Common Home Décor Mistakes & Ways To Avoid Them

Home decoration is a matter of personal taste. In many cases, taste fails to make for a cozy and inviting home. Those, who can afford an interior decorator, hire them for advice but chances are, this expert help for a hefty charge might end up lending an obnoxiously opulent look to the house. The best judges of homes, still, are people who live in them. A well-decorated home is a good mix of comfort, elegance and utility, and who can achieve the perfect balance but home owners themselves!

Here are some home décor approaches that miss the point. If your house reflects any of these, there are ways to fix them as well.

1. Too many things: This is a rookie mistake. You have the home you love, you have traveled a lot and gathered a lot of collectibles. Slowly, you fill the latter in the former. The result - catastrophe. A cluttered home stresses guests and home owners alike. If you have varied home decorating material, there are better ways to use them than storing or gifting away or placing them all in one place. You can change the décor of the house once in three months. Match the showy lamp with the bright colored sofa cover. Arrange all your material in color-coordinated sets and re-work on the look again and again.

2. Color first and decorate later: Yet another mistake that new home owners make is to paint in a hurry. Do not plan the colors for an empty house. Even if you are yet to buy furniture, at least zero in on what you want before you plan the colors in the rooms. What if you get a great deal on a pretty bright red couch after painting your wall purple? If you have no idea of the furniture you are going to pick up, go for soft and neutral paint on the walls. That might give you flexibility to pick and choose furniture. If you have already painted and want to fix the furniture that does not match with the wall paint, invest in new upholstery and sofa covers to compliment the colors.

3. Badly arranged pictures: Yes, we know that you have a lot of loved ones in your family. You love all your nieces and nephews as much as your children and there are many pictures of each of them. However, nothing messes the look of your home more than too many photo frames on a side table. If you have memories to share through snaps, hang each of them in a pattern on the wall. Many people hang them on the way to the staircase. 

4. Gaudy colors: There is a thin line between what a few people perceive as bright and others as gaudy. That line is like politeness. Most people, who like to experiment with the look of their house, end up choosing deep, dark colors that border on scary. Home owners too regret such paints, soon after their joy in decorating their homes wears off. Extremely bright red and similar deep shades such as shocking pink, are a complete no no for homes, unless you are designing the set for shooting a horror movie. The only way to fix such mistakes is to plaster a soft-colored wallpaper.

5. Too many cables: No home is complete without a number of gadgets. There is the TV, a home theatre, laptop and its charging wires, cell phone chargers, set-top boxes, and playstations. As if these are not enough, there is the internet cable and telephone wires. That leaves a home into a wiry mess. Most tech-savvy homes have serpentine wires all over the walls. A good way to avoid the excess wires is by storing them in a box and letting out only the length that is required. A number of tubes are sold in the market these days that let you cover the wires on the walls, which you later paint. Also, invest in tubes for a home theatre. This also ensures that these cables do not break easily, in addition to camouflaging them.

(Katya Naidu has been working as a business journalist for the last nine years, and has covered beats across banking, pharma, healthcare, telecom, technology, power, infrastructure, shipping and commodities)