What to Bring to Start a Conversation

While you may not need all of these, some of these will help you and us choose a fabric treatment that will go with your window, bed or sofa or anything else. It will help your decorator/design professional get a basic understanding of your space and then they can work with you to suggest things that might go well in a space. A large room can handle larger patterns. A small window might suggest the use of a sheer to maximize the available light. Then again there might be privacy issues. All of these when noted go a long way in making design choices.

A Plan

A drawing to show the size of your room/space or window Note the physical dimensions Do not forget the height Do you have cathedral ceilings, dormers, large windows

Floor Plan

No, you do not need to go to architectural school to do this. Draw neatly on a graph paper and draw major items to scale. Mark distances to the windows, corners, lengths, width. This will help get a feel of what the space looks like. Mark which side is North; it will help get an idea of where the Sun comes in. Add, other details such as yard, street etc.

Scaled drawing to reflect your space and the Showing location of large pieces of furniture, rugs and carpets. TVs, Pianos etc within Show location of doors, windows, dormers etc etc

Pictures are worth a thousand words

Take pictures of your space from different vantage points to show the space that you are trying to decorate.

Take pictures head on, take pictures from corners or doorways to get an idea of the entire space. In some cases you might go upstairs and take a picture of the entire great room.

• As you enter
• As you sit down
• from outside if you would like to view fabric from inside
• Pictures of neighboring/adjoining rooms
• Swatches of fabrics, pillows, pictures of furniture pieces
• Fabric samples ( you can bring throw, a decorative pillow)
• Samples of rugs
• Color of walls (paint chips), pictures
• Wallpapers
• I want my room to look like….
• Saved pictures, cuttings, clippings reflect your life experiences. Collect them and organize them and bring these to throw some light into the things that you like.

• Magazine cuttings
  The picture below shows Pages extracted from Architectural Digest and House Beautiful. Keep these pages to give you inspiration on what you want your space to look like.
  
• When you see an idea or a picture, save it away.
• Books showing what you like
• Floorplans
  
• Colors that you like
• Fabrics/paint swatches, wall paper
  
• Save names of things and stores that you like.

To organize a binder for decorating a house, you can start by creating tabs or dividers for different areas of the house, such as living room, kitchen, bedroom, etc. Within each section, you can include inspiration images, paint swatches, fabric samples, floor plans, and any other relevant information. You can also include a section for budgets and timelines. It's also a good idea to keep a running list of tasks and to-do items in the binder, so you can easily track your progress and make sure everything stays on schedule.

Organize it by rooms and work the flow from page to page as if you were going from room to room. Add a color, drop a color. Visualize in your minds eye and then implement. Stop by any of our stores and we can help achieve that reality.