Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Add your own personality to your decor

Whether you have got your interiors done from anyone, don't leave the styling stage without adding your own personality. When someone visits your home for the first time, they judge you by your surroundings. If it has your personal touch, it will reflect your personality. 


By personal touch, I mean the sort of decor objects that you put around. For example if you visit someone's home and you see fresh plants and flowers in the decor at multiple places, you can judge that the person is fond of flora. If there is a use of natural materials like jute, pebbles, sea finds like corals and shells, and less of acrylics, you can figure out that the person is more close to nature and like collecting and enjoying inspirations from nature. 

For example, if you see a console top with the following vignette, you can guess a bit of personality of the person living in that room. 




And believe me when your surroundings too reflect you as a person, you are at more ease and comfort.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Tips on adding new life to your home

Not everybody is buying new home or refurbishing it every other month. But how do some homes always look different- full of energy and new life?

If you are someone who likes to keep your ambience always beautiful, just try this. Within the same decor, you can keep charging it by adding a bit of style here and there to make it look fresh and new. You can do it every week, every fortnight or every month depending on how much time you have. But it just takes a few minutes to do that. May be you can just target a few places in your home which are good for adding vignettes and keep changing them. These could be some corners, shelves, consoles or just table tops. This does not require you to keep buying new stuff. It just require you to change the vignette by changing mood, patterns, colours, adding fresh flowers, plants, having you favourite books, candles, cutlery(may be just a tea pot) or whatever that can be accommodated in that place which reflects your mood and personality.

For example : There are times when you want more pattern and colours. Simply pull out a different table cloth, table mat, small rug, or may be just cut an old suit, a torn saree and bring a beautiful piece of cloth form a background of your vignette. Then start layering it with your favourite books, candles or just small sculptures.

My Vignette today: Added a few books, candles, indoor plant & some cutlery
     

So just adding these and rearranging them, lighting a few candles makes a huge difference. Adding lamp or candles adds to the mood. If you have different sorts of lights available in the room, don't use them all together. Just highlight one space at a time. It brings more highlights and shadows instead of making it flat from all sides. Also prefer warm daylight lights as compared to cool day tube lights( white tube lights) which tries to flatten the surfaces.

Adding a life to the vignette like an indoor plant, fresh flowers or say a fish in a glass bowl makes it perfect and lively. And if you could give a few drops of your favourite fragrance oil- nothing beats that. 

Last but not the least, if there is a way to have your vignette blessed with a special spot or focus light- 3 cheers!

Keep experimenting!!!

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Size of objects while creating vignettes

An important rule while creating a vignette is to group different elements of different sizes.  They should not stand with same size competing with each other. Essentially one requires a mix of vertical object, horizontal object and something that bridges both. For example if you have a vase or a table lamp(a vertical object), you can add books as horizontal element and say a small sculpture bridging between the high and the lows in the arrangement. Just like the below:

 

The little Buddha is bridging between the books and the lamp. It is an important element here else our arrangement will look incomplete.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Some de-cluttering hacks


Everything in the house should have a dedicated place. This essentially means a dedicated place for all stationary, dedicated space for for tools and hardware and everything else. 

De-cluttering hacks:
1. Save your courier cartons for de-cluttering. Put these into your drawers, cupboards and wardrobes. They make good containers for same sort of stuff. For example all pens can be kept in one box, similarly all adhesives like tapes, Fevicol, araldite etc go together in another box, all hardware tools in one, cutting tool in one, all charger and cables in one, gardening related stuff in one etc. Similarly all hair accessories together, one for hankerchieves, one for belts, one for ties, sewing accessories in one etc.  This way all things similar are together.

2. Use labels for containers so that other members in the family are aware that everything in the house has a designated space n they also take care while keeping back the stuff. Reading the label just ensures that they don't miss the rule of picking n keeping back stuff at designated space.

3. Use cable ties or rubber bands for saving charger cables from intermingling.

4. Wide PVC pipes act as a good organiser for badminton and tennis rackets. If you spend 10 minutes in any hardware shop, you will find plenty of such low cost hacks.

5. Save your old used crates and have wheels below them. Use brush and acrylic paint to add some interest and if you have some stamps-awesome!!!

Crates on wheels

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Clutter free spaces and less chaotic mind


Over the years, from my teenage years to mid 30's, I(just like many others) have gone through different state of minds, liking and disliking. Same was true for me in terms of my liking towards keeping my space around. I have thoroughly enjoyed my teenage being a clutter loving person(only in terms of keeping my space around). But as I grew up, one thing was surely understood- after a chaotic day of work, a clean and clear surrounding gives a sense of the much needed peace. But how does it happen actually-?

While I completely believe in my theory as I experienced it myself, I also conducted some experiments with a few people around. The best time to experiment was where they were already going through a chaotic phase in their lives say some issues in office or something else. I tried this experiment with different people lying on the different extremes of liking/disliking for organising their things and clutter/clutter-free surroundings. My first experiment was with a completely disorganised and clutter loving person when they were in some chaos. If i tried adding a little more clutter in their living spaces, they got very uncomfortable and they wanted to cleanup the mess. So basically there was a limit to which they could handle the clutter and in already chaotic situation, it was uneasy for them to handle more chaos around. So they started to sort some of their stuff. Some other day, in similar situation, i just cleaned up the mess before they returned home after a chaotic day. And as expected they were little more peaceful seeing things in place.

I tried same experiment with totally organised husband of mine.  And there you see a huge difference!
Just tweaking the place of a key from left to the right on a shelf hook would make him go crazy and they would not find it when it is still in front of their eyes. And ofcourse if you introduced 4 new unrelated things to say their work desk, they would be upset and will be seen more impatient. But in similar situation if they see everything cleaned up and lying at the designated place, whatever situation they are in, they seem more relaxed.

All of us are busy in our lives and in families where all are working people, it gets very difficult to keep cleaning and organising things around. For such people, the mantra to be followed is that the home should have only those things which have a designated space for them. Then you do not need to find special time for organising or cleaning your surroundings. 
So if you ponder over the next line for 5 times, you would find it easy, really easy:
If a thing A has a accessible and convenient place say X,Y coordinates in home, then it is never too difficult to place A at X,Y when it is not in use and pick it again from X,Y whenever needed. 
We all just need little and very little discipline to feel more peace in life. 

So just ponder over above, you will find many answers to the chaotic state of mind you deal with everyday!