The Positive Side of Disasters Is That You Get To Redecorate!

2/8/2017 (Permalink)

Old Saybrook CT Fire Damage Restoration - How to rebuild your feelings of "home" after fire and flood damage

In the midst of a fire damage restoration or flood damage restoration project, your mind is reeling with all the fears, worries, and expenses of having to replace your destroyed and damaged stuff, but making lemons into lemonade is a part of our lives, and thinking on the positive side of bad things that just happen sometimes, is the key to being happy and peaceful in this life. During a fire and flood, it can be hard to think beyond the moment, so this is a positive post to help you think about the next steps of your process of repairing your house after a fire. You get to redecorate! This is a unique opportunity for you to choose your color palette, buy some new stuff to decorate your home with your own individual style, and introduce some new style tastes, textures, patterns, colors, knickknacks, etc that you have seen and appreciated.

While SERVPRO is cleaning and restoring your home back to intact to protect you from the elements outside, you can be coming up with your plans for what to do to get organized, design and beautify your new rooms.

Here are some questions to incorporate into your disaster repair home restoration project…

1)   What are your favorite styles? Look online, go to the local mall, flip through magazines, daydream about the things you like and select a few things that you really love to become the focal pieces of your new style. Don’t think about what they would look like together. The key to decorating is to love what you have around you, and if you love the items, designing to tie them all together is the easy part. Choose 3 things from stuff you are keeping and or new stuff that you want in this room you are planning to decorate.

2)   Now that you have had fun window shopping and choosing your 3 favorite things to incorporate into your new decorating “theme,” evaluate the items together. What makes you excited about each item individually? What do the 3 items have in common?  Is there a color of wood or metal similar between 2 of them? Is there a complementary color scheme that just feels good to you? Pull that out to use it for your decorating style in other aspects of the room. If you are buying furniture, buy at least one piece of furniture that is amazing to you, that you love and you can make it the focus of the room. For example, in designing a home office, you can get a desk that you love and make it the design focus for that room, making it so that love being there.

3)   Let’s say they all have bronze metal or a color blue (even if they don’t match perfectly) somewhere in them, then you can paint one wall that color or use a faux painting effect to give that one wall depth as a focal point. All walls the same color is a very common thing for people to do, but the most gorgeous rooms aren’t all the same everywhere. They have different things working well together.

4)   Choose something textured for a wall decoration that has some depth to it, hang a large painting that has mixed media design elements, and hang 2 sconces you love on either side of it. This wall just became AMAZING! By making the one wall a focal point, you have already made the room look bigger with visual effects.

5)   Ok, so now you have your entire design already flowing into a room that looks like you paid thousands for a Decorator to come in and do it for you! Now, choose a calming soothing peaceful neutral color for the other walls tying together whatever the furniture and other items you are going to have in this room have in common. Taupes, burgundy’s deep, rich colors give the room a more elegant mood, while lighter colors give the room a more spacious feel. This focus for this part of the design is to make it feel more like you are being snuggled up in a warm blanket.

6)   You can go to the local hardware store and purchase the paints other people rejected to get them on discount. The colors are pretty, they just weren’t an exact match for the picky people. There’s a selection to choose from, and you can likely find a great neutral color from the local stores leftovers getting it for a great price, to save money.

7)   If you want a rug, the advice decorators give is to have the rug big enough to have every piece of furniture partly or all on the rug so that the edges of the rug are tied into the room well leaving about 9-12” as a sort of border seems to be the best effect. You can still use a rug for decorating with hardwood floors or carpeting, and it protects your floors carpet too, keeping them cleaner and nicer longer.

8)   When designing the layout of the items within the room, the best way to think about it is by thinking of what naturally occurs in the room. If it is a living room, congregation and socialization is the key, bringing people together. Curving pieces thinking of a circle or aligning the furniture within a box in the letter H so that the seats are facing each other is the best advice for this. Use straight lines as a design element. Kitchens and dining rooms are other congregation areas that should be thought of similarly. When people come over, where do they tend to linger and hang out? Set your home up so that they can do as they already want to. This will make people feel more comfortable and relaxed, and that will even get more compliments! Plus, cleaning up daily is easier when you aren’t constantly rearranging things because they aren’t in their naturally proper spots where they can both live and work without being moved around. Bedrooms main focus should be sleeping. Some people like to watch tv in bed, and if that’s your thing, then position the furniture so that it functions well together for your comfort. The office den and play areas of the home should similarly be functionally set up to be efficient for what you need them to be so that stuff stays where it starts and is easy for you and the people who live in the home to just live life and do your daily life without much effort. If you use your desk to collect mail and pay bills, then set it up so that it is efficient for doing so. That becomes the focus of that part of that room.

9)   The next thing to think about is lighting effects. Layering lighting provides ambiance, so you can highlight your 3 focal point items with lighting effects. That is an easy and awesome decorating tip!

10) Once it is time to start painting, if you are doing it yourself, have a painting party with your friends and family and provide cheese and crackers and a beverage in a big carafe. Hosting an event is a million times more fun that doing it alone and the workload gets lighter when more people are around even when some people don’t actually do any work, others will be helping you, and the overall socialization aspect will give you a great memory of this time to replace the negative emotions with positives.

We know how hard it is to go through disaster remediation and repair your house after a fire or after a flood. Hopefully these ideas will give you something wonderful to plan for and to remember us by after we help you get your life back on track, get your home restored after emergency home repairs, “Like it never even happened.”