Five Things to Look for in a New Rug to Improve Your Home Decor

Raising children requires mothers to be home much of the time. While the spouse is away at work, homemakers do the work of maintaining the house, couponing to keep expenses under control, and nowadays many run their own blogs. But being around the house all day, they see the same four walls all day. While at one point they loved the decor they designed the rooms in, seeing the same thing everyday can get very boring. They may need a change.

One of the easiest things you can change about your home decor is the rug. If you do not have one, buying one can really bring the character of the room to life. If you already have a rug in a room, trade it out for a different one; one you haven’t seen for the past several years. It will make you feel like you are living in a new house!

Focal Point

Start looking at your new rug by making it the focal point of your room. Use it as the centralizing theme in the room, whatever room you you put it in. Coordinate colors by matching them to the furniture and on the walls. The rug is more than an accessory. Use it to tie everything else in the room together into one beautiful space.

Think of your rug as floor art. You hang art on the walls, put pieces of art on shelves or as stand alone pieces. Choose a rug that is artful and stylish. Surround it with similar pieces to make it all blend together. Just be tasteful with the number of decorative items you add to your room. You don’t want to overdo it.

Size

The size of a rug is something to consider. Often, people will purchase a rug that is too small for the room. Your rug should encompass the entire seating area at the least. While it looks good to have all four legs of your furniture on the rug, don’t be afraid to let the back two hang over the edge. This actually gives the room the appearance of being larger than it really is.

While you can make a smaller rug work in many cases, be careful with doing so. Even if you pick out a rug that works well with your furniture and the rest of the decor in the room, the size of it may detract from the beauty of it. The eye tends to catch things that are out of place, and a tiny rug could be noticeable. Proceed with caution.

Shapes

Experiment with shapes. Nowhere does it say your rug has to be rectangular or round. Envision what your room would look like with an oval rug in the middle of it. What would the room look like with a hexagonal rug at its center? Curved rugs fit better with curving furniture while rooms with a lot of lines would do better with a linear rug. Also keep in mind the shape of your room. An elongated room would require an elongated rug; this is where that oval rug would be best suited. A rug that doesn’t flow with the room becomes obvious and distracting.

Color

If you are placing a rug into an existing decor-themed room, pick out a couple of the colors in the room and match them up. They do not have to be the exact shade but they do need to be close enough to look natural in the setting the rug is going in. Keep the pattern in mind also. Too elaborate a design and the rug will appear chaotic among the other elements in the room; too simple of a style and your rug becomes a blaring eyesore.

Layers

Did you ever think about using more than one rug in a room? Not many people do. You can create some wonderful effects by layering rugs. You can frame that small rug you liked by setting it on top of a larger one. You will even enhance the effect by leaving the right amount of existing flooring exposed on the edges, allowing the floor to border the rug.

Abstract rugs could work well laying on top of another rug. Keep in mind the overall appearance this will create. Do the textures compliment each other? Do the colors match what you are doing in the rest of the room? If not, does the clashing add to the room’s ambiance or does the combination just look ugly? Choose your rugs and the method you want to layer them in carefully.