10 things that can make your home look cheap

It doesn’t matter how smart and sophisticated the decor and design of your home is if it’s constantly covered by a layer of clutter. Clutter clogs up the flow of a room more than anything and automatically makes any design choices seem less intentional.

The good news is that clutter is a treatable issue – here are 12 things professional organisers declutter every day.

There are a lot of ways that lighting can influence the look and feel of a room. Bright, white lighting is a quick way to make a room feel washed out and makes any potentially tacky design decisions stand out even more. Dim, minimal lighting, on the other hand, can can also pretty quickly make a man-cave feel a bit too much like an actual cave. You’ll be surprised how much the mood of a room can change if you put some thought into your lighting by switching up fixtures and bulb styles.

Here’s everything you need to know about lighting.

A handmade end table is a great conversation starter, but it doesn’t mean there can’t be too much of a good DIY thing. When the other pieces of furniture your charming end table compliments so nicely are also handmade, it’s time to take a step back. A whole room full of DIY furniture can look less like a design choice, and more like you’ve filled your living room with a collection of repurposed junk.

Trends, by their definition, are designed to come and go. It might seem like a good idea to fill a room full of the latest stylish decor, but in just a few months that room can go from trendy to tacky. Sticking to classic styles will ensure that you’re not swapping out entire rooms’ worth of decor every other month at the whims of whatever trend happens to be popular on Pinterest.

Here are 10 design trends that are dying out in 2021.

Creating a gallery wall is a great way to fill up empty, blank walls in your home. Just make sure that when you go to create your gallery wall, you do it with a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish in the space. Don’t cover up a wall with generic, mass-produced art just to fill up the emptiness. It’s almost better to have a blank wall than it is to have a wall covered with unoriginal and uninspired art. If you want to put up a gallery wall in your home, take your time, and create a clear vision of what you want to achieve in the space before selecting the artwork. Remember, you should love to look at it!

Once you’ve figured it out, keep your wall looking sharp with these picture-hanging tips.

First impressions matter, and the first part of your home that most people will see is the entryway. Having too much stuff in an entryway will make it feel cluttered, oppressive and immediately uncomfortable.

We’re not saying that everything in your home should be uniform and each room should be decorated in the exact same style. In fact, that could also make a home feel cheap and staged. What you don’t want, though, is for there to be a lack of cohesion from room to room. Having one room decorated in a modern, minimalist style and the next full of Bohemian decor creates a jarring feeling that makes it seem less like the design of the home was planned and more like it was an accident.

These home decorating tricks will also make your home look messy.

Realtor.com published an article declaring the chevron pattern (a sideways, two-colour zig-zag) played out back in 2017, so by now it’s definitely time to ditch this pattern. Although it looks fine in small doses, chevrons can easily become an overwhelming and distracting design feature. Simpler, less attention-grabbing patterns are a better option.

Popcorn ceilings are an unfortunate design choice left behind by lazy home building practices in the 20th century. The rough, bumpy texture is tough to keep clean, hard to repair, and frankly just looks bad. If you can, remove popcorn ceilings in your home. It’s a bit of a chore (and a messy one) but once the popcorn is gone the clean, sleek surface of your ceilings will look much better than before.

“Live, laugh, love” might be a perfectly fine motto by which to live life, sure. But that doesn’t mean you should have the phrase plastered on 14 different surfaces throughout your home. Generic “phrase” art is very often tacky and impersonal. When selecting art for your home, try to find things that are more personal, or even go an extra step and create your own pieces.

Try these 8 room design tricks interior decorators would never tell you for free.

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Source: RD.com