Kelly Edwards shares easy and fun Thanksgiving decorating ideas, and answers the design dilemma about painting a room black.
Kelly Edwards is the segment host and home decorating expert for Shelter Pop, and the author of the Design Cookbook. She’s a co-host and design coordinator for HGTV‘s “Design on a Dime” as well as STYLE Network’s “Tacky House.” And she’s sharing a few of her easy Thanksgiving decorating ideas with us.
Here is our interview with Kelly
Mark: You are back inside MyFixitUpLife with my wife, Theresa, for whom I am deeply thankful. I don’t say it enough throughout the year.
Theresa: Really?
Mark: Who does? I mean, I am thankful for you all the time and I under-do how thankful I am for you and all the things you do that you think I don’t notice and don’t understand because I am a knuckle-dragging guy.
Theresa: Awww. I appreciate you too, darling. I like spending this time together because I think of our radio show as our little date. Our date time.
Mark: It is our little date time, but it is also Thanksgiving time and that means tackling turkeys.
Theresa: Yeah, we’re getting ready for the holidays here at MyFixitUpLife. We have a design expert on the line, who has recipes for success for you when you have all of the guests coming to your house, you’re looking around your house and you’re like “Oh my goodness, what am I going to do? They’re going to be here in a half an hour.” Or “I only have a half hour to spend this week getting ready for my family. What do I do?” Kelly Edwards, how are you?
Kelly: I’m great and I love the holidays, my favorite time of the year.
Theresa: It is absolutely one of my favorite times of the year because it gives an excuse to just be creative and do all kinds of things at home that you just don’t normally do. There’s excuses with parties and excuses because of the season that you can just go crazy. I want to hear about… you’ve got five minute decorating tips in your book. Lay it out for us, help us, save us, so that we’re ready for our family coming over. What are some easy Thanksgiving decorating ideas?
Kelly: The one place I think you should always focus on is, obviously, your front door. That is, seriously, the first thing that everybody sees. If you have family coming over and you have five minutes to do a couple, getting to the nitty-gritty and get it all decorated, start with your front door. Put a big wreath on there. Go up in your attic, grab it and it’s going to make a big difference. Put a big red bow around it or something. You really want to make a statement as soon as your guests come over.
Of course, if you have a gorgeous staircase, it may take you a little bit longer than five minutes, but when people walk through the door, that too is one of the first things that they see is your staircase. I always say focus on your front door first, then your staircase, maybe wrap some garland or something around it. It doesn’t even have to say Christmas, it can say Thanksgiving, it can say anything, just some greenery, some branches, something to kind of dress it up, that’s definitely for me number one.
Another thing I always say too, people love to walk into homes that smell like the holidays. Seriously the holidays for me are a chance to eat myself silly and eat every dessert. I especially love when I walk into other people’s homes and it smells like they’ve been baking.
I have a trick for you that I did it on The Marie Osmond Show. Two things, one is if you have a chance to grab pine cones that smell amazing or light some great candles, do that. That’s imperative whenever guests come over. But one way to trick your guests and make them think you’ve been baking all day is you take a coffee mug, pick an old one, don’t pick a new one, put a couple drops of vanilla in it and then stick it in your oven for like 20 minutes. It’s an old realtor’s trick and your home, within 10 minutes, will smell like you’ve been baking freshly baked cookies. It’s amazing. Your house will smell like the holidays.
Theresa: I’m going to do that every day of the year. No joke, I love that trick.
Mark: Where is the nearest oven? So you said, put a vanilla ice cream cone in … okay, I got it.
Kelly: Exactly. All that you need is a little bit of that vanilla, that you bake with, and then just grab an old coffee mug. Put a couple of tablespoons in there. I actually like to put more. Stick it in your oven, 10 minutes later, your home will smell amazing. Let me tell you, that is the easiest way to make your home smell good for the holidays. It’s simply by putting that in the coffee mug and putting it in the oven. If you think about it, not a lot of people like smells. My mom gets headaches if she has too many really pungent smells when she walks into a place, so when she comes over, on the switch side of that, I just put that into the oven and then it smells awesome.
Mark: That’s fantastic. I want to take it, of course, because Theresa and I are husband and wife. We’re going to take it in a totally other direction. You bring up in The Design Cookbook, which is design like a celebrity, that’s what I want. I want to design like I’m Brad Pitt. Even though, I am not.
Kelly: In my book, honestly, designing like a celebrity, and it’s also a combination of five minute decorating, is really, a couple things is lighting. You really need to have fantastic lighting in your space. Even for the holidays when you’re entertaining and people are coming over, you want to make sure that you have ambient lighting. I’m talking about, like candles, chandeliers and sconces. I’m not, to be honest, a big fan of overhead can lights. I just feel like they are really sterile, especially when you’re having a dinner party. If you can avoid those, that’s the number one thing I would say.
One other way to make your home look great is use reflective material. That’s design for a celebrity and that’s also five minute decorating. That can be stuff like use a couple mirrors, grab some mercury glass, which is absolutely gorgeous, that put on your dining table or on your mantel. It’s just very reflecting especially if you have a candle near it, it looks even more festive. You want to focus on that.
The other thing too is great textiles. This is something that with cold weather coming, you want to have fur and all that great, cozy pillows and a throw on your sofa. You just want to make things look really comfortable even textures like plaids and great plaid blankets. All that stuff really is like designing like a celebrity. It just feels more luxurious. That’s really what you want.
Mark: That is just another excuse, Kelly Edwards, for me to get my kilt.
Theresa: How do you get kilt out of that?
Mark: I heard plaid, I went to Braveheart, like that.
Theresa: Really? I’m thinking about some kind of old movie screen actor, that whole glamour with the diamonds and the furs.
Mark: She said plaid.
Theresa: No, I’m thinking about the fur.
Mark: Oh, okay. (laughs)
Theresa: The fur and all of the reflection, the mirrors, the candles, I’m thinking romance.
Mark: I’ve got one for you and I’ve got one for you, Kelly. True or false, dark colors always make it, and I’m asking you your opinion, I’m not quizzing you. What’s your opinion on this, dark colors, true or false, always make the room feel small and you can only use them in big rooms?
Theresa: False.
Kelly: Totally false. False. That’s what everybody thinks. This is the deal, I have to be honest, I’ve painted almost all of my bathrooms in every place I’ve ever lived at, a really super dark gray, almost black. What happens is in a small room, when you paint it dark, it blurs the lines so sometimes with a white room, you can see where all the corners are. But with a dark room you actually can’t, so sometimes it actually makes it looks bigger.
The other thing is I always tell everybody, if you are planning on painting your room a dark color, always get appropriate lighting. Because truly what makes it look so dark is the fact that you don’t have great lighting in there. If you want to paint a bathroom, a very tiny powder room, dark, get some great sconces. It’s a matter of really having the appropriate lighting with the appropriate paint color.
Theresa: I love that you said that, because we are planning to renovate our bathroom and I’ve been thinking about going with a color like you described, but I was thinking it was going to be hard to convince my husband.
Mark: Are you kidding me? Paint it black right now.
Theresa: But now …
Mark: With black crown molding.
Theresa: Now that you’ve said that, I don’t have, we don’t have to do that husband-and-wife thing, going back and forth. Somebody else said it. So thank you, Kelly. You have liberated me in ways you can’t even imagine.
Mark: We have to liberate ourselves into a break.
Theresa: We have to go to break.
Mark: Check out KellyEdwardsInc.com and follow her on Twitter @KellyEdwardsInc. And follow us, because we’ll be back with more MyFixitUpLife.
Check out more easy holiday and Thanksgiving decorating ideas.
