Sometimes, the walls of our homes remain sadly ignored – bland and dull. We may buy expensive furniture and decorative pieces for our home, but the walls are usually kept empty. If your rooms are small and your home is limited, it is usually the walls you can count on.
Whatever the size of your home, you’ll always have four walls to accessorize and decorate. Even with all the doors and windows that the walls are built for, there is usually plenty of space on your walls. We tend to use our walls for lights and a few paintings, mostly, but there are many more ways to make your walls be the central focus of your home.
There are many ways to decorate your walls besides installing a few practical lights and hanging a few frames, and you might find some interesting ideas in this article.
- Hang Potted Plants
Potted plants are not only for your foyers and terraces, or simply for the floor; you can hang small pots in any of your rooms, including the dining room, the living room, your study or your bedrooms. Any room can be turned into a mini garden with just the right plants hanging from the walls. With plants, you won’t have to look for expensive paintings or wall hangings for your rooms; plants and flowers have a way to make your rooms more cheerful, fresh and beautiful, than anything else you can buy.
Hanging potted plants in your room requires proper taking care of. Most plant owners choose plants that don’t require a lot of sunlight or water; otherwise, you’ll have to take them out into the sun every day. Besides, indoor plants need to be sheared and kept short, because you don’t want an overgrown plant taking up your whole room.
- Construct a Wall-to-Wall Bookshelf
Besides plants, there’s nothing better than to decorate your walls with books. A traditional bookcase is perfect for your walls if you are an avid reader; readers who buy more books than they can read usually end up with more books than they can store. If this is you, a wall-to-wall traditional bookshelf is what you need in your house. It can take up a whole wall, or you can build your bookcase centered around a window, the television or a large painting.
On the other hand, if you only have a few books in your possession that you want to show, you might want to opt for a more modern mountable ledge-style bookshelf. They take up less space than a traditional bookshelf, and you can show off your paperbacks, hardcovers, and magazines on the same shelf, as well as photographs, memorabilia, and souvenirs.
- Make a Souvenir Wall
If you love to travel, you can allocate a wall entirely to your experiences. Every time you are someplace new and exotic, you can bring home a souvenir fit to place on the wall: a painting by a local artist, or a regional artwork, a charm, a wall hanging or a mask. If nothing, this wall could have photographs of you and your family, one for each of the countries or cities you have visited.
A souvenir wall or a wall that bears your holiday memories can be a great way to decorate one of the walls in your living room or your dining room, and the perfect icebreaker for your guests. You can start your day staring at this special wall to boost your energy, or use it to plan your next holiday.
- Choose Something Unique
Anything can bring special attention to your walls if you use it correctly. Something as ordinary as a ladder, an empty frame, a vintage poster, a colorful shawl, tennis or badminton racquets, a wreath, a bicycle, wood carvings, a skateboard or a surfboard, vintage phones – anything can look great on a wall if it matches or contrasts the color of the wall.
It might be tricky to get just the right prop for your home, and it is certainly a big risk. Whatever you choose might end up looking silly and wrong on your walls, or it might become the highlight of your home. It helps if you choose something that has a background or a story behind it because you are definitely going to get a few questions about it from guests and visitors.
- Use a Stencil to Create Something Special
This is something you can do on your own, with a stencil, a brush, a little paint and a day off from work. If you can choose the right color and stencil, even the simplest design can make your wall completely unique.
With stencils, there’s one thing you need to remember: it has to be a contrasting design. If you have a white or a beige wall, you need a paint that’s dark and vibrant, i.e. purple, navy or gold. In the same way, you can paint your whole wall in a dark shade and use white paint for designs on it. When the wall is beautiful, you won’t need to put anything on it to make it stand out; a mirror or a single painting would do!
- Hang Plates
Hanging plates on your wall isn’t a new practice; actually, people have been hanging colorful and designer plates on their walls since before 1930. At first, people hung plates to celebrate any change in their country’s monarchy or history; every time a new king or queen ascended the throne, married or had a child, the monarchy would manufacture plates for the public to buy for a reasonable price and hang on their walls. The tradition continued until the time of our grandparents and parents.
These days, too, hanging plates on your walls isn’t considered to be old-fashioned. Rather, it is a traditional look that can actually go very well with your modern décor. Colorful Turkish plates or plates made from broken tiles, plates of different shapes and sizes, colorful plates or white porcelain plates – you have a lot to choose from.
- Hang String Lights
String lights aren’t only for teenager’s bedrooms, but for anywhere around the house. You can hang string lights and fairy lights in your living room, den, study, bedroom, dining room or even in the kitchen. A simple blank wall can be turned completely magical if you hang a string of lights in it. Some of the lights are often bright enough to be used into a reading light; you can use a miniature clothespin to hang photos, small memorabilia, letters or jewelry to these string lights, just the wall into more than just a wall.
- Turn it into Storage
It’s not just cabinets and cupboards that are meant for storing your necessities, because you can also use your walls for storage. In the kitchen, you can use the walls to put up all the pans and pots you need regularly; in your bedroom, a few shelves or a grid can hold your books, jewelry, toiletries, makeup, and personal belongings. Grids are perfect for holding up anything you want to, and they can be quite helpful in your craft rooms, library, study or living room.
Even if you don’t want to spend a lot of storage, all you need to do is to drill a few nails on your wall and hang some store-bought shelves from them. Large or small, they can hold everything from souvenirs and decorative pieces to books and photographs.
- Hang Wall Baskets
Just like hanging plates, hanging baskets on your walls is a timeless décor idea. They are also extremely affordable and will give your walls a vintage, classic look. You can mix and match these baskets with other traditional décor pieces, i.e. a dreamcatcher, a framed shawl, hats, and potted plants, etc. If the colors and style all compliment each other, you’ll end up with a beautiful wall at a very reasonable cost.
- Arrange for Practicality
If this is a small wall in the middle of the house, you can put it to some practical use. A large chalkboard, a whiteboard, a magnetic board or a transparent board – these are only some of the things you can hang on your wall, for whenever you need to write something. You can use these boards to plan your meals, leave notes for the other members of your family, or divide the chores list for all the members of your family.
This idea is both practical and decorative, and if you are an artist, you can decorate it with doodles, designs, and art.
Your walls can stay bare, or they can be the most beautiful parts of your home. A beautifully decorated wall can become the highlight of your room, or it can become something practical and useful. The good news is that you get a lot of walls in your home, even when your home is a small one, and you can decorate them in any way that you want to.
