Our bedroom has been undergoing a minor transition over the last few years.
About the time we got married, I had the most beautiful cream bedspread with a southwestern-style design in navy and gold. It was gorgeous, and we loved it.
When we remodeled our bedroom, we positioned our bed in front of an accent wall painted a very dark, dark navy color called “Starry Night”. I probably have a picture of it somewhere, but that would require me to get up, go to the basement and do some digging. And I just ate lunch and am lazy. 😉
That was before all the dogs who found me just happened to be black.
So needless to say, the life span of that bedspread wasn’t as long as I would have liked, which necessitated a change. Because we liked the blue wall (we aren’t really ‘blue’ people, but it was a really pretty color), I looked for something that would go with the blue and the rustic feel of our house.
Enter the bedspread in the above picture. We enjoyed it, but then I began to get restless. Call it a career hazard.
“Starry Night” had run its course, and it was time for a change. So I painted the wall behind my bed “Garden Sage”. We loved the green wall, but the room lost it’s WOW Factor. Tired of the moose (meese?) bedspread, I wanted a plain one with no design. And so, the one in the picture above adjourned to our RV for the rest of its useful life.
Remember the term ‘focal point’? How you want one object in the room to be the ‘focus’ of the room? That’s the item you want your eye to go to when you walk in.
Well, WOW Factor ramps it up just a bit. The Oxford Dictionary defines Wow Factor as “a quality or feature that is extremely impressive.”
It doesn’t have to be fabulously expensive. It just has to be fabulous!
Your Wow Factor can be anything.
Maybe it’s a really fabulous painting or photograph on canvas. It can be the colors or the size that give it its Wow.
My friend John is a photographer who specializes in large canvas prints. If you visited Kirksville’s Red Barn Arts and Crafts Fair last fall, you may have seen his booth or met him and his charming wife Bonnie.
I ordered this canvas from him custom-sized just to fit my space. The crispness of the colors and the contrast take my breath away and make me feel like I’m standing in that field.
Our bedroom has its WOW back!
There are lots of things you can do to give your room WOW Factor.
A simple accent can do it. And paint is relatively cheap! This is a picture of my friend Beth’s living room from a previous post. Is that wall awesome or what? It’s Behr’s “Wine Tasting”.
Or a fireplace. Here are a couple that I’m very familiar with. One was originally brick and has been recently refaced. (Ahem.) 😉
And here is one made of cultured stone. Probably more cultured than the people who live here. 😉
A large window with a spectacular view.
Beautiful cabinetry or a piece of furniture accented with a paint color that makes it POP!
I have it on good authority that a number of people thought my friend Beth also got all-new cabinetry, simply because they’d never noticed them before.
Perhaps it’s a really unusual mirror or some other wall decor.
Did you see me waving in the mirror? 😀
There was no way I could contort myself out of the picture, so I decided to just flagrantly be in it.
WOW Factor makes your room look complete. And, the rest of your decor in that room become accents that harmonize with it.
It’s especially important if you’re thinking of selling your home. If there’s nothing in a room that stands out, buyers may view the room as being just sort of…blah. And thus, there isn’t really anything that stands out about the house.
You want buyers to remember your house and how they felt in it after they’ve looked at 12 different ones and they all start to run together. And to remember it in a good way.
The rooms should be decluttered,clean, balanced and neutral, and each room should have a WOW Factor. (Not all WOW Factors need to be over-the-top. Sometimes all you need is a really nice clock. Or a beautiful wall paint. Or maybe wainscoting.)
This is our guest room just off the Black Dog Saloon (AKA our basement.) The wainscoting in here is rusty tin which came from an old barn where my parents’ house was on the farm. And amazingly enough, I found a rusty metal clock to go with it. WOW. I’m still not completely happy with this room, but that’s another post for another day.
And just in case you were wondering, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. That bed really is low. It’s an air mattress, as we don’t yet have a guest room bed. I told you my house wasn’t perfect! 😀
Staging is taking what you have and making it look nice in the space!
If you have a room that feels like it’s missing something, try to take a look at it as objectively as possible. Or have a friend look at it for you. After all, it is really hard to see things when it’s your own house.
Trust me, I know. When you walk by something often enough, it’s easy to simply not see it any more.
Maybe all your room needs some WOW! 🙂
