Tip #1. Choose a color scheme from the largest pattern in the space.
If you’ve got patterned upholstery, an Oriental rug or large piece of artwork, pluck colors you like from the pattern. For a neutral wall paint color, look to the pattern’s whites and beiges.

Tip #2. Start with the formal areas of the house.
Specifically, the living room, dining room and entry way. Choose a color scheme for those areas first, then pull one color from the scheme. For example, take the red sofa and tone it down (say, to burgundy) for an accent in more private spaces such as the den, office or bedroom.

Tip #3. Decorate your space from dark to light, vertically.
A real “cookbook” way to make any space look good without much risk, McCauley says, is to use darker color values for the floor, medium color values for the walls and light values for the ceiling.

“Any interior space replicates the outside world,” he says. “The exterior environment is generally darker below our feet (the earth itself), medium-valued as you look straight ahead (buildings/trees) and lighter values skyward.”

Tip #4. Study the color of your clothes.
Most people buy clothes in colors they like to wear and think they look good in. Similarly, you should decorate your rooms in colors you look good in. “If you don’t wear yellow, don’t get a yellow sofa,” McCauley says. “You’re going to look sickly on it.”

Tip #5. Use the color wheel.
In general, analogous color schemes — colors next to each other on the color wheel, such as blue and green — are more casual and relaxing, and work best in informal or private spaces. This is a good strategy for a bedroom, where you want to rest and recover.

Whatever color scheme you choose, McCauley advises to put something black in every room. “The black clarifies all the rest of the colors in the room,” he says. Try a black lampshade, a black vase or a black picture frame.

Tip #6. Use the rule of 60-30-10.
“When decorating a space, divide the colors in the space into components of 60 percent of a dominant color, 30 percent of a secondary color and 10 percent of an accent color,” McCauley says. The walls will most likely be the majority, the upholstery would represent the secondary color and accessories such as a floral arrangement or throw pillows would make up the rest. “Works every time!” he says. “The colors are properly balanced and there is a shot of color (the 10 percent color) for interest.”

Tip #7. Go with the architecture.
If you have a small room in your house, don’t paint it white to make it seem bigger. Instead, cozy up to its architecture with a rich, warm color scheme. Let your big rooms expand with light, and your small rooms wrap you up and nurture you.

Tip #8. Follow your personal style.
If you decorate honestly, other people will appreciate it because it’s you, even if they’d never decorate their own house in the same way. That means if you want to make every room in your house red, white and blue, go for it. You can make any color look good as long as it’s your taste.

Photo: Thinkstock

You don’t have to be underwater on your mortgage to feel trapped in your home.

Now may be a less than ideal time to put a house on the market or to take on big debt — icing your plans to trade up or build an addition anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck living in an uncomfortable home.

For a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, you can make your place “live” bigger without actually making it bigger, says architect Sarah Susanka, a small-space specialist and author of “Not So Big Remodeling.”

Call it thinking inside the box; here are nine creative solutions for cramped homes.

1. Multitask the dining room …

Cost: $500 to $2,000

If you have an eat-in kitchen, your dining room is probably used for special occasions only.

“Why have a prime spot sit vacant except for two or three holidays a year?” says Susanka.

Use it every day as an office or homework room without giving up dinner-party capabilities. Install doors ($300 to $500 each, with labor); add shelves or a cabinet for supplies; and invest in fitted pads to protect the tabletop.

For more flexibility, try a table like homedecorator.com’s $629 Mission Table Cabinet, a sideboard that — amazingly — telescopes into a full-size dining table.

2. … and the guest room

Cost: $100 to $3,000

Stop dedicating a whole room to infrequent out-of-town visitors.

With a decent air mattress, futon, or pull-out couch, you can lose the spare bed and use the room for day-to-day needs. (If you go with an air mattress, make sure to choose one with a built-in reversible motor to simplify the inflating and deflating.)

Add furniture, and what was only a guest room can double as a media or game room or home office.

3. Add a powder room

Cost: $3,000 to $6,000

Adding a first-floor powder room is simple if you have an unfinished basement or crawlspace for running the new pipes. Look for an existing room — a coat closet, say — and you won’t have to build walls.

To save more, forgo the tile. The minimum space required by code is typically 2½ by 4½ feet, but you can often get an exemption to go even smaller.

4. Build a home office closet

Cost: $100 to $3,000

If your family is already bursting the seams of your abode, a home office might seem out of the question. But every household needs at least a small desk for paying bills and to anchor a wireless Internet system — and you can often fit it all in a closet or armoire.

At its simplest, all you need are five or six deep, sturdy shelves made from wood or a composite product, which can total less than $40 at a home center. In a closet, set the lowest shelf at 30 inches high so you can wheel up a chair.

5. Bring the laundry upstairs

Cost: $5,000 to $7,000

Hiking up and down the stairs with laundry is enough to make anyone wish she could trade up. Instead, just move the machines.

Today’s full-size high-efficiency washers and dryers are all designed to stack. You can steal the space — a little more than four square feet — from a closet, hallway, or nook.

You’ll need to run new pipes and wiring, so being near an existing bathroom helps keep costs down, says Raleigh, N.C., architect Tina Govan. Make sure to include a drain pan to collect overflows or spills.

6. Open the floor plan

Cost: $2,000 to $4,000

A choppy layout of undersize rooms can make any house feel claustrophobic.

“People like the look of older homes, but not the way they function,” says Seattle architect Thomas Lawrence.

To open your floor plan without major expense, remove doors from rooms that don’t need them. Interior walls can come out for $2,000 to $4,000, unless they support the building or contain pipes — in which case a window or pass-through may be a more feasible solution.

7. Use built-ins to replace a closet

Cost: $4,500 to $6,000

If you choose to eliminate a closet to expand or enhance your living space, create some built-ins to get back the lost storage. A run of four- to 10-inch-deep shelving along a wall has almost no effect on the size of a room, says Corvallis, Ore., architect Lori Stephens.

And it can handle many times the capacity of a closet. You might spend $4,000 removing the closet and another $2,000 on new built-in cabinetry, or just $500 if you use assemble-it-yourself home-center cabinetry, such as the Billy collection from Ikea.

8. Build a bump-out

Cost: $6,000 to $12,000

Another trick to expand a home without a full-blown addition is called a bump-out. You hang extra space off the side of the house, sort of like an oversize bay window.

Structurally, it can’t extend more than about three feet from the existing exterior wall, but it can run nearly the whole length of the building — enough space to add an eating area to your kitchen or a closet to your master bedroom suite.

Because there’s no foundation work, a bump-out costs about $150 a square foot — or just $100 if you can tuck it under an existing roof overhang.

9. Finish non-living spaces

Cost: $15,000 to $30,000

Converting a full-height basement or garage into living space gets you an addition at half price. You’ll need a floor, ceiling, walls and more, but no structural work, no foundation, and no roof, so it’ll cost $50 to $100 a square foot — vs. about $200 for a true addition.

Attics are fair game, too, but more complicated because you may need to add a stairway and probably extend the plumbing, heating, and cooling systems a flight up. Doing all that brings the cost to around $150 a square foot.

Wine Crate Display Cases!

Here is what you will need to complete this project:
Metal ruler
Crate
Gift wrap or other fancy paper
Pencil
X-acto blade
Bone folder
Spray adhesive
Sawtooth hanger
Hammer
Small nails
Rubber bumpers
Hanging hardware

Wine Crate Display Cases!

First, use a metal ruler to measure the interiors of each crate to make sure you have enough fancy paper to line all of them. Next, draw out the measurements in pencil on the backside of the paper. In order to avoid any potential gaps along the interior edges, add a 1″ “allowance” as follows:

Long pieces: add 1″ to each of the three sides that border the interior of the box.
Short pieces: add 1″ allowance to the side that borders the back of the box.
Back piece: no allowance necessary

Using a straight edge and an X-acto blade, carefully cut out each piece of paper (five per box). Create fold lines by scoring along your pencil marks with a bone folder. Finally, miter each of the interior corners by cutting a 45 degree angle from the outside edge in, along the 1””allowance.

Now it’s time to glue. In a well-ventilated area, apply spray adhesive to the back sides of each of your long pieces. Carefully place them carefully inside the box, lining up the folded edges with the edges of the box and smoothing out any air bubbles that may appear in the paper. Next, spray and apply the short pieces. At this point, all four sides of the box will be lined, and the back will have a 1″ border all the way around it. The last step is to spray and apply the back piece to the box. Smooth out bubbles and let dry completely before proceeding to the next step.

Decide which direction you want to hang your boxes, and attach a sawtooth hanger along the top edge of each box using a hammer and small nails. Apply peel-and-stick rubber bumpers along the bottom corners of each box, to ensure that they hang straight against the wall.

Mark the position of each box on the wall with a pencil, and attach them using the appropriate hanging hardware for your wall.

Thank you Design Sponge for the inspiration!

Materials and Tools:

bucket
bleach
sponges
laundry detergent
rubber gloves
level
tape measure
grout floats
putty knife
wide trowel
toothed trowel
wet saw or tile cutter
safety glasses
grout
tiles
pre-mixed tile adhesive
caulk and caulking gun
grout sealer
paintbrush

Steps:

1. Clean the surface thoroughly first to remove all grease and residue. Mix together 1/4-cup laundry powder, 1/2-cup bleach and one gallon of water and scrub the wall with a sponge. Wear rubber gloves when scrubbing.

2. Use a putty knife to scrape off stubborn, built-up grease stains

3. Measure the length of the wall and mark the midpoint.

4. Dry-fit the tiles, starting in the middle to get an idea of how things will fit. If you’re fitting tiles in below a window, bring tiles up to the bottom of the window. Use a level to extend the window line along the wall.

5. Since the row just below the window will be made up of full tiles, measure the remaining space to the counter to determine how wide to cut the tiles.

6. Put on safety glasses and cut smaller tiles using a wet saw.

7. Spread grout along a section of the wall using a wide trowel. Go back over the grout with a toothed trowel to smooth everything out.

8. Start sticking tiles to the wall. Press and twist just a bit to set each tile in the adhesive. Stagger the tiles to make the pattern more interesting.

9. Once the last piece is in place let the adhesive cure overnight. Come back the next day for a grout party.

10. Apply the grout with a rubber grout float. Hold the float at an angle and force grout into the joints.

11. Don’t worry about smearing grout all over the tiles. Come back with a clean grout float and sponge and remove as much as you can.

12. Once all the joints are nice and full of grout, use a damp sponge to remove any remaining grout from the surface of the tiles.

13. Let the grout dry and polish tiles with clean, soft cloth to buff away any remaining haze.

14. Rub a damp sponge along the grout lines for the next few days so the grout cures properly. Also run a bead of caulk along the bottom and top of the tile backsplash.

15. After another week or so, paint the joints with grout sealer.

For the little kid in all of us:

Touch of whimsy

For the Eco Conscious:

Made from recycled paper

For the bookworm:

Total of 800 books!

For the Minimalist:

So chic and simple!

For the Foodie:

Creative use of silverware!

For the Builder:

Creative use of a ladder!

For the practical:

Wall decal + art, no fuss to remove!

Birch Tigerwood

Ash Tigerwood

Almond Tigerwood

Black Tigerwood

Birch Tigerwood Installation

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