Resources for Decorating and Remodeling

By Elizabeth Wasserman

There's a reason for the popularity of home renovation TV shows such as "This Old House" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." The American dream revolves around owning your own home. But not everyone can hire contractors to install a dream kitchen, add closet space, or upgrade the house with an entirely new d‚cor. That's why the do-it-yourself (DIY) craze started and continues to thrive thanks to the many resources available on the web.

"We have a lot more interior design options these days. You are not limited to the neighborhood furniture store," says Janet Ramin of the Sheffield School of Interior Design, located in New York City, which runs a web site with design tips. "You can order things from across the country like flooring, tile and window treatments."

Whether you are looking for a new color scheme and selecting the right lighting, or you need step-by-step instruction on how to retile your bathroom floor or hang wallpaper, the Internet is the place to start. Here's how:

Step No. 1: Discover your inner style  The first step in any interior decorating project is to come up with a design plan. Do you want the living room to go from a 1980s motif to modern sleek? Or should the bathroom get a redo by adding new Zen style his-and-her sinks? The web offers a variety of interactive quizzes to help determine your style. For instance, WAVERLY offers a "lifestyle quiz" to help you determine whether your style is modern, traditional, classic or vintage. The site also provides decorating tips, suggestions on how to mix and match prints and a color quiz. At HGTV, a photo gallery of 1,400 rooms created by top designers can also provide decorating ideas and inspiration.

Step No. 2: Pick your color palate  Color is one of the keystones of any home design project. House Beautiful magazine's Paint Brush tool allows you to select paint colors and applies them to a variety of rooms: bathroom, bedroom, living room, family room and foyer. Many paint manufacturers now offer a similar feature. Behr's ColorSmart tool let's DIYers see how paint colors would look in sample rooms, but for $4.95 a year it's possible to upload photos of your real home to get an idea of how different Behr paints would look on your own walls. Benjamin Moore offers a similar tool, Personal Color Viewer, and for $10 you can order a CD-Rom of digital photos of your home's rooms "painted" with sample colors. Sherwin Williams' Color Visualizer allows you to see for free how interior or exterior paints look on a variety of stock house photos.

Step No. 3: Get a tutorial   The Internet has become the place to turn to for step-by-step instructions on how to make your redesign or remodel work, from concept to execution. Several web sites now provide tutorials with either printable instructions or online videos that provide pro tips on everything from hanging wallpaper to installing kitchen cabinets. The Home Depot offers printable guides to dozens of home improvement projects, from replacing cabinet hinges and knobs to installing ceramic tile in your bathroom. The site also has online videos for those interested in undertaking such projects as installing garage doors or creating a fountain out of an old flower pot. Lowe's Home Improvement features an assortment of interactive tools to help you redesign closets, add crown moulding or chair-rail to a room, or to calculate how much tile you would need for a room's floor. Lowe's also offers a click-on library of how-to projects with instructions on everything from how to lay a wood floor, install a new faucet to tile a backsplash.

Using the Internet to find your style and get instructions is the easy part. The challenge comes next when it's time to roll up your sleeves and complete the project. But as many DIYers will tell you, there's no greater reward than doing it yourself.