| ABOUT ROOMS |
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Every space in your apartment probably has some room for improvement, whether it be a little improvement or a lot. You've had that feeling, haven't you? That sense that the room's flow isn't quite perfect, the colors aren't right, or something is missing. Sometimes it's barely noticeable, nagging little thought that comes and goes. In other rooms, it may scream at you the moment you step inside. It all depends on your sensitivity to your surroundings and your perception of how serious the problem is. But if a room isn't working, it may be very difficult to ignore and hard to enjoy the time you spend there. Sometimes you can attack a room's problems easily by painting the walls a different color, moving around furniture, or adding or removing accessories. You may stumble across a fix with little planning, or you may need to draw from your mental repertoire of decorating hits and misses from the past. Either way, it's a pretty wonderful feeling to triumph over a room's difficulties and end up with a comfortable, usable space. Sometimes, how to improve a room is not at all clear. Perhaps you've lived with the room in its current state for a long time, and you just don't know where to begin to make changes. Perhaps the room is small and you have few options for making a lot of changes, particularly to the furniture layout. Or maybe you're not completely confident in your decorating abilities, and you're afraid you'll make mistakes. Well, the truth is, there are few decorating mistakes that can't be fixed. Choose the wrong paint color? Just paint over it. Position your furniture awkwardly? Roll up your sleeves and move it around again. Create a grouping that just doesn't work they way you'd hoped? No problemtake it apart and start over. I'll share a little secret with you: I have learned much more from my decorating mistakes than I have from my successes. As a person who is intensely affected by my surroundings, I will confess that a poorly arranged bedroom once rendered me unable to sleep for weeks. And when I worked for a month in a home office with critical design errors (particularly an inefficient layout), I am certain that my productivity dropped significantly because of my constant discomfort in the space. But eventually, I identified and fixed the problems in both of these rooms, and now I can sleep and work again. So when you have a problem area, remember: You can and you will find a decorating solution. It might just take a little time. |
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