Tag Archives: home decor

Springtime in Sapphire Can Prompt Home Décor Decisions

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There is something about spring that gets everybody at least thinking about fixing up the house, and it’s that time of year again. Throughout the length and breadth of Sapphire, home décor decisions are being pondered. Ambitious landscaping and fix-up plans are being laid, budgets drawn, and troops assembled (the troops will be armed with paint brushes and rollers, hedge clippers and rakes).

Perhaps it’s the weather; perhaps the angle of the sun—or maybe even last Sunday’s clock-adjusting exercise—for whatever the reason, this time of year is when we look around the house and decide changes will be made!!

It’s also the time of year when occasional disagreements between Sapphire’s husbands and wives have been known to crop up. The Home Improvement section of the realtor® web site just ran a feature titled “When Couples Disagree About Home Décor,” which promised to tell who the winner is in such arguments. It pointed out that women have different priorities than men (women: “leather makes those embarrassing noises each time you sit or stand” vs. men: “but you’re going to freak out each time someone sits on [the linen cushions] with a drink”). The woman who wrote the article says that she won the argument—but admits that now she freaks out every time someone sits on her sofa with a drink (it’s already freckled with water marks). So maybe the man won in the long run…

If your home décor efforts are getting special attention this season because you plan to add your home to the Sapphire listings, “what’s hot” might suddenly be more of a consideration. But a different home décor impasse can come about when the fashion zeitgeist points in one direction while your personal taste pulls in another. Even worse, you may find that the fashion world is arguing amongst themselves!

The Realty Skinny says, for instance, that gray is about to overtake white in popularity (simultaneously also “pushing out the beige era”). That’s not a problem for The Washington Post, which agrees that “gray makes all your possessions pop out” (except, I have to believe, the gray ones). On the other hand, the Pantone Color Institute, which practically wrote the book on color, couldn’t disagree more. They think that pinkish Rose Quartz (“warm, embracing”) and faintly bluish Serenity (“calm-inducing”) are what’s happening right now. In fact, it/they are its Color[/s] of the Year. That is because “the pairing…brings a feeling of calm and relaxation into the home environment.” That would be welcome—especially when you’re freaked out about the water marks on the sofa.

You don’t have to be selling your home for home décor tweaks and garden renewal to occupy your thoughts, but if you do, I hope you will give me a call. My free, no-obligation consultation will let you in on the latest Sapphire market information. I think you’ll agree that knowing exactly what’s happening has a definite serenity-producing effect!

Ultimate Rainy Day Home Décor Inspiration Generator

1-10-16-homedecorEven if you don’t pride yourself on your artistic flair, you probably have developed fairly firm ideas about what makes some Highlands homes come across better than others. Without even consciously thinking about it, you know as soon as you walk through a front door whether that immediate impression is strongly positive, just so-so, or sub-so-so­.

A Highlands home’s agreeable first impression can usually be laid to a combination of pleasing architecture, diligent maintenance, and appealing décor. Not every home in Highlands has all that going for it, but there can also be a saving note: sometimes the most important impression comes from just a few minor touches­­­­­—clever accents that just seem perfect.

Now that we’re wading deeper into the months when Highlands’s bad weather days are stacking up, we are more likely to find ourselves with some spare time—the commodity that was so hard to find when the sun was shining. That makes it an ideal time to browse through the web (or home decorating magazines, if any of those are around) to fire your creative decorating juices. There are websites galore that feature photos displaying imaginative design touches that other homeowners have come up with. Today, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel­—when it’s being reinvented by thousands of others

All by itself, Pinterest is a single source of boundless do-it-yourself design ideas. The virtual pin board site is the source of billions of images its users are proud enough to want to share with the world (and a surprisingly large percentage live up to that appraisal!). Since there are more than 100 million active users every month, the images and ideas are constantly changing. If you’re open to new ideas, this is boundlessly rich territory.

If you enter ‘decorating’ in the search bar at the top of the Pinterest screen, you’ll summon up dozens of tabs (they look like color swatches) that lead to all sorts of classifications. There are Apartment, Home, Bedroom, Cabin, DIY, Room, Fall, Rustic, Kitchen, Bathroom, Wall, Ideas, House, Vintage, Country, Table, Dorm, Cookies (this leads to dessert-type cookies­­­­—so here ‘decorating’ means ideas for icing them), On A Budget, Farmhouse, Cottage, Bohemian (a suitable alternate title for that one might be ‘clutter’ or ‘gypsy wagon’)­­ Beach, Nautical, Modern…you get the idea: just about everything.

Alternatively, once you are in the greater ‘decorating’ section, you can also just key in a more specific description of the area you’re exploring. For instance, if you put in ‘spring,’ you’ll see hundreds (perhaps thousands­­­­­­­—the pages just keep expanding) of colorful ideas for springtime everything: bunnies, door hangings (a great idea showed an umbrella hanging from a front door knocker with a terrifically colorful springtime floral display bursting up out of the inside of the umbrella)… Then, once you click on any image, you are taken to the creator’s page…and that’s likely to show hundreds of other ideas. A lot of them turn out to be commercial sites­, but those have often cooked up some of the most creative ideas.

In case you’ve never visited Pinterest, I’d like to apologize in advance to the amount of time it’s likely to devour. Still, when the weather turns foul, and you’re looking for ways to enhance your Highlands home, that’s probably a reasonable price to pay. I have a number of other resources if you are thinking of maximizing your property’s appeal for sale (or for you!). Give me a call anytime!

Snap Quiz: Sapphire Home Décor—by Decade!

11-26-quizFirst of all, a Spoiler Alert: It’s not fair to peek down where the answers are! Now that we’re clear on that, this is a quiz that will tell you how “Decade Sensitive” you are when it comes to Sapphire home décor. It took a little browsing around to put this together, but it sure was fun.

The idea is to match the décor item with the decade it is most closely associated with. Ready? GO!

A. Popcorn Ceilings
B. McMansions
C. Sherwood Green & Stratford Yellow
D. Stainless Steel Appliances
E. Shag Carpets
F. Sustainable Materials
G. Kitchen Islands

The 50s
The 60s
The 70s
The 80s
The 90s
The 2000s
NOW

Now that you’ve matched the items with the decade, you’ve probably noticed that there is a lot of ambiguity here, because Sapphire home décor themes didn’t just go in and out of style at the beginnings and ends of decades. The answers are combed from a variety of sources, but here is what the consensus (sort of) agrees on:

THE ANSWERS

The 50s: Answer-C. Sherwood Green and Stratford Yellow were first popularized for kitchen appliances during the postwar era. The 50s can be forgiven for these unnatural apparitions, which might have had something to do with the advent of vinyl flooring in the kitchen …

The 60s: Answer-A. Popcorn Ceilings – Thank you, The 60s, for giving us this innovation. They were popularized for conveying a “textured” look, adding insulation, and cutting down sound. We’ve been scraping them off ever since…

The 70s: Answer-E. Shag Carpets (of course!). Sometimes associated with the 60s, but unmistakably reaching peak popularity in the 70s, a “period when wall-to-wall carpeting was fairly new.” Its fluffy look and feel remained popular until The 90s, when it is said to have “faded into oblivion.” Hardly—it’s still causing vacuum cleaner jams in Sapphire homes with cool “vintage” décor.

The 80s: Answer-B. McMansions, aka “garage Mahal,” “starter castle,” and “Hummer home.” They may have been around since The 70s, but the term first appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1990. Even the wisecracking nickname couldn’t curb the irresistible advantages of the mass-produced luxury home. Unexpectedly, some of them turn out to have been quite well-built.

The 90s: Answer-G. Kitchen Islands. If you placed these in The 80s, you’ve got a good argument, because that’s the era when modern kitchen design really took off. In The 90s, though, the ‘island’ first took its place in the majority of new kitchens spacious enough to make it practical. They are still everywhere, so you’re forgiven if you put them in The 2000s or Now.

The 2000s: Answer-F. Sustainable Materials. Even defining “sustainability” can get you into an argument (it could be salvaged wood countertops; might be granite), but the Green movement that took off in The 60s began to get serious government support in the New Millennium.

NOW: Answer-D. Stainless Steel Appliances. You can’t get away from them: today’s prospective Sapphire home shopper is finding glistening stainless steel refrigerator and oven doors in kitchens all over the place. This finish may have been around for more than a decade, but is NOW available at so many price points it’s hard to think of a single décor item that is as widespread—or one that’s more likely to stay popular long into the future.

With or without the stainless steel appliances, if yours is one of the Sapphire homes that will be listing this winter, do give me a call!