t have to be constrained by what you can hang from a hook. Look into the third dimension and consider what you can place in front of your walls.

Like in this image, the walls of the home are a dark charcoal color and instead of covering up the paint work with a lot of hanging wall art, a unique desk lamp has been placed against the wall. The frame of the lamp is structurally designed and creates a contrast and a unique pattern against the wall.

Or maybe you have light walls at your place? Well instead of hanging bold wall art prints on your walls, consider placing a streamlined table against one wall in a darker neutral color – chocolate perhaps – and on top of the table, place a clear vase with bright flowers, and rich green stems.

Designers and artists are often quoted in interviews and magazine articles, on their style – an interviewer will ask them to sum up their style, and the artist of designer always seems to have a wonderfully eloquent single sentence to describe their passion, their inspiration and the direction of their work.

Of course, these creative types have probably already had to put some thought into their style as it defines their work every day and why they are doing what they do. Which makes you think – as a home decorator, you too should have a ‘style sentence’ which sums up who you are, the image you want to portray and how you want that to come across in your home.

This will give you clarity for your decorating project, and when you actually sit down and think about who you are and what you like, you may discover a whole new style path to follow in your home decorating.

Stripy Walls

There is a lot of encouragement out there if you are looking to add a stripy feature wall to your home. There are seemingly never ending ranges of stripy wall papers, and some interior designers even suggest simply breaking a wall into three or four horizontal blocks and paint your wall to match the paint sample cards you get from the hardware store – you know, the ones with three or four different shades on each one.

Well a stripy wall is a great place to start when brightening your home and refreshing your walls, however, how do you do about creating a stripy feature wall without ending up feeling like you should be in a prison, or beside the seaside?

It’s all about the colours you use and where you use them – this image is of a dining room which gets lovely, dappled afternoon sun, so a soft orangey-yellow colour and a white stripe were used, but that’s not where the decorating ends. They have also matched up the dining room decor too, to follow the simple and chic theme throughout the space.

Normally when you are redecorating your kitchen you are looking to incorporate the latest and greatest appliances, finishes, colors and styles as you want your time in the kitchen – and there’s a lot of it – to be as easy as possible, and we all know mod cons make it easy!

So why should you consider a vintage decorating style for your kitchen makeover? Well for the exact reason we have just mentioned. All of your friends probably have streamlined kitchens which are a sea of stainless steel and white – because that is the modern style.

However, you can have a modern kitchen with all of the best accessories, and still have a personality. A vintage style kitchen is all about the details. Choose wooden bench tops instead of plain white ones, and instead of another neutral feature color, choose a soft pastel sea green for the feature cupboards. Display tea sets and tea pots on open shelves or glass cabinets, and choose a Belfast style sink which looks a little like an old fashioned trough but works perfectly as part of the modern world.

Incorporating a vintage style into your decorating is often as simple as adding a single piece of something you didn’t just buy at Ikea. This could be an old coffee tin displayed in your kitchen, or a wrought iron fire poker hung over your mantle piece as metal wall art.

In this case vintage decorating takes the form of a vintage milk bottle filled with a single bright poppy flower to brighten up a bathroom. The vintage bottle vase is simple but elegant and by displaying a bright flower in your bathroom, which is often a sea of white, draws your eye to the display and then to the unique style of the vintage vase.

The vintage decorating style is often about using and displaying simple, everyday items, because as with any style which mimics a past era, something as mundane and ordinary as a milk bottle can now be easily turned into vintage art.

As with almost anything in life, decorating has to be considered within the context it will be seen and used. This means that just because you like a certain decorating style, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will work as part of your home, office or store decor.

For example, the vintage decorating style is generally characterised as any mixture of pretty colors, fabrics and prints, mixed with retro objects and bright bolts of color. So no matter how much you want to decorate in a vintage style, you will probably find yourself wondering why the vintage look isn’t quite right, if you try and apply it to your law office for example.

This doesn’t mean you should give up on your favourite vintage style though. All it means is that you have to make sure you have the right decorating attitude and instead, try to apply vintage style decorating colors to your beachside cottage or upstairs apartment.