Have you ever walked into a room and thought there was something strange about it? Even if all the individual pieces are beautiful, and you've followed all of the spacing rules when hanging your gallery wall, there's still something off about the whole thing?
Even if you're an Olympic medalist in home decorating, it's often easy to fall prey to one of these common decorating mistakes. It's hard when there are so many moving pieces (literally) to take a step back and make sure that everything is coming together in a cohesive way. Here's a few prevalent things to look out for when you're redecorating your home to make sure you're not making the same mistakes as so many have made before you:
1. More is Less and Less is More
There's something about human nature where we tend to err on the side of filling up every nook and cranny with decorative items. Get comfortable with whitespace - leaving space on your bookshelf or avoiding crowding it up makes a decorative statement of it's own.
2. Keeping The Lighting Your Momma Gave You
Fluorescent lighting is, unfortunately, a fact of life, especially for you all city renters out there. If you'd like to avoid seeing every imperfection of your apartment magnified by the harsh fluorescent lighting your new home came with, make some small changes that can make worlds of difference. First -- switch out your standard light switches with dimmers, so that you can control the amount of light that is given off. Add in a few table lamps and side lamps to create an illusion of pools of light to soften up your space.
3. Putting all your Eggs in One Fabric
We get it -- you love your dark blue velvet or your industrial steel coffee table. We love it too! Just not featured on every single one of your surfaces. Mix and match your fabrics and materials to add more depth to your space, and avoid creating a room experience that falls boring and flat. Mixing different materials can be daunting, especially when you're not entirely sure what goes with what. This is when hiring someone like Havenly -- an online interior decorator -- could be helpful, due to the fact that you can have an expert guide you into figuring out what works and doesn't work, especially with your existing pieces.
4. Size Does Matter Sometimes
Rugs are funny. They're very rarely the first place one's eye goes to, but choose the wrong rug for your space and all hell will break loose (okay that's an exaggeration, but it can easily mess up the entire vibe that you've worked so hard to curate). In order to choose the right size - make sure that at least one leg of each furniture piece is placed on the rug, so that it doesn't "float" in the middle of all of your pieces. There's nothing worse than having all your furniture be crowded around the rug itself.
5. Ignoring Scale
It's important to remember that each piece of furniture does not live in it's own island or peninsula. Rather, in your space, they directly are related to each other and need to be scaled appropriately. There's nothing worse than having a too small coffee table in front of your sofa (okay, yes there are many worse things like famine and thirst, but I mean design wise there's nothing worse) or hanging art above your TV console that is overshadowed by the piece below it. With the help of measuring, as well as the help of a design firm, you can make sure you don't fall prey to this common mistake.
Also on HuffPost:
