Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Free Fixes For Your Home...y otras mentiras!

Hola mi amigos. I have been gone for a while. After nearly thirteen years of unwed bliss, me and my non-husband Jay became marido y esposa! It was a beautiful day and I am swimming in happiness, but I've been a little neglectful of my blog, with all of the planning I was doing for my wedding... and for that, I am truly sorry.

For the last few weeks I have been searching many home improvement websites, only to find that many of them tend to pull your leg with the information they deliver. Mentirosos! The largest offender I found this week was Better Homes & Garden's site www.bhg.com, which claims to give you tips for no cost decorating- 26 examples of it too! And, while I am a firm believer in lost cost, but don't call a chancleta un zapato!

One of their ideas is to add height to your room by raising your curtain rod close to the ceiling. this is one of my favorite designer tricks and really does work to expand your room, but what it isn't... is free. Sure, to remove the curtain rod and then reinstall it a little higher is nothing but labor, provided that you have spackle near by to patch up the former holes in the wall. Then you have to put the curtain on the rod. Oh, what's that you say? Now it's too high off the floor? Of course it is! Now you have to buy a new curtain. And longer curtains, though they will look better in the room, will cost more money because they use more fabric. I have already known someone who tried this themselves but didn't think about the consequence...shopping!

So, if you are crafty or a good sewer and have a few yards of leftover fabric that just so happens to coordinate with the rest of the furnishings in your room, you can always add the new fabric to the bottom hem of your old curtains for a color block effect. This doesn't always work well. Your room has to be more contemporary in style for it to look like you meant to do it; definitely don't try this in a more traditional styled room. I have done this before, on purpose and it looked fantastic. But it just might be easier to explain the whole truth to the reader, cree que si?

Last week I truly did do a "free" remodel. My 6 year old son, whose room was going to be designed in a motorcycle theme came to my husband and I and requested that it now be army style. I asked him what we would do with all of the motorcycles and he said, "mommy, there are military motorcycles". Well, excuse me... We had one gallon of a deep gray paint for three walls of his room and hadn't yet bought the red that was going to be for the last wall. This gave me an opportunity to do one of my most favorite things...recycle. I always save the old paint from past rooms and am pretty good at mixing colors. I used the minty color that Walmart messed up in my hallway, added some purple gray from my last home's living room (seen in a past wallpaper blog post), added a dash of bright white that I use for all of my trim and a quarter if a can of lime green from my daughter's room. I mixed it all together and created an army green that looks great against the other three walls. Jay (my husband) likes it because I got rid of some paint from the garage. Jaidyn (my son) likes it because he got his dream fulfilled. I (me) like it because I was too tired to go to the store! And, it was really free.

Now, I'm not saying that anyone can do this. You have to experiment with proportions and combinations of colors, but it can be done and it's better for the environment whenever you can use existing products versus buying new, especially when the item contains chemicals!

As soon as mi hijo cleans his room, I will post a picture to show you the new color scheme. I hope to get back into the war zone to finish decorating my drawing figures on his wall to tie in the theme. I will post those as well. It's always a work in progress, but so rewarding!

My next post will be answering questions from homeowners across the country. If you have a question for me, please email it to fashionhouseinteriors@gmail.com. I will do my best to answer it this Friday. Bye for now. Besos!