When the weather outside is frightful, and in some places temperatures drop down to dangerous lows, the winter months are a great season to spend some extra downtime just hanging out and relaxing around the house.
In fact, with so much indoor time to spend, it might even be the perfect time in your life for a few do-it-yourself style home improvement projects.
Sure, improving and designing interior spaces can certainly be a daunting and difficult task...
but it doesn't HAVE to be as bad as you think! We consulted with a few of our interior design school experts and got some fun and fairly simple tips for cozy home improvement projects to spend time on while you're locked inside your house during this crazy-weather winter...
One great way to achieve a cozy feel inside a room or a house (ESPECIALLY within a DIY interior design effort) is by mixing and matching different design elements.
Many interior design school students and professional decorators alike will affirm that mixing and matching often creates a sort of artfully cluttered, cottage-like feel in an interior space.
Of course, depending on one's individual taste, there are many different style elements in a room to mix and match.
However we have collected a few popular ideas to get the ball rolling anyway.
Try selecting different prints for any cloth elements in the room and throwing them all together.
For instance pick one print for the curtains or blinds, another for an area rug, and perhaps another for a tablecloth or blanket.
Don't shy away from bold, noticeable colors or prints EVEN IF you think they absolutely won't match.
Another great example straight out of interior design schools is to mix and match your kitchen-ware.
Instead of all-matching sets of silverware and dishes, get thrifty and collect different stuff from all sorts of different places.
Use mason jars as cups, oversized mugs as bowls, and if a fork or spoon in your silverware drawer gets slightly bent out of shape, who cares? It will only add even more character to your cozy kitchen! For even more coziness inside your home, try tapping into some classic winter design elements and incorporate them as decorative accents.
For instance, many people often connect the winter season with dark, knotted wood, probably because the wood reminds them of log cabins and snow.
One simple ideas is just to add in some nice wood wherever it can go.
Perhaps you are looking to replace an end table or a coffee table? Choose a sturdy, dark wood table and voila! And for the simplest, coziest wood trick in the book, just grab some logs from outside, toss them into your fireplace and spruce up the room with a hot, strong-burning and irresistibly cozy fire! Another classic winter design element is the simplicity of white.
Even if you hadn't been dreaming of a white Christmas, interior design school experts still encourage you to incorporate white into your winter-inspired interior decorating experiments.
White is a great interior design element many different ways.
It matches every other color.
It attracts light, and makes rooms appear bigger and more open, and its simplicity is clean, simple and super cozy.
Whether you re-paint a room with fresh white (off-white works too), or maybe just sew a new, white comforter or duvet cover for your bed, this classic winter color will only up your coziness factor at home.
Cozy can mean different things to different people.
Luckily, there are infinite winter-inspired interior design project ideas to choose from.
Find YOUR version of cozy and improve YOUR home today!