Don’t risks letting any of the good ideas running through your head get lost in the water? And make sure you can read your own handwriting. Hieroglyphics are even more confusing. 6 How to Plan for a Makeover
- Snap a Photo Take a “before” picture of the room. You’ll want to remember it the way it was because it’s going to be oh so much better! Okay, now you only have eleven more steps to go.
- Assess what you Like and What You Don’t Like Make two lists: one for what you like about the room and one for what you don’t like. This is just to get a general sense of what needs to change.
The furniture?
The wall colors?
The window treatments?
The floor?
Now is the time to consider whether you can live with the shag carpeting left behind by the former owner or if it’s time to put in hardwood floors and a few throw rugs. Walk around the room and look at its construction. Are there any awkward spaces? Does the room have symmetry or are the windows and doors out of balance? Before you can decide on the specific changes you want to make, get a read on the big picture. What are the purpose of each room, and what about that room is and isn’t working now? 3. Save Four Things choose four things that you want to keep when you make over the room. There are probably a few items that still appeal to you or that you feel you just can’t let go of. It might be a piece of furniture, a work of art, a rug, a lamp.
If you’ve got to be crazy, go ahead and pick six. But here’s the thing. Sometimes people have a tough time getting rid of stuff that they’ve had forever. But if it doesn’t have sentimental value and it wasn’t handed down by a grandparent or an uncle Can this chair be saved? A little reupholstering should do the trick.
One of my first major design-and-build projects was a three-story tree house (with a sundeck) that I created in my backyard when I was eleven years old. To get other kids in the neighborhood to work on it with me- kids whose dads had better tools than mine -I took a page from Tom Sawyer and bartered, trading comic books for their help. I remember the bond I felt with those kids while we built that tree house together, and it’s the same feeling I get today working with not only the EMHE team, but also the hundreds of local contractors and volunteers that help us do our job. I like to have as much fun as possible when I’m working, and I’ve found that bringing in a How to Plan for a room Makeover crowd to help makes a project livelier and even gets you better results.