Credit: Max Pixel
5 Tips For Choosing The Best Furniture When Decorating Your New Home
People in the UK spent a whopping £17.5 billion on furniture in 2017. It makes sense to invest in home furnishings – your furniture makes your place truly your own, turning a house into a home.
Choosing the right furniture can be tricky and that’s why I’ve listed these 5 helpful tips for you. From knowing who the property is for to getting the color scheme right, here’s how to go furniture shopping for a new home!
Recommended reading: Ways to Transform Vintage Houses for Modern Style and Use
How long are you going to be in your home?
If you’re like me, then you’ve lived in a bridging home. What’s a bridging home? It’s simple. It’s a property you own and live in with the purpose of doing up, adding value to, and then selling on – so you can use the proceeds from the sale to buy the home you really want.
If you’re not going to be in your home long-term then my tip is that you don’t overburden yourself by getting large, cumbersome pieces of furniture. Why? Because it will be a hassle to move them and could be costly to do so. If this is the case, then the best furniture for you will be the essentials – beds, wardrobes, dining room tables, etc… – rather than decorative pieces.
Start with one room at a time
Breaking down the furnishing of your new home into manageable chunks is a great idea. It can be expensive to buy new furniture for every room. And, the pressure to get everything right the first time can lead to mistakes and impulse buys that you may live to regret.
If you are unsure where to start, the bedroom or the living room is probably your best bet. You spend over a third of your life in your bedroom, so it needs to be comfy and full of furniture that helps you think restful thoughts. Equally, the living room is where you go to relax, making a soft sofa for shedding the stresses of the day and an interior design scheme that soothes the soul is essential.
Look for great value furniture for your home
Whatever stage of your life you’re in – whether you’re a first-time buyer, or making your fourth move up the ladder – there’s never a time when you shouldn’t be looking for great value furniture. With this in mind, I recommend doing a bit of digging to find a bargain.
Car boots are often a great place fo find a potential treasure, and a fantastic way to spend a Sunday morning. Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree, and eBay are all easy ways to both buy and sell furniture online. Or, if you’re looking for modern furniture, Furniturebox offers some of the best value pieces in the UK for every room of the house.
Vintage, modern, contemporary, future, or unique?
Once you’ve decided how long you need your furniture for and what your budget is, style is perhaps the most important factor behind your decorating decisions. And style often boils down to one of four personal preferences about the look you want – vintage, modern, contemporary, future or unique?
If you want a vintage or a unique look, then shop accordingly – look for furniture in kitsch stores that cater to your needs, ones that have tables, chairs, and beds that you won’t find anywhere else.
If you’re more a fan of a modern or contemporary look, you’re in luck – these are the styles most stocked by both furniture stores or websites, so do your research and find one that stocks what you want at the price you’re willing to pay.
Finally, if you want a completely unique look then go after tradespeople and artisans – get a trained cabinet maker, a specialist bed creator, and a skilled table builder.
Have a color scheme in mind for your pad
Colour scheme is both one of the most fun and most frustrating parts of decorating your new home – we all have a favorite color and fitting it into your pad adds an individual touch to it, while you can also pick colors that help to control the mood of your rooms. However, colors clash and not all furniture comes in the ones you want.
While much of the color scheme literature you’ll find relates to painting, there are some points that are absolutely applicable to your furniture too:
> Begin with selecting a color for the largest and most centrally located room
> Build upon the palette of your home by getting furniture of a similar hue
> Keep in mind whether any of your rooms are connected/within sight of each other
> Treat the color scheme of your upstairs and downstairs rooms separately
Decorating your new home is one of the most exciting parts of moving into a new pad – it’s the moment when it starts to become truly your own. Getting the right furniture is a part of giving your home the look you want and now you know how and where to get the right furniture!
