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Home Interior Decoration

Straight-talking advice about planning and completing your interiors.

Sometimes it's almost impossible to see the wood for the trees. However much you try to focus on one particular aspect of design, it is all too easy to get bogged down with all the details.

It's all very well for trained interior designers to tackle a room, but what about us mere mortals who approach the task with a little fear and considerable trepidation?

There are so many sources of inspiration for colour schemes that just deciding on the theme can take some considerable time. But once you have taken that first tentative step, what are your priorities?

Planning is the key. You want to arrange an order of work for the room so that each task fits in logically with the next. Make a checklist of all the jobs that will need to done, allocate each an estimated time from start to finish, and then work out how you are going to co-ordinate all the different tasks.

Any structural changes have to be completed first. If the chimneybreast is coming out or you are removing a wall, get these jobs out of the way before you proceed any further. This would be the right time to get any rewiring done, or to sort out additional lights and sockets. Just think a little bit ahead if you can bear it. Would it also be worth having cabling for your house alarm or the wires for wallmounted speakers for the stereo system sunk into the wall? If you are going to have to replaster, then you may as well get everything done in one fell swoop.

Next, make a decision on your flooring and get the order in. If the supplier is not going to lay the floor, then you need to marry up the arrival of the flooring with a fitter. I would add a note of caution here: certain types of flooring need to acclimatise to the room in which they will be laid, so you may need to allow a period of time between the delivery of the flooring and the date that you book the fitter. It's much easier to bring fitters into a reasonably empty room than to have to shift out all the furniture or have them move it around while they work. It will cut down on stress levels if you can get the flooring in place before anything else that you have ordered arrives.

If you are going to have pieces of furniture upholstered in a specific fabric rather than buy them off the shop floor, then find out how long the job will take. You don't want to be left with a completed room and then have to sit on boxes for three weeks. Once you have worked out delivery dates (and try and get all the furniture delivered within a few days of each other) you can arrange to decorate the room. If you are going to use decorators make it very clear that you have a start and finish date in mind. All too often I hear of situations where the job is half finished but then workmen are called off to another site which is allegedly more pressing. It may be to someone else but it most certainly isn't to you. I can't stress enough how important it is that you make this clear. It causes so many problems when you have to try and drag people back to finish a job. It's much more relaxing for you to watch decorators work in a room without the finished floor, and it is much easier if you are doing the work yourself to function in a space where you are not worried about drips of paint or blobs of paste marking a new carpet - so ideally you should get this out of the way before the floor goes down.

Unless you are buying ready-made curtains or blinds you need to be aware of how long it will take for these items to be made up. And also be sure that they can be hung after all the decorating is completed. Painting window frames is much more straightforward when there is no fabric hanging in the way. Once you have chosen all the elements for your room and decided on which professionals you are going to use, do impress on them the importance of your own schedule. That way there can be no misunderstandings further down the line.

With the plans in place you should be able to relax and enjoy it as your scheme slowly comes together.

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