Decorating

A house is a shell; decorating is what turns it into a tavern, a wizard’s tower, or a museum of your adventures. This guide covers the tools and tricks players use to place furniture exactly where they want it, the workflow that keeps your work safe, and a few themed build ideas. It is community technique knowledge (not yet field-verified on this shard); the underlying mechanics — lockdowns, secures, storage limits — are documented and sourced on Housing.

Before decorating, you need a house: see House Types for the shells you start from (a fixed classic house, or a customizable foundation you design first). Everything below assumes you are the owner or co-owner of the house.

The house decorator tool

The decorator tool is the heart of interior design. You access it from the house sign menu (or the house’s context menu) — choose the decorator / “Customize” placement mode, or pick up the in-house decorating tool. With it active, single-clicking a locked-down item lets you nudge it without picking it up:

Turn — rotate the item to its next available facing. Many items (chairs, tables, some decorations) have several orientations; cycle until it faces the way you want.
Raise — lift the item upward by a small increment (z-height). Use this to set books on a shelf, mugs on a table, or a rug under furniture.
Lower — drop the item back down toward the floor.

The tool only affects items that are locked down (or secured) — loose items can’t be finely positioned and risk decaying. This is why the golden rule is lock down first, then decorate.

The lockdown-then-decorate workflow

Drop the item roughly where you want it inside the house.
Lock it down from the house menu (target the item). It is now fixed and safe from decay and casual theft.
Use the decorator tool to turn, raise, and lower it into its final position.
Repeat, building up from the floor: rugs and carpets first, then furniture, then the small items that sit on the furniture (raise those onto the surface).

Every locked-down decoration counts against your house’s lockdown limit, and secured containers against your secure count — both detailed (with per-house numbers) on House Types and Housing. Decorating and storage compete for the same budget, so plan: a heavily themed house has less room for loot, and vice versa.

Placement tricks

Stacking and layering. Raise an item enough and you can rest a second item on top of it — books stacked on a desk, a candle on a mantel, plates on a table. Build vertically with repeated raise clicks.
Raising onto surfaces. Tables, shelves, and counters have a height; place the small item on the floor beside the furniture, lock it down, then raise it until it visually sits on the surface.
Hiding the edges. Tuck rugs partly under furniture, or use large items to mask the seam where a wall meets the floor, for a finished look.
Add-on deeds. Many decorative fixtures — forges, looms, training dummies, fountains, large furniture sets, mounted trophies — come as add-on deeds. Double-click the deed inside your house and target a spot; the add-on builds in place and is owned by the house (re-deedable later via the house menu). Add-ons are the easiest way to place big, multi-tile pieces.
Carpets and floor tiles lay flat and are a quick way to define rooms or zones inside an open customizable foundation.

Dyeing and recoloring

Color ties a room together. Many furniture pieces and cloth items can be dyed:

Dye tubs recolor cloth, clothing, and some furniture. Apply a dye tub to a furniture dye tub or a clothing item, then target the piece to apply the tub’s current hue.
Furniture dye tubs specifically recolor wooden furniture to match a palette.
Pick hues deliberately — see the hue reference for the shard’s color values, including the notable and rare hues, so your tavern’s chairs or your library’s rugs share a consistent palette.

Recoloring is one of the cheapest, highest-impact decorating moves: a matched hue across furniture, rugs, and banners reads as intentional design.

Theme ideas

A theme gives a house coherence. A few classics to build toward:

Tavern. Long tables and benches, kegs and bottles raised onto a bar counter, a cooking hearth or BBQ add-on, lanterns for warmth, and a chalkboard “menu.” Leave open floor for gatherings.
Library. Bookshelves (add-on or locked-down books raised onto shelves), reading desks with quills and open tomes, globes and maps, a few comfortable chairs, muted rug hues.
Mage tower. Best in a Tower or Small Stone Tower: a runic study with spellbooks, crystal balls, candelabra, alchemy stations, and an observatory feel up top. Vertical themes suit the multi-floor tower shells.
Museum / trophy hall. Mounted creature trophies, display cases (secured containers) of rare loot, statues, banners of your guild, and good sightlines so visitors can tour.

Match the house shell to the theme — a thatched cottage makes a cozy home, a keep or castle makes a guild hall or museum, a customizable foundation lets you design the exact floor plan a theme needs.

Storage vs. decoration balance

Every decoration is a lockdown you can’t spend on stored goods. Decide your house’s purpose first:

A crafting / storage house wants most of its budget in secures (containers of resources) and minimal decoration.
A showpiece house spends lavishly on locked-down decorations and accepts limited storage.
Most players land in between — a tidy, themed main room plus a back room of secured containers for materials.

Bigger houses (see House Types) simply give you more of both budgets, which is the real argument for upgrading your one plot.

Galleries & inspiration

Do not copy others’ screenshots into your own builds blind — but these well-known community resources are full of ideas, techniques, and tours worth studying. (External links; descriptions are ours.)

UO Stratics — Housing & Decorating — the long-running UO fan encyclopedia; its housing and decorating sections cover deco item lists, placement guides, and classic technique write-ups.
r/ultimaonline (Reddit) — the main UO subreddit, where players regularly post house tours and “rate my deco” threads with candid feedback and how-they-did-it comments.
UOGuide — community wiki with articles on housing customization, add-ons, and decorating items and their hues.
YouTube “UO house tour” / “UO decorating” searches — many creators post walkthrough videos of finished houses; watching the camera pan reveals stacking and raising tricks that are hard to convey in text.
Official UO / Stratics Discord communities — active housing and decorating channels where decorators trade techniques, share dye hues, and answer placement questions in real time.

When a technique you see externally contradicts what this wiki says about mechanics (limits, lockdowns, decay), trust the Housing page — it is sourced from this shard’s server config — and file a discrepancy report if the wiki is wrong.