Hi everyone!

As of a few days ago, Nick and I are now the happy owners of a cute two bedroom home. And we only paid.... *glances around* $300! Can you believe it? Anyhow, back to my point. Any ideas for decorating? Nick says I get to do whatever I want with it and, well... I'm a little stumped. I have a vague idea about what I want to do paintwise.

I'm thinking dark peacock blue green and black for the master bedroom, dark eggplant and maybe cream for the kitchen, maybe a darker magenta for the smaller bedroom. Oh, and dark green for the living room. How does an absinthe or charteuse sound and black for the bathrooms? Too bright?

I have a decent budget and almost nothing to put in the house. Any art or decor suggestions would be wonderful.

It is always fun to decorate a new house. I can only say go with what you like as you are the one who has to see it everyday. The house should be an outside extension of you so having fun with it can be exciting. I know with my dad's house (I'm his caregiver) I have slowly been turning his kitchen into a Buddhist paradise. It's all about what you like, I guess.

Good luck!

I really love dark walls, but unfortunately, they have a tendency to make rooms feel smaller if not done right. My bedroom is the attic of a small, one-bedroom house --and the windows are East-West facing. This landed me in a situation: I really wanted a bright, albeit on the darker side, purple, but doing the whole room in that shade would've just made it feel smaller, so I decided to split it up with a wisteria-lavender --and to avoid making the room feel like a corridor, the lighter colour went on the bigger walls and ceiling, and the darker colour went on the smaller walls. It feels bigger than it is this way, and after I finished painting, my house-mate (who's 6'4" --I got this room cos I'm only 4'11½", and the ceiling is about at 5'10" at the peak), my house-mate forgot how short the ceiling went, and ended up with a knot on his head for a few days. At first, I thought of doing the colours in the other way around, thinking that more of the lighter colour would make the room feel longer and (with the darker colours in the smaller walls) narrower than it is, but it really seemed to have the opposite effect --and I don't remember what made me finally go with the arrangement that I did. I'm now convinced that how you paint and what colours make a huge difference in the feel of the room.

So for advice, depending on how small the rooms are, I wouldn't suggest dark colours for the walls, at least not if all walls in the room are to be a uniform colour. Blacks and aubergines make for great accents or for very small walls --in the latter situation, the lighter colours seem to make very dark colours "pop" and the illusion created with proper execution, as with, say, my attic, is almost a dome-like feel.

Even though the house is a rental, we plan on staying here long-term and I've actually been given permission to do whatever decorating I want, especially with the garden, and the only rule is not to paint over the natural wood on the ground floor --which I wouldn't've done, anyway, since it's gorgeous. Since the household budget is limited, the décor has been building slowly, but my next step is to finish the bathroom, and then on to the kitchen. The lounge is going to require all new furniture, so that's saved for last, but I have a perfect mental image of what to do with it.

I've heard about this and it really makes sense.

If you are good in drawing, you can draw in your walls (I'm planning to do this), otherwise, you can simply find some wallpaper to put in the walls (but I think it's hard to find, in the chinese stores near me, the cow pattern makes success XD)

Other thing that, in my opinion makes a good decoration, are those things where we put the candles (I don't know the name of it --"), the big ones. One day I saw one that looked like a torch with a skeleton hand holding it. I was, like -> I-WANT-ONE! XD because I love that stuff. Unfortunately, it was too expensive for my pocket =/

Dried flowers are also great. Sometimes, when me and my mom go on a walk, we just pick some flowers and dryed them. We own a lot of these:

http://user.img.todaoferta.uol.com.br/J ... hoto_0.jpg

Here, we call them "fox tails", don't know the name that you give them, but they grow a lot, near us, and they are really fluffy

Another thing very good to use in decoration are skulls. When I went to Gandia (Spain) on March, with my friends, we went into a store that sells decoration stuff. One of my best friends called my name and when I reached him, he showed me a skull with a rose and a dagger, it was so beautiful and it wasn't expensive. But I don't buy it because I was afraid (and with reason) that it could break in my way home (the bus drivers kicked our bags inside the bus, literaly).

And last, I'm a big fan of posters (don't mock, here is almost impossible to find another things). My favourite one is a Nightmare Before Christmas poster, similar to this:

http://magicalmoviereviews.files.wordpr ... 1/nbx5.jpg

But just the image and say "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas". It's really big

Anyway, this is my opinion but I hope it helped (not in the paint-walls issue, but in the decoration XD)