Submit Your Decorating/DIY Questions!

Many years ago, I used to allow readers to submit their decorating questions, and I’d do my best to answer them. I stopped doing that just for the sake of time. As my own DIY projects began to take up so much time, I had less and less time to spend on others’ decorating and DIY dilemmas.

Lately, I’ve had several people ask if I would consider doing paid consultations. The fact is that I don’t want to take that responsibility on right now. If someone’s paying me to do something, then obviously, I’m obligated to do it, and to do it well. And my fear is that those consultations would take up way too much time, and then I’d never get my own projects done.

But I would love to bring back the posts answering readers’ questions! I feel a lot less pressure with those, especially now that I have such amazing readers with great ideas. I mean, y’all have given me so much input over the years on my own projects, and have given me so many helpful ideas and constructive input. It was a reader who suggested that I built the overmantel above my fireplace, and what a difference that made! It changed the whole look of my fireplace in such a beautiful way.

And that’s just one of countless examples. So I’d love for this community to be able to help others with their dilemmas as well.

What type of questions am I looking for?

You can feel free to submit any question pertaining to DIY, decorating, or design. I’m not an architect, licensed designer, or landscape designer, but I’m sure there are readers who are. In fact, do y’all remember when I was trying to decide on the look I wanted for the front elevation of our house, and I decided I wanted it to look like this?

I wasn’t doing those designs! Those designs were being done for me by a reader who was a retired architect! She was just having fun and playing around with some ideas and sending them to me for inspiration. (I’d still love for the front of our house to look like that one day.)

So you can submit questions about your own specific decorating question that you have about a specific room in your home. Or you can submit questions about how to go about doing a specific DIY project. Or you can submit general DIY/decorating questions that you’d like me to answer.

I already have two general questions that I’ve been asked repeatedly lately, and that I plan to write about soon:

1. I love color, but have no idea how to incorporate color into my neutral rooms. How do you even start?
2. I want to paint my kitchen cabinets, but I’m unsure about the process. Can you share the step-by-step process for painting cabinets?

So if you have those general questions, just know that those are already on my list. 🙂 But those are the types of general questions you can submit.

But as far as specific decorating questions, here’s what I need:

What info should you submit with your questions?

Pictures! Submit your pictures. And it’s better to have too many pictures rather than too few pictures.

You don’t have to have fancy equipment to take your pictures. Your iPHone (or whatever phone with a camera you have) will work just fine. But please do not use a flash. Use as much natural light as possible (open curtains and shades). But just please don’t use a flash.

Get as much of the room in to the pictures as possible. If they need to be cropped, I can do that. Also, don’t resize the photos. Just send them to me right out of the camera. If they need to be edited for lighting (made brighter to see details better), I can do that. If you have something like Dropbox, you can upload the pictures to that and then send me a link and I’ll download them.

And then send anything else that may be helpful. If your question is about furniture placement, then a quick floor plan sketch with room measurements would be helpful. If your question is about paint colors, then pictures of neighboring rooms might be helpful. You get the point.

More information is always better than less information. 🙂

How do you submit your questions?

For now, you can email them to me at [email protected]

**In the Subject line, put “A2D Reader Decorating Question”. If it doesn’t have that subject line, I might overlook your email, and I’d hate for your question to get overlooked!

I hope this will be helpful AND fun!