It’s confession time, I’m not perfect. (Gasp!). There, I’ve said it.
When I was first starting out as a decorator/stylist I made plenty of decorating mistakes on install day and they’ve all been lessons to serve me well in the long run. I was lucky early in my career as a property stylist as we had a warehouse full of furniture and decor to choose from so if I got to a job and realised I’d selected a sofa that was too big to fit down the hallway to the lounge room it wasn’t the end of the world as we could get another one sent over from the warehouse. However, as a decorator it’s a bit more complicated if a sofa doesn’t fit into a client’s house and they’ve already paid for it then it’s an expensive problem to solve (or we just chop the sofa in half…kidding!). Let these mistakes be a lesson to those of you attempting a decorating project!
Common decorating mistakes
- Furniture measurements – when I first started in the decorating industry (fresh out of Uni with zero experience), I had no idea about scale and size. A little trick I use often is marking out the furniture I’m considering for a client’s home in masking tape or newspaper to give my client’s a sense of how much space the furniture is actually going to take up. How we picture it in our minds can be very different to how it looks in real life, you don’t want to be dodging a massive sofa in your living room forever.
- Hanging art too high – don’t make the same decorating mistakes I did with hanging art….The average eye level is 150cm from the ground up, this is where you should be centring your artwork on your walls. Before I knew this trick, I’d go around blindly hanging art where I thought worked but sometimes my eye was off and it wasn’t quite right.
- Pancake flat scatter cushions – invest in good quality feather inserts for your scatter cushions. Polyester filled inserts will flatten down within a couple of weeks of stuffing your new cushion covers plus they aren’t anywhere near as comfy to snuggle into. Feather inserts make your cushions look better and are mould to your body when you lean back into them after a long day at work!
- Lighting – I find my client’s also overlook this element too sometimes but when I was starting out I would be visiting the house during the day so thinking about lighting at night wasn’t something that registered with me. Now I know to ask client’s how they use the room at different hours of the day to ensure the lighting is sufficient.
- Paint colours are never the same on the wall – ALWAYS, I repeat, ALWAYS paint a sample of the wall colours you’re considering on the wall before committing. They are never the same as the paint colour card and you’ll be disappointed with the result if you haven’t seen test patches in various areas of the room.
I hope you take away the lessons I’ve learnt over the years and avoid making any expensive decorating mistakes of your own!
If you keep making decorating mistakes and can’t handle the thought of making any more, shoot me an email to see how I can help you 🙂
