Who doesn’t dream of those picture-perfect living rooms, the calm and cozy bedrooms, a very trim but efficient kitchen? When it comes to minimalist interior design concepts, nothing beats the Scandinavian aesthetics.
Scandinavian design is not new, having been coined in the 1950s. Its popularity, however, was further spread around the world when decluttering became a trend once more, and the KonMari method was becoming a buzzword in households.
Scandinavian design is a lot about natural light, nature, and zero clutter in the home. While you couldn’t scrimp in opening up walls or replacing your floor with wooden boards, you could save on other things.
Selling the stuff that you don’t need
As the cliché goes, go for hitting two birds with one stone. You will get rid of the unnecessary clutter in your home and earn some funds you could use for your designing needs.
When you declutter your house, do it systematically to accomplish it fast. Sometimes, people decide on what stuff they want to remove or keep on a whim. With this, you’re likely to keep more than what you need. Although you don’t have to follow the KonMari way, which relies more on your feelings than the rational functions of the surrounding things, you could follow the process. For all the things in your home, think if it still works for you or you’re just keeping it in the hopes that there will be an instance in the future when you will need it.
Scandinavian design prefers clean lines to intricately designed furniture. But if you have a couch framed by an elaborate carving characteristic of the Victorian era and handed down from your forefathers, please hold on to it. It could be the talking piece that your minimalist space needs.
Repainting on your own
Painting your walls has several DIY helps online, and they include tips on how to make your strokes smooth and clean. Non-professionals can do the painting, but it takes a lot of patience and fortitude, especially if it would be your first time doing it.
Learn about the layers you would need to apply on your walls. You would first have to peel off the current paint you have to make your work even. At the very basic, your wall would need a primer and at least two good coats of paint.
Using wood scraps from a lumberyard
Scandinavian design has an affinity for natural material. This is one of its distinctive characteristics from the general minimalist trend. Where minimalism could go for steel and glass industrial looks, Scandinavian interiors prefer eco-friendly materials.
For wood, you can look for scraps in a lumberyard. Many interior designers have utilized the beauty of imperfect slabs of wood. You could use these as suspended shelves on the wall to display your books or one or two clay pots. Uneven and unpolished lumber could also be used as simple side tables. You could even do the wood treatment on your own, so you could purchase cheaper wood.
Scouring thrift shops and revamping old furniture
It’s understandable if you want something different from what you had owned. But you don’t need to go to expensive furniture shops. The good thing with a Scandinavian design is it mixes and matches modern and old antiques with new furniture. In fact, you don’t really need to buy new stuff since you could simply revamp what you used to have.
If you have a dining set you wish to replace because one or two chairs have been broken, then simply replace the broken chairs. You don’t need to discard the entire set. If you want to discard your current pots because they don’t match and want to buy a set in exchange, don’t waste your money. Repaint your points so that they would at least have the same color. It would pull together the look, and at the same time, their differences would give it an eccentric effect.
You also might want to discard some stools or chairs, probably because of their torn seats. Remove the upholstery and replace the seats with smoothed slabs of wood. There are several ways of restyling your old worn down furniture.
The essence of this design trend is to have an efficient, minimal environment so that you could live your life uncluttered and free. Half of the redesigning initiative should be to free yourself of that material baggage. The other half of it should be about unleashing your creativity, thinking about how you could upscale the things you have been taking for granted. Scandinavian design is about the sustainability and longevity of our home interiors. It is not about feeding our consumerist needs.