Why are room design plans the best thing ever? Well, that is if you’re a homeowner looking to furnish and decorate, this is an invaluable tool to make your life easier. What is it and how do you create one? Let’s jump in.
For most people the idea of furnishing and decorating a new home is overwhelming. And re-decorating a home that you haven’t really touched in ten or twenty years is probably even more scary.
Like everything else that feels huge and overwhelming, the way to approach decorating your home is to break it down room by room. If you’re a goal setter, then you know that if you are ever going to have a chance at achieving your goal, then you gotta have a plan in place.
Fail to Plan or Plan to Fail
With Pinterest and HGTV shows, it may feel like it’s easier than ever to tackle home decorating on your own. The trick is to approach it in a systematic way. That means creating a design plan for each room that you need to furnish and decorate.
A good room design plan will take all the guessing out of furnishing and decorating a room. It will tell you what furniture pieces you need for the room to function the way you want it to; it will show you where each piece of furniture will go in the room; it will have details like what size, colour or finish each piece of furniture should have for it to achieve your vision. Ideally, you have a budget for each room based on your furniture plan.
Imagine if your design plan could help you visualize the room. That means you know what each piece of furniture will look like and how each piece will coordinate with other pieces in the room. You’ll be able to shop confidently knowing exactly what you need to furnish your space.
Creating Your Own Room Design Plan
Here is our 4 step process for creating your own design plan for any room in your home.
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- Create a Pinterest board for your room. Over a period of time like a couple of weeks, collect and pin any rooms you like into this board. See a specific item you like for your space? Pin that too, so you can find it easily when you start putting your plan together. Once you have about 15-20 pins of rooms you like, you’ll start to see patterns in style and colours you like for this room.
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We ask all of our clients to create a Pinterest board for us when they start a project with Daakor. It helps our design team understand what styles our clients gravitate towards. We usually find that most of our clients like more than one design style. This is where understanding how to bring together these seemingly different styles can help you create a seamless, cohesive look to your space.
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- Set a budget for your room. Make a list of furniture you need for your space and do a bit of research around the cost of these items in styles and colours you like. Now that you know what style and colours you will incorporate into your space, this should be relatively easy. Yes, I won’t lie, it will be time consuming but it will be so worth the effort in the end. Get started on a Google Sheet to help you track everything. You can even add links to items you like here as you progress through later stages of our plan creation.
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Having a budget handy for your room means that you will know how much of an investment you’ll need to make. It will help you plan, prioritize and space out your purchases over time as your budget permits. If you want it all at once, then you can explore financing options since you know what the investment you will need is.
I have had random people argue when I use the word investment about purchasing furniture. Yes, I understand investment is something that increases in value over time. Well, hopefully anyway, right?
I think of furniture and decor as an investment because it will have a huge impact on your wellbeing at home. A nicely decorated home will give you pride, not just be a sanctuary, or your safe haven, away from the crazy world. We all have different reasons for why we want a nice home. You might be interested in this post about how your surroundings impact your mood.
If there’s one piece of advice I can give you about setting your budget, it’s that your budget should be based on the vision you have for the room, rather than what you can afford right now. Purchase what you can now and add other items as you have funds available. This will help you create a space you truly love over a period of a few months or a couple of years.
We go much more into detail on how to create a realistic home decorating budget on this post here.
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- Create a moodboard. Canva is a free tool that you can use to create a moodboard. Now that you have a sense for what items you like and how much you can afford to spend on your furniture, start browsing online to select furniture for your room. Grab pictures of items you like and upload them to your Canva moodboard. This will help you visualize the items in your room and give you a sense for how they will look together.
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Don’t worry, if you’re not ready to buy online, you don’t have to. Once you know what you like, then you can hop around from shop to shop checking out all of your finds before you purchase the items that suit your needs.
When I first started Daakor, we used to give our clients moodboards. What we found was that not everyone found this useful. Not everyone is able to visualize how items on a moodboard will look in their home.
This feedback resulted in our current configuration of style boards where we first mock up your actual room and show the pieces of furniture that’s part of your design in your room. We want to take all the guesswork out of furnishing and decorating your home. All of the pictures on this post are style boards from past projects.
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- Put together your floor plan. You don’t need any fancy software to do this but it helps if you have access to an online app that can help you create a floor plan to measurment. Draw out your room on a piece of paper. Now draw out where various pieces of furniture will be in the room.
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If you are doing this free hand, it will be tough to make sure how things fit and flow in the room since you can’t really adjust items to scale without investing a lot of time to measure everything out accurately on your paper.
You can always take out some painter’s tape and mark out the furniture in your actual space. We know that even after we provide a floor plan, some of our clients do this before they order furniture, just to be sure that everything fits in the room.
Floor plans that are part of our online design plans are made to actual room measurements and furniture is based on actual sizes of those items as well. We want to make sure the furniture we recommend as part of your room design plan actually fits your room in the right scale.
By investing in a little bit of time and effort, you can follow the steps above to create a design plan for each room in your home. However, if you are short on time, Daakor online design plans are the done for you service that you need. As part of our online design plan, we will help you visualize your space with our style boards, show you the best layout for your room and source everything you need.
We even provide you with an online shopping list where you can purchase everything you need in one place. We’ll run around behind the scenes to the 18 stores we sourced your items from and have everything shipped right to your door. You get all of that without having to spend your evenings and weekends shopping around for furniture.
