Bulky furniture have always posed tough problems for Do-It-Yourself decorators. Often they're heirloom pieces one doesn't have the heart to leave behind nor sell when moving into a new house. Besides they're often simply captivating-- a Sheraton dining set, a Chippendale armoire dating back to the early 1900s, or maybe a priceless Bobby Haines-- that you simply couldn't part with them. Lugging them in a U-Haul van from Buffalo to New York is one thing, getting them into your 15th-floor New York apartment is another, but making huge, off-scale furniture blend into your tiny room and the rest of your home decor is a nightmare.

Fortunately, the situation's not hopeless. There are things you can do to tame bulky furniture-- a 7 ft x 5 ft armoire, for example. Here's how:

Tip # 1 Realize that bulk is about two things: physical size and color. If it needs more than two people to move it, it's big. If it also happens to be of a dark, stained wood grain, it all of a sudden became bigger.

Tip # 2 Don't put it up against a white, off-white, or pastel wall. You'll be shooting yourself in one foot if you do. Instead of making your armoire disappear or at least recede, putting the armoire up against a white wall will actually make it stick out like a sore thumb. To make your armoire disappear, you have to borrow a trick from David Copperfield: match the foreground with the background. With the bulk and dark color of the armoire thus tamed, it's ready to blend into the background. You get a further bonus: the richer background color of the wall brings out the exciting wood grain of the armoire.

Tip # 3 Realize that beautiful rooms are achieved by trade offs. Your changing of your wall color from white to color might have reduced by an inch or two your visual space, but, in exchange, you achieved harmony - not such a bad trade off.

Tip # 4 Remember that yellows enhance wood grain. If you have another huge armoire in your dining room, and your dining set consists of a farm table and Windsor chairs, it might be a good idea to paint your wall a brilliant yellow. Brilliant yellow or any sunny color brings out the yellows in the wood grain. What you might do first is to look at your wooden furniture. If it's made of pine or oak, sunny colors will bring out the lighter parts of the grain and brighten the whole piece. Cool colors such as ones suggested by the plants in your dining room or the iron wall art or the fish metal decor on your wall will enhance the darker parts of the grain for a lovely overall effect.

Come to think of it, Do-It-Yourself decorating is really no big deal. It can be daunting, yes, but only initially, when you still haven't understood some of its basic concepts like balance, contrast, texture, color, lighting. Once you do, decorating becomes a pleasant experience.