Apartment Decorating

Decorating an apartment can be a lot more difficult than you might think. The problem is that you don't have as much space for apartment decorating as you do in a house. I used to live in a pretty decent sized house out in the suburbs, and back then I had no problem at all with décor. I would simply collect various artifacts and artworks wherever I went and, when I got home, put them up on the wall. There was almost always room for something else on the wall, or maybe some other little knick-knack on the mantelpiece.

By contrast, apartment decorating requires some strategy. Usually, I will draw out a graph of the apartment floor plan before I even get started. I will take stock of all the decorations that I already have and how much space they will take. Then, I will prioritize them. Can that old picture from aunt Ida be sacrificed for the good of the apartment? What about that corner table with the Caribbean motifs? By thinking about what pieces I absolutely must use in my apartment decorations, and what pieces I might be able to discard, I can come up with the best possible layout.

Of course, some people get a lot more methodical than I do with their apartment decorating. If you really want everything to fit together just right, you need to make some tough decisions. I know some folks who will think up a theme and make sure that all of their stuff fits with the theme. If they are doing earth tones then a brightly-colored painting – no matter how valued – will have to go. This approach tends to give a very tightly organized look to the room. Everything fits together perfectly.

For me, however, a little bit of chaos is almost a necessity in apartment decorating. I can not stand the look of a room which is too neatly organized. I think that, even if a beautiful work of art clashes with your furniture or paint, you should still keep it. After all, having a truly beautiful objects in your living room is more important by far than making sure it matches the stuff around it. Still, I guess that it depends on tastes. For some people, art is nothing more than stuff to hand on the wall to accentuate the room. For others, the artworks are important on their own.