Decorating mistakes you can fix in 15 minutes or less
You buy a sofa without measuring your door clearance. You hang a light too low and bump your head on it. You paint an entire room in the wrong color without testing it first. Decorating faux pas are a dime a dozen, but most often, they’re not so easily fixed. It can be tempting to put these decorating fixes way down on the to-do list.
But other mistakes are actually much easier to fix than one would think — so we asked a handful of interior designers to share the most common design mistakes that can be fixed in 15 minutes or less.
“A common misconception is that a small space only warrants small pieces,” says Abbe Fenimore of Studio Ten 25. “Larger pieces actually bring in visual interest, texture and color, completing the look of the space. When hanging pieces, don’t go too high or too low. Aim for the center of the piece to hit 60 inches, at eye level for most.”
Most designers would agree that people tend to hang art too high.
“Art hung too high is always a pet peeve of mine,” says Nancy Mayerfield of NM Design House. “More than art being hung too high is art that is crooked. To fix a crooked piece, there are two options. The easiest is to add a second art hook. To make sure that the addition of the hook does not cause the art to be hung higher or offcenter, you may need to start the process from scratch.”
“A room oftentimes has overhead lighting and that is it. To make a room really stand out, I recommend using light from all different heights and angles: overhead lighting, a floor lamp, a table lamp and the often forgotten up-lighting,” says Kazuko Hoshino, principal at Studio William Hefner.
“Simply rethinking how a room’s furniture can be arranged can change the entire look and function of the room,” says Carter Kay of Carter Kay Interiors. “In fact, we usually start with a client by simply rearranging the furniture!”
Mayerfield concurs: “Sometimes people take a large room and place all the furniture against the walls. Move the furniture around to make the furniture part of the room and part of the conversation.”
“We find that way too many people seem to be ordering drapery from catalogs or premade sources,” says Kay. “Most times, these solutions result in poor-fitting and cheap-looking drapery. A quick fix could be buying extra panels for each side of a window to double the volume. Moving the pins to ‘lower’ drapery is not ideal but can work for drapery that is not long enough. Or you can call on a professional drapery workroom for a true measurement and estimate. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes!”
“A typical 84-inch sofa doesn’t need copious amounts of pillows to have a tremendous visual impact in a room,” says Kay. “In fact, we find that three to five is plenty!”
Jaclyn Joslin, a designer at Coveted Home, adds that worn-out cushions are the easiest way to cheapen the look of a room: “Fluff your cushions, and rotate them on a regular basis. Most don’t think sofa or chair cushions need maintenance, but they do.”
The last mistake you might not have known you were making is placing your rugs in the wrong direction. “Rugs should be wider than the area of the furniture they’re framing so they extend past the right, left and front of the sofa or bed (or whatever furniture is resting on it),” says Caitlin Murray of Black Lacquer Design. “Just remember that this rule doesn’t apply to behind furniture.”