Experience magic in your home

A very close friend of mine has recently bought her own home-sweet-home. She is in that honeymoon period where all our coffee meetings or potlucks are about how she is doing up her home or what is next on her interiors agenda. Since I’ve always been aesthetically inclined, I am a major part of all her planning and decision. And it has been a fun experience!

Home is the most important place for a person as he or she spends most so much time of there. Home is not only just a place where you live, but it represents you, your family and your living standard. These days, home has also become a symbol of people’s status and style. Hence each decision of my friend has an added baggage and needs to be carefully thought through.

It is surely not easy though, in fact it is a complete art.. Everything from painting, to wood work, to contractor chasing has its own set of challenges that the poor husband wife duo are dealing with. Understandably, they want a unique type of decoration for each room and yet have a sense of harmony. Till last week, each time I met them, they would be discussing questions like which colors will work for our living room? Which products will best suit our needs? Will these products and services it fit the budget? The questions were innumerable but answers weren’t easy to find. So most of the time when some of us would meet, these questions would come up and each person would start narrating his or her own anecdotes. One person would say, his contractor has an experience of twenty years so perfect for designing cupboards. Another would say that his bathroom walls started leaking in ten days because of faulty tiles. Yet another would flash out a tablet and start Googling the best color-play for the house.

I was noticing all the stress that my friend was going through so I decided to visit her last Sunday. Firstly, I told her that she needs to understand that creating and maintaining a beautiful home takes a lot of work, so she needs to calm down. Secondly, I took out a piece of paper and decided to jot down the most important consideration while she created her dream home. Here are all the points we came up with:

• There needs to be an allocation for the interior designing budget.
• Each space or room in the house needs equal attention so we can’t just keep talking of the living room or bed room. I have seen instances where people were so focused on getting the perfect modular kitchen that their bathrooms look like Indian railways bathrooms. One should utilize the whole space of the house well.
• Different wall papers, paintings, curtains, carpets and furniture need to be selected carefully to ensure right pricing, style sense as well as overall harmony.
• Last but not the least, hiring the services of a professional interior designer or contractor is great because they know what they are doing. Your house is not a play ground for you or your friends to experiment with. Of course this is possible if your budget allows it.

Some of the other points that we noted down were based on the personal choices and likes of my friend because they are very similar to my own. Here are some of them:

• Lots of greenery and plants to give the home a great fresh feeling.
• Wooden flooring for the bedrooms for that cozy woodhouse ambience.
• Large cupboards in dark brown so that they are spacious yet classy.
• Lot of storage space in the kitchen along with many places to hold and place utensils.
• Light colors for the walls to give a sense of space everywhere.
• Lots of beautiful art for the walls to suit her creative inclinations.

While we were talking about all this and jotting down all the points that would go into her perfect home in complete agreement with each other, I suddenly landed on an interiors website on my mobile phone. And then all our worries just vanished. It was the Asian Paints Home Solutions advertisement that I had chanced upon. Here was a trusted organization with many many years of experience in home solutions! And what was great was that they were now available at our very own doorsteps! I straight away went over to their website and browsed through their details.

The first thing on the home page that caught my eye was 'Get Inspired' that has something called the 'Inspiration Wall', and I was not disappointed once I landed there. The page has many examples of beautiful homes that you can achieve with a little bit of help from Asian Paints. There are actual pictures from people who got makeovers from Asian Paints, which give you many thoughts as you plan for your own. There is a wonderful side-bar on the left that allows you to give specification for your room and then offers you many examples of how you can play with your space.

There are a lot of other options where you can try various combinations before deciding things like paint and overall look for your rooms and house. On the home page that you saw above, this comes under the ‘Try & Decide’ section. The ‘Make it Happen’ section helps you make a project calendar along with helping plan your budget and locate the closest dealer. You can find a list of all Asian Paints products at one place on the website too so you don’t have to scout shops.

But my favorite part of the Asian Paints Home Solutions experience is the ‘Experience Magic’ page because it unleashed creativity in me. My friend and I spent a lot of time playing around with it and gradually felt like we were floating in a bubble of ideas. Even if you are not in the process of setting up your home, you should check out this page for a wonderful creative experience complete with colors and sounds!

You can even have all your queries answered in a friendly, online chat session. Between 8 am and 8 pm, our experts are available to clear all your doubts. Go to their 'Ask Aparna' link for this!

So if you are nurturing your home-sweet-home, or have just purchased an abode that needs sprucing up, or are looking for ideas for a any interior space, check out the Asian Paints Home Solutions website for a one-stop-shop place for ideas and solutions. What’s more! If you go here, and click on ‘My Inspiration Wall’, you get a chance to win a free beautiful room makeover on sign up along with assured gifts!

Here is a video that will tell you how you will experience magic in your home with Asian Paints.

Disclaimer: I have written this post for an Asian Paints Home Solutions campaign. All views expressed are my own.