Avoid Overdecorating your Home

Is your house becoming a storage place for decorative items? Furniture, ornaments, vases, photos, rugs... You need to know how to be selective when decorating your home and avoid overdoing it.
Avoid Overdecorating your Home

Last update: 29 November, 2018

When decorating your home, it’s not necessary to place ornaments, furniture and other items in every single corner and empty space. The room could get to the point of feeling overcrowded or crammed. To avoid that, you should avoid overdecorating your home.

Order and correct organization in the home is essential to make you feel comfortable, both for you and for others in your home. Another reason to avoid overdecorating is that leaving empty spaces without decoration will add to your interior design. At the same time it will give a sense of balance in the room.

On that basis, you should let the air in the room flow, with some parts of the room decorated and others that aren’t. The atmosphere within the room should be unconstrained and shouldn’t generate visual tension or overwhelm your view with too many objects.

Why you should avoid overdecorating

Avoid overdecorating your walls by not hanging too many pictures

Within the home, when you use an excess of decorative elements, it can make the room feel slightly uncomfortable. Your house could even come to feel like a warehouse. Sometimes you might not realize that everything you bring home will have to have a place.

Frequently, the living room is turned into a museum with a large and varied collection of decorative pieces and furnishings. You should ask yourself if it’s really useful to have 4 lamps, 4 bookshelves full of books and other objects, lots of chairs, and the whole floor covered with a collection of rugs, etc.

Obviously, this kind of exaggerated overdecorating of interiors produces a feeling of disquiet, and you can’t relax when in the room. It can generate anxiety, stress, and discomfort. For that reason, you should think about if you are decorating a room or if you are really just storing things.

– It’s better to decorate well with 5 things than badly with 15. –

Ideas to decorate without overdecorating

When you go to buy something new such as items or furnishings for your home decor, you should first have clearly in mind what you need. You should also think about what you want to achieve with your purchase. Know what you’re looking for in the shop. You could try putting into practice the following steps:

  • Check the space you have available before proceeding to decorate. If you think that you have something old and you could get rid of it, just do it. That way, you’ll have one more space.
  • Make a list of the items you need. Then go looking at different commercial locations to find what suits your existing decor best.
  • Use your head and decide rationally. You shouldn’t buy every single thing you like. Use your capacity to reason to be able to choose what you need most without falling into the trap of consumerism.
  • Only buy what you really consider fundamental. Compare between different products and choose the best one. Then just take home one thing of each item, and not four just because you’re not sure.
  • Drawing a mental picture helps a lot when you need to think of how the items you buy will fit into the existing decor in your home. You could even physically draw a plan of the room to help you decide what you can fit comfortably.
Before buying new items think about the existing decor and design of your home to avoid overdecorating

Correct placement of items in your home

When thinking about where to put each decorative item in your home, try not to place them randomly or haphazardly. Rather, you should try to organize your items in a way that suits your needs and where you will feel comfortable. For example, let’s see some steps you can take for decorating the living room:

  • In the first place, take into account what direction the furniture is facing. Normally, couches are placed so they are facing the television. With that in mind, you should study where best to place the sofa, the coffee table, and the rug.
  • You could place one or two bookshelves in the room. Try not to use more than two, since that could make the living room seem like a library.
  • You could include a dining table with just a small number of chairs. Don’t buy too many. That way you won’t have to store the extra chairs somewhere in another room or even in the living room itself.
  • Decorate the walls with two or three picture frames. It’s not necessary to occupy every wall with pictures. Leave some of the colors of the wall showing.
  • On the bookshelves or tables, avoid overdecorating with too many ornaments, plants, vases, photo frames, sculptures, etc. Just choose the best.

What can you achieve with all of this?

Keep your decor simple and uncluttered and avoid overdecorating

In the first place, if you stick to these suggestions to avoid overdecorating you’ll create a room that’s airier and that feels freer. You can have spaces in the room without anything there, and that’s precisely what can make your decor ‘breathe’.

In the second place, it will be much easier to clean – the floor as well as the furniture. When you have a bookcase crowded full of items for example, you could easily spend half an hour cleaning and dusting it.

Finally, the best thing you will be achieving is a sense of well being. There’s nothing better than to arrive home and feel comfortable and relaxed.