Six Great Decorating Web Sites

We love decorating web sites as much as some people love chocolate, perhaps even more so. It's an addiction, actually. A harmless one, but an addiction nonetheless.

Here are some fantastic decorating web sites we'd like to share with you. They serve as inspiration boards, ideas and sometimes, just decorating porn...

1) Light Locations

The web site itself is a photography agency for home & garden magazines, but you can get ideas from their beautiful images.

2) Remodelista

This is great blog for resources, product ideas and the like. Easy reading, pretty pictures.

3) Design Sponge

Founded by Grace Bonney, this blog has several postings per week with topics ranging from decorating, DYI project, before & after, book reviews. Very thoughfully written.

4) Point Click Home

This is the official web site for Metropolitan Home and Elle Decor. It is well-categorized and have all the back issues covered. A great site to browse through past & current issues without having to store tons of old magazines.

5) My Home Ideas

This is the official web site for Sunset Magazine, Southern Accents, Southern Living, Cottage Living and Real Simple. It has tons of pictures (and tons of ads as well), but it is a wonderful site to browse through for tips and inspirations.

6) Redcover

We love this web site for its wide range of home decorating pictures, mostly international. Beautiful photography.

Tool to help you do your own drapery treatment.

There are many mysteries in life--one of them is the cost of drapery. Seriously, can you believe how expensive it is? It's unfathomable to us how much one piece of fabric and four stitched sides can be so costly. But costly they are.

Aside from having a professional drapery workroom come to your house, measure and make the drapes to order, there isn't that many alternatives really. Sure, you can buy pre-made panels from Restoration Hardware or Z-Gallerie, but they usually end up looking like crap. And why? Because they never seem to fit. Either they are too long or too short or too wide etc..

We found Casa Fiora a long time ago when we were looking for an alternative to having custom-made drapes for budget reasons. We find that if you are looking for just simple styles, they are pretty good. We are writing about them now is because they now have a great tool for you to measure the draperies that you need. This, we feel, is one of the most important things you need to do. If not measured incorrectly, you can get the totally wrong size and end up throwing money away.

You can get the tool here. Again, we emphasize that this is best if you are looking for simple draperies styles. Complicated styles are best done by a professional workroom.