If renovating your home renovation is more wishful thinking than a realizable dream, I have good news. A powerful way to bring more beauty into your home is to improvise with what you already have.
Before we delve any further into decorating, first answer a cooking questions for me. In the kitchen are you a recipe follower or do you take liberties with the instructions? Which way do you approach cooking? There is no right or wrong answer; either way puts food on the table. Me? I treat food recipes more as guidelines rather than strict step-by-step instructions. I play around adding other ingredients from my pantry and will rarely make a dish the same way twice.
Now think for a moment about Chopped, the Food Networks cooking game show — you know the television program that challenges four competitors to combine four strange ingredients from a mystery basket into a culinary delight on the spot while the clock is ticking. Even though every chef start with the same four ingredients, improvisation makes every cook’s appetizer, entrée, and dessert look, smell and taste distinctively different. Cooking on Chopped is a performance art.
If you improvise while you cook, perhaps it’s time to try your hand at improvisational decorating. If you can successfully tweak a recipe, I’ll bet you also have the talent to tweak your décor. If so, you don’t have to wait to renovate to transform your home to make it beautiful. By making small adjustments to the recipe of your décor, you can easily make it look a hundred times better.
At the end of every HGTV programs’ before-and-after room revels, the things that really grab our attention is the imaginative use of color and the stunning arrangement of the room’s furniture and accessories — these are the very ingredients you should use to transform your space.
Keep the improvisational essence of Chopped in mind while thinking about a few of the strange decorative items you have collected over the years – a vacation find, a shopping splurge, an arts festival purchase, and an inherited item. Have those items – items that once captured your heart and imagination – been worked into your home’s décor or are they siting silently gathering dust on a closet shelf or folded, hidden away and forgotten in the attic?
Just as cooking depends on the ingredients you have on hand, your decorating challenge can be as simple or complex as you wish to make it. When you are inspired to improvise as you cook, you’ll often taste the mixture before adding more of this or that spice, flavor, or ingredient. It’s the same when you improve your décor through improvisation – you’ll compare the colors on paint charts to the colors on your walls, flipping the room from one color to another in your mind, you’ll move furniture around, you’ll try lamps, rugs and accent pieces in different places, and keep stirring the mix until you have exactly the match you desire.
Give it a try. Have fun with it. Remember, the overall goal of improvisational decorating is to make your home feel fresh, inviting and beautiful.
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