HOME DESIGN : A SPECIAL ISSUE OF ORANGE COUNTY LIFE : Doing It Your Own Way : Decorating Workshops Put You in the Designer’s Seat

By the time Doris Lektorich finished decorating her home several years ago, she was already bored with it: “Every room looked alike.”

Today, after numerous design classes and two years of effort, her Anaheim Hills home is beautiful--not the least bit boring.

Her secret? Lektorich learned how to maintain design continuity but still make each room exciting on its own. She’s one of many Orange County residents learning how to give their homes a custom-decorated look.

Interior designer Valinda Tivenan says many students in her “Designing Your Home” class at Rancho Santiago College want to learn how to decorate their homes because they “are just tired of nothing ever looking right.”

And by decorating themselves, they save money.

Do-it-yourself home decorating is a grand American tradition and a necessity for people on a limited budget. But not everyone is good at it. Simply knowing what you like is not enough.

Without a somewhat educated eye to style, color and elementary design principles, the result can be a disappointing hodgepodge. Individual elements may be nice, but somehow they may not connect for that custom look.

But there is hope.

You can learn interior design, and a wealth of resources are available in Orange County to help you. With the proper skills and inside tricks, designing your home interior can be fun and immensely satisfying. And you can do it successfully even on a limited budget.

Local interior design classes range from one-or-two-session seminars, where you can learn design tricks and shopping bargains, to Tivenan’s 18-week credit/non-credit course where students learn such design principles as color theory and how to make a room with conflicting elements work.

Other classes run the gamut from sewing for the home to how to design your own kitchen or bath or even lay your own ceramic tile floor. You can learn how to wallpaper, how to upholster, how to stencil and much more.

Lektorich started with Tivenan’s introductory class and was so excited by what she learned she continued with other classes. Now she is close to completing her study to become an interior designer herself.

“The most exciting thing about taking a course in interior design is you find out why people make mistakes and how to prevent yourself from making mistakes,” Lektorich says. “You understand why things look good and why they don’t.”

Lektorich, a former teacher, says she designed her home with a backdrop of four shades of apricot because it’s a warm, happy color and good for her personally. She used other colors too, picking up as a dominant color in one room what might have been an accent color in another.

And, with some help from her husband, she did all her own window and wall treatments. In the master bedroom she wanted something “extraordinary” to go with the four-poster bed she selected, and she combined two Victorian styles--bishop’s sleeves, fabric draped over a rod and shaped to look like an old-fashioned sleeve, and puddling, where fabric is allowed to fall softly on the floor.

The wall in her guest bedroom looks like wallpaper, but it’s not. Lektorich painted the wall in a light apricot color. Then she used a sea sponge dipped in paint to create a design on the wall in two other shades of apricot plus a green accent. In the family room she painted rough-hewn beams a light apricot to give a softer look and blend the vaulted ceiling with her antique furnishings and mementos.

Lektorich says it’s hard to determine how much money she saved overall by doing the work herself. She does know, however, that it would have cost her about $25 an hour to hire a painter and that she saved almost $600 by making her own dining room window treatments. She had paid someone $558 to do the sewing on a similar treatment--with a cloud valance and side panels--in her living room, only to discover in the meantime through research that the job wasn’t as hard as she thought.

Before Lektorich started all of this, however, she had a plan, a concept of the look she wanted in her home. This is crucial to attaining a custom look and staying within your budget.

Interior designer Elsie Hale says the most important step in designing a home interior is a plan “because if they have a plan, then they don’t go about as haphazardly.” Hale teaches “Get the Most Out of Your Decorating Dollar” and other design classes for Coastline Community College.

“They need to know what they like,” Hale says. “Many people have no idea what they like, so I suggest that they start out on some sort of idea file.” Home design publications can be expensive, however. You may want to make periodic trips to your local library to read current publications.

Hale also suggests that even budget do-it-yourselfers consider a two-or-three-hour consultation with an interior designer.

Sandra Hayes of Design Possibilities in Fullerton agrees that a consultation is helpful. “When you’re decorating on a budget, your funds are limited, and you don’t want to make mistakes. Designers know all the tricks,” says Hayes, president of the Orange County chapter of the American Society of Interior Design.

Hayes says anyone interested in a design consultation can call the society at (714) 643-1549 and receive referrals to designers who seem to best suit the clients’ needs. Interior designer fees in Orange County range from $50 to $125 an hour, she says.

Hayes did many such consultations several years ago before she specialized in commercial design. The first step was to find out what a client really liked and then help her formulate a plan. She would also tell her clients what they could do themselves to save money, such as painting and wallpapering or sanding and refinishing a hardwood floor. Or she might even take a client to a store and point out what furniture or other decorative items fit in with the plan.

At the end of the consultation, a client would have a packet of material, including suggestions for colors, fabrics, types of furniture to be added, and wall and floor coverings. Also included were floor plans with tissue overlays suggesting arrangement of existing furniture and other elements.

Hayes might even suggest refinishing a table to make it fit in better with the new plan.

Using existing elements is important to a person on a budget, and it is possible to mix styles and break the rules. In fact, Tivenan says, breaking the rules and getting away with it is half the fun.

For instance, someone might have an antique table with a contemporary light fixture hanging above it. The two items just don’t go together--yet.

First, one style should become dominant. By repeating the traditional theme of the table three or four times elsewhere in the room--in other furniture, wallpaper or drapery--that theme becomes dominant.

Now you need to do something about that lamp.

That means another contemporary element must be added. Tivenan says most people are afraid to take this approach.

“They think if one’s wrong, two would be worse, but actually two makes it better,” she says. In this instance, she suggests an inexpensive piece of contemporary poster art that repeats colors used in the traditional elements. This unifies all the elements in the room.

New window treatments can also tie a room together, and this is where the do-it-yourselfer can really shine. Hale refers students to We R Fabrics in Mission Viejo for discounted decorator fabrics, classes, handouts and advice on window treatments, coverlets and upholstery.

“If anyone can make dresses, they can sew anything that they need to for the house,” says Linda Migge, a We R Fabrics manager. “I get a lot of women who walk in here and say, ‘I’ve sewn all my life, but I’ve never made anything for the house and I’m scared to death.’ ”

Migge tells them not to worry because “if you’ve made a dress, you can make a pillow.” Even draperies are no big problem, according to Migge, because it’s all straight sewing.

“Sewing for the home is a lot more forgiving than sewing for your body,” adds Heidi Leverant, who started We R Fabrics five years ago with her father, Oscar Leverant.

One window treatment she suggests is a continental rod. At 4 1/2 inches or 2 1/2 inches, continentals are wider than the usual curtain rod. “All you really have to know how to do is sew a straight line,” she says, yet it is a treatment that is quite popular as a topper for mini-blinds.

Leverant also has a referral list for people who want to hire someone to do at least part of the sewing. Some customers, she says, may be willing to sew their own valance or draperies but don’t want to tackle a bedspread.

“We’re trying to get them to have a real custom look versus something they went to the store and purchased,” says Chris Bolton, in-house decorator. “They just need that little bit of encouragement to get a custom look without spending the custom price.

“Basically it’s teaching them how to tie it all together.” She emphasizes how important it is to repeat a fabric.

“If you do a valance, you have to have a reason why you do a valance in that room,” she says. “You don’t have a print up in your window and not have it anywhere else in the room.”

Leah Pariser, owner of Leah’s Fabric Galleries, believes there is a resurgence in sewing for the home because it is fast, easy and “there is a lot of pleasure derived from it.” She recommends “Singer Sewing for the Home” ($11.95) as a good resource book. The fall class schedule for her Orange County stores isn’t available yet, but Pariser says they will offer classes in such things as window treatments, basket decorating, stenciling and general decorating.

And you’re in for a surprise if you haven’t been in a fabric store recently. Most of the major pattern companies make patterns for slipcovers for chairs and couches, seat cushions, pillows, balloon shades and other window treatments, pillow shams, shower curtains, quilts, bedspreads, dust ruffles and nursery items.

Another decorating project that is dramatic and easy is wallpapering. The key here is to know what you are doing before you start to wallpaper.

It’s easy if you have prepared the wall properly and you understand the procedure. But it can be traumatic if you are vague on the concept. For instance, soaking pre-pasted paper too long may cause it to peel itself off the walls. Failing to plumb a line to guide the hanging of the first strip of wallpaper makes it impossible to hang it straight. And, without vinyl-to-vinyl paste, wallpaper borders will not stick to wallpaper.

Most wallpaper stores offer brochures, how-to advice and all the necessary equipment. “We’re set up specifically for the do-it-yourselfer,” says Janet Whitehead of Wallpapers to Go, which has several stores in Orange County. In fact, she says, customers in the midst of a wallpapering problem sometimes call with a panicky, “What do I do now?”

Fortunately, Wallpapers to Go employees try to answer questions before customers leave the store, Whitehead says.

A detailed booklet on how to wallpaper is available at Wallpapers to Go, and an instructional videotape runs nonstop in the stores. Customers can also rent a video or attend live demonstrations that are held each week.

Just remember that planning and fully thinking your ideas through is the most important part of your decorating scheme.