Transcription
I hear this all the time and especially ever since I started doing my one-day makeovers where I'm in and out of someone's home in a day. I don't know where to start. I don't know what's missing. And then I see the same living room over and over and over again. People have either a gray, beige, taupe, or brown sofa, mostly gray right now since that's what's been trending for the last 15, 16 years. A placeholder rug. Random pillows doing nothing, family photos standing in for art, and a big empty wall that nobody knows how to finish.
So, here's the truth. You're not actually bad at decorating. You're just totally overthinking it. Cuz decorating and styling the finishing of the room, it is less about having a fully formed style identity. It's more about making a few correct related decisions in the right order. And if you've been watching my one-day makeovers, you'll already have a sense of exactly how I do this for every living room. So today, I'm going to walk through five of the one-day makeovers that I did in 2025. I'll show you the before, the after. We'll talk about how long it took, how much it cost, because this part is always cheaper and simpler than people think. So, let's get started. [bell] >> [music] [music] >> Welcome back to my channel. I'm Maria Kllum and I've been decorating and styling and teaching homeowners and designers how to pick the right color for everything in your home for 25 years. And I want all of you to have a living room that you don't want to leave. So, I'm here to demystify the whole thing and just make it so much easier for you to have a designer living room without hiring a designer to get one.
If choosing color still takes you hours, you don't need more inspiration. You need a system. For 16 years, designers have been specifying black, white, gray, and cool tones. Now, beige is back. Undertones matter. And a lot of designers are feeling stuck and slow and second-guessing their choices. If you want to stop guessing, work faster, charge properly, and build real confidence as a color consultant, I'm teaching exactly how this is done inside my True Color Expert training. So, sign up for my free master class to see if it's right for you. I'll post the links below.
Okay, so here's the first living room. This one, standard gray sofa. We've got the furniture pushed up against the wall and no lamps. So, right away, I pulled out the sofa, added a lamp on both sides, and then she had just one piece of art. So, I took that piece of art. When we got to HomeSense, I just added art to it. We chose green as the accent color. So, then we repeated that green in the pillows and throws and the artwork. We weren't able to find a rug that had green in it on that day, but right away the new more creamy neutral rug that we chose actually calms down her black really busy coffee table. So, where before I didn't like it at all, I actually thought it worked really great at the end of the makeover. So, we arrived at HomeSense at 11:00 a.m. and we were finished at 4:00. Now, usually my makeovers do spill over into buying things for other rooms. So, we did work on her kitchen and adding and styled up her dining room as well. You can watch the full video makeovers. We're going to link those below. But today, we're just talking about living room so that you can get a sense, you can see the pattern that is happening over and over and over again. And also, this is the room we spend all our time in. So, let's get the living room right, shall we? Let's just focus on this room.
In this second makeover, we had a charcoal sofa, another neutral sofa, but the homeowner already had a fabulous colorful rug, so that got to stay. And then we just took the art straight to HomeSense and added more pieces to it to finish the wall and then brought in a couple of chairs that she really needed in order to make the living room look finished and a coffee table. So, in the end, the styling, the lamps just transformed this room. She said, "I can't believe this is the room I get to come home to every day." This living room was $1400. And in this case, the color was easy because it was already in the area rug. So, then adding in the yellow and the navy was easy to do and just made the room look so finished. But the rug created the inspiration for everything.
And here's the other thing that I want to give you some freedom around. So many people think that choosing a rug and some accessories and art to go with it is some big style declaration. Something I hear all the time from clients is, "Well, I don't really know what my style is, or I don't really know how to define what I have right now." And most homeowners stay stuck with a living room that looks super drab and unfinished because they think it needs a label first. French country, modern farmhouse, mid-century, transitional, and yes, designers do this beautifully in full and complete homes. But the problem is trends have blurred everything. Mid-century furniture has been trending for more than a decade. And there's a lot of pencil-legged dining room chairs in traditional homes where they don't actually work, but that's because it's been hard to find dining room chairs off the shelf that are traditional. So, people buy it by accident and then wonder why it doesn't look right in their traditional home. So, you don't need to name your style to decorate and finish your living room. You just need your pieces to relate to each other.
This third living room is a great example of a color scheme that was already set by the earthy fireplace. In this particular situation, you can't just throw in bright modern art with clean colors because it's going to clash with the existing earthy tones of the focal point stone fireplace, which is what we're looking at all day long. So, we found some art that coordinated with it. Some matching pillows, a fabulous faux fur blanket that we got to cover up the big oversized ottoman that doubled as a bed for their fabulous golden retriever. Just cleaned it right up and added another layer of warm browns to the room. This makeover took four and a half hours. We got there at 10:00. We were finished at 2:30. Oh, and one more thing. So many people because they don't know what to put on their big blank walls put shelving up and then on the shelves family photos. And that's because if you're waiting to name your style and you're waiting for some like magical day to come along when you find that piece of art that's going to mean something. Well, most people wait forever and end up with nothing on their walls. My goal is to take the significance out of choosing art that is beautiful. And I actually wrote a great post about that. I'm going to link that below. So that means all of that accessible art that is beautifully framed and so well priced that is available to you to make your home beautiful. So family photos belong in stairwells, hallways where you can actually see them up close. That is the key because when they're far away in a living room above a mantle or sitting on a shelf high in your living room, first of all, you can't even see them. And second of all, they don't make enough of a statement to be doing anything to create a look and a feel for your living room. Take them down and get some fabulous, inexpensive art and add some color to your world.
Number four, this living room had a taupe sofa and the homeowner had been on maternity leave for a year, staring at her blank walls. So, when she discovered me, she applied right away and we did a fabulous makeover on her living room. Now, this one we spent about $2400. We needed a new coffee table, a new upholstered chair with an end table. We actually bought two end tables that day for her. Lamps, all the art, and now we have beautiful artwork to look at when we're sitting in the living room and the fabulous rug.
So, just to recap, take your sofa cushion, bring it with you to the store when you're looking for a rug. You find something that matches that pulls the colors out, it's a no-brainer. Two, pull one or two colors from the rug for pillows. And notice pillows are less about decoration and more about connecting the accent color in the room. I have three styling school modules that I teach inside my community. You can join below. I'll show you how to create gallery walls that look as amazing as wallpaper. How to choose the right lamps for your house and how to add pillows to your sofa. Nobody ever has the right pillows. The pillows alone bring that sofa from looking drab and sad and make it look super happy. That is the goal. So, you can find my styling school below.
Living room number five. This was the one that actually kicked off the rebranding of my YouTube channel. Now, I'm calling it decorate or renovate because what I'm teaching is maybe not every single bathroom or kitchen needs a complete gut job. Maybe what we need is some creativity. Maybe what we need is to get our budget in the right order. And decorating this living room brought way more joy to the homeowner for $2,400 than the $7,000 that it would have cost to paint her kitchen. So painting and renovating can come later. If there's one room that most people will hire a designer to finish, it's the living room. So if that's not something you're doing, well, I'm showing you here how to do it.
So this is a very important point that I want you to hear. So many people do nothing with the decorating and finishing of their home because they're constantly thinking, "Well, I'm going to move or we want to buy. We'll do it properly later." So, people live for years in rooms they don't enjoy. So, here's the thing. Rugs, lamps, pillows, accessories, they move with you. So, you have no excuse. And most importantly, when your room feels good, you actually want to be in it. You stop escaping every weekend. You stop needing a break from your own house. Every one of these rooms was finished in one day. None of them required renovation, and all of them followed the same logic. Decorating isn't about more stuff. It's about finishing what you already started. So, join my community. You can access styling school and so much more. Get help from a community of homeowners that are all in the same village talking the same language. If you live in the Fraser Valley and would love a one-day makeover, I posted the links below. You can apply and I would love to come to your house and help you transform it in just one day. I'll see you next time.