10 Common Decorating Mistakes
It happens: the color you thought looked so
good at the paint store turns out to be the
wrong shade of yellow. Fortunately, paint
colors are easy to fix. You simply roll on
another coat. Some decorating mistakes
aren’t as easy to correct and are much more
costly, such as buying furniture without
measuring your space first. Could you be
committing common decorating errors? It’s
possible. Here are some of the most
common ones.
1. Knick knack attack.
This, simply put, is too much stuff. The list
includes everything from the little porcelain
cats, small boxes, picture frames, and other
decorating flotsam and jetsam that makes a
house feel cluttered and annoying to look at.
Edit out all but a treasured few items.
2. Plant problems.
Plants are often kept long after they should
have been put out of their misery. Worse
still are the ivies with nine foot long tendrils
pinned around a door or window. This looks
positively dreadful and don’t let anybody tell
you different. Plants should be lush and full not spindly and dying. Another plant concern is the lack of plants. Every space needs some green, even if it’s a silk plant.
3. Family photo explosion.
Too many walls of homes are covered with too many family photographs. They’re overwhelming (double that if you’re trying to sell your house) and are detracting to a space. Select a few key quality photos of family members and display them in one place, and put the rest into albums.
4. High art.
Not knowing where to hang art, many people hang it too high. Art should be at the level where you can view it. This means that you should see the center of the picture, not the bottom edge of the frame.
5. Curtains hung too close.
To the trim, that is. Even worse are curtain rods hung on the window trim. Try hanging curtain rods out from the trim about four to six inches so that when the curtains are opened you can see the whole window.
6. Teeny weeny syndrome.
Little things are for boxes, not rooms. Buy décor items with size. Nothing looks worse than a great room with teeny tiny knick knacks or itty bitty pictures on a big wall. Having large items in a small space is better than small items in a large space. Think big when you buy accessories.
7. Color conundrums. Houses seem to fall into two categories: the white house and the test pattern. The white house is a homeowner who lives in fear of color and has the whole house draped in a shroud of white paint. . The test pattern house has a different color of a different palette in every room. Test pattern houses have colors that are widely divergent. The effect isn’t decorative, it’s disjointed and jarring.
8. Bedroom dilemmas.
The bedroom is often forgotten about because it isn’t a public space like the living room and dining rooms are. Too often bedrooms are a mishmash of mix and match furniture, beds go without headboards, and lamps are too small.
9. Wallflower furniture.
Another common mistake is having furniture pushed up against walls. Don’t be afraid to pull sofas and chairs out into the room. This makes the setting more conversational and comfortable.
10. Matchy-matchy.
Ever go into a bathroom that looks like it came out of a department store catalog? The motifs become tedious instead of interesting. Children’s bedrooms are another good source of matchy-matchy. Whole bedroom decorating sets can be found in cartoon characters and other themes. Again, the designs seem artificial and canned and looks like you bought a bedroom in a bag. Like Spiderman? Instead of Spiderman wallpaper border (boring!), stretch Spiderman sheets over simple wood frames to make an oversized picture for the wall. Now that’s interesting.
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Kathryn Weber is the publisher of the Everydayclean.com Cleaning Calender, that calendar that puts you in control of your home by ending the power struggle. For more information log on to http://tinyurl.com/d9rh5.
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© 2007 Kathryn Weber, all rights reserved
