What Are the Best Tips for DIY Home Decor?

DIY home decor can give your space a personalized, unique feel for a fraction of the cost of purchasing items at major stores. Some of the best tips for these types of home improvement projects are to look through interior design catalogs and websites to get different ideas for your home, and to try to use things that you already have on hand, whether you refinish them or use them for purposes other than what they are intended. Just as when you’re decorating with store-bought items, it is also important to put together a decorating plan and research home improvement methods before you start working on DIY projects.

No matter how naturally creative you are, it can be a good idea to look through home design magazines, catalogs, or websites to get ideas for the types of things you want to do with your living space. While you are doing this, you can clip or bookmark any looks, specific products, or general ideas that appeal to you, and then begin researching ways to recreate them. Although this can be an excellent tip for DIY home decor, keep in mind that some of the best projects will be very loosely based on what you see in stores, magazines, or online. Oftentimes, it is much more interesting to incorporate your own tastes and needs into a project rather than simply copying something that you’ve seen elsewhere.

Reusing or repurposing objects is one of the most cost efficient and easiest ways to incorporate DIY home decor ideas into your space. Instead of purchasing a new end table or other piece of furniture, you can repaint or stain your current piece or add new hardware to give it an entirely new, and custom, look. It can also be helpful to avoid limiting yourself to what something "should" be used for. Flower vases make excellent pencil holders, coasters can double as wall-art, and curtains can frame more than just windows. This is one of the many areas of DIY home decor where you can truly let your creativity take over.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when undertaking DIY home decor projects is not putting together an overall plan for their space and not learning how to do home improvement projects properly. Although many tasks give you a lot more room for creativity than simply purchasing items from a store or hiring a contractor, randomly starting projects without thinking about how each one will tie into the others in your home, or how you should properly complete the project, can cause you to end up with a haphazardly-designed, unusable space. To avoid this problem, make a list of each DIY home project that you are interested in, chose the ones that will work best together and according to your personal preferences, and then take the time to research the proper way to accomplish them. For the latter tip, there are thousands of tutorials and videos online for specific projects, and your local library or store is likely full of books specifically for DIY home decor and improvement projects.