Curate Your Spaces

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Dear friends,

If you’ve been participating in some of the January Money Diet exercises like giving away 31 things and decluttering your home’s “hot spot,” perhaps you’ve been enjoying the peaceful calm of open spaces.

This weekend’s challenge is to work

with what you have, and make one (or more) of your spaces pleasing to your eye.

Decorate Like the Rich

With few exceptions, most of the rooms featured in home design magazines are open and uncluttered. People with great taste can often afford to fill their homes full of stuff (and some do), but most tend to opt for rooms that lean toward simplicity and serenity.

I’ve been writing articles for interior design magazines for 15 years. Many of the top designers I talk to invest in clean-lined, classic furniture of good quality and scale, appropriate for the size of the room.

They help their clients accessorize sparingly. With just a few well-chosen pieces, spaces look elegant and streamlined.

Here’s an example from the January 2017 issue of Western Art & Architecture magazine, featuring a lovely dining room designed by Nina Magon, founder and creative director of Contour Interior Design:

 

Simple dining room

The table and chairs are classic and clean-lined, and the designer kept the accents simple with fresh flowers and two metal vessels. The room is open and spare, with plenty of space around the furniture.

Simplicity Adds Appeal

If you’ve ever browsed home listings on real estate websites, you may have noticed that the homes that are uncluttered look larger and more appealing. Cluttered spaces, on the other hand, can seem small and cramped.

Professional stagers are sometimes hired to declutter and spruce up spaces of homes for sale. The result? Realtors say that buyers offer a 1 to 5 percent increase on the value of a staged home.

The good news is that we can emulate this look in our own homes. We can edit our belongings. We can resist the urge to fill every surface of our homes with stuff.

Uncluttered rooms are also easier to clean, which will give us more time to relax and enjoy our homes.

January Is Winding Down…

As we wean ourselves off the January Money Diet, we’ll be confronted with shopping temptations. We will need to be strong!

Let’s visualize our homes as beautiful, simple and peaceful when we are tempted to buy a singing wall-mounted bass (speaking for myself) or gyro snack bowls or Brookstone TV remote pillows.

If you do any streamlining or editing of your stuff, or complete any of the other challenges, we’d love to hear your experiences in the Comments section of this post or over at the Money Diet Community Facebook Group.

Remember, you can win one of the $250 in total prizes by participating, thanks to our generous sponsor YourMoneyFurther.com and the Open Your Eyes to a Credit Union Campaign. (Click here for the Official Rules.)

Best always,

Signature for Eliza Cross

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