What do High Point Market and Carrie Leskowitz Interiors have in common? We are included in USA Today's Spring edition magazine, on newsstands till the end of May. I was so proud to be approached about a piece on clever DIY ideas for the bedroom, and that morphed into 2 pictures on 2 pages and a story in the magazine as opposed to the supplement. It was quite a nice surprise and coincidentally, I am writing this while many of my friends are at market.
The bigger story was going room by room through your home making improvements, creating beauty within each space to the best of your ability, and tackling DIY projects, especially if you are thinking of putting your home on the market. I never understood why someone wouldn't want to make improvements and have the pleasure of living with them vs. doing nothing until it was time to sell and then spending all kinds of money fixing or upgrading things you have chosen to ignore. It's cheaper in the long run to maintain things as you go along. Trust me!
The sub story that I was a part of involves comforting details in a bedroom. "With a few inexpensive tweaks, you can transform your master bedroom from drab to fab." If you had seen the before picture you would realize the transformation was quite stunning. With Crate and Barrel chests, lamps from HomeGoods (with custom shades), a remnant rug, and a few custom pieces, this room could pass for really high end, but we made it affordable without losing the quality. Affordability does not have to forsake being luxurious!
Every project is different, as is every budget, but one thing is consistent: every client wants a lot of bang for their buck! There are places to spend money and places to save money.
USA Today cites upholstered headboards as an inexpensive way to bring comfort into this very intimate space. Some sort of seating if possible allows for another place to cozy up, bedding should express your personal style and finally, the importance of lighting.
This is where I come in ~ While they liked that my rooms expressed examples of the top style tips they mentioned, I gave a few tips on lighting. I often like to use oversized lighting and I make custom lampshades more than I buy them ready made. However, you can get great lamps at any price point, and I often spend less on the lamp than the lampshade, but the finished result looks like a million bucks. Think about putting dimmers on everything and have different forms of light: accent lighting (in this case the chandelier is the accent lighting in the room), task lighting (the reading lamps on the night tables) and ambient or general lighting. Candles in a bedroom don't hurt either.
One of my favorite sayings applies ~ "When you know the rules, you can break the rules."