Making decisions about your home interiors can be overwhelming as it does involve considerable thought and effort. Using your mental and emotional energy in a nonconstructive way can make you feel depleted. You will always feels that it competes with everything else in your life that you need to deal with.
You only have so much time and energy to spend on figuring out what interiors will be suited to you, your family and your lifestyle. With so many choices and influences in the traditional media, online and through our family and friends, there is hardly anything left in you to sort it all out.
While your home interiors are not the most important decisions of your life, they are still integral to the proper enjoyment and use of your spaces. Many people ignore portions of their homes that unfortunately are never used, because they can’t make decisions about what to do with them.
Happily there are ways that will help you to overcome this and limit the amount of frustration and difficulties that are encountered in the home decorating and designing process.
Through following these 7 guidelines, you may find it much more manageable to work through the considerable thoughts and actions that are part of making decisions about your home interiors.
1. Give Yourself Some Breathing Space
– while you may wish to view every Instagram, blog, TV program or magazine that can get your hands and eyes on, it will be advantageous for you to try and prevent information overload. Why? This can lead to not making any decisions at all. The reason is the choices that are available can be overwhelming and likely they all will not be suited to your tastes, budget or interior layout. The better approach would be to try and narrow down what your tastes are, then only seek decor and design influences that fall along those lines. For example, if particular vintage styles are your preference, seek decor and design influences that run along those lines.
2. Limit Your Influences
– often it can be helpful to ask the opinion of others like your family or friends, however this can become a real problem. People, no matter how good their intentions are, will resent you if you don’t take their style or design advice. Unless they are professional decorators, stylists or designers, they won’t under the underlying difficulties with giving you those suggestions and moreover they don’t understand what is really involved with some interior design decisions. In addition, they may question your taste that leads to hard feelings and at the end-of-the-day it is your home and your project, so you need to have it according to your aesthetic. Trust your instincts and don’t become overly swayed by the never ending barrage of opinions. Also – don’t become too endeared to trends – they may not be for you or your preferences and that surely will not lead to a congenial home!
3. Don’t Doubt Yourself
– if you are constantly changing your mind then you will never have finality with your interior project. Make the best decision that you can and then stay with it. The process of second guessing is time consuming and you likely will return to your first choice anyway! Just be sure to make decisions thoughtfully and wholeheartedly.
4. Start with Inspiration
– you can begin with creating your own mood or inspiration board. This essentially is an electronic or cardboard page that you place clippings of all of the pieces of fabric, furniture, paint chips, swatches and pictures that you collect from magazines, brochures, Instagram, Pinterest, other online sources, etc. that will help you to build your personal awareness of what your design preferences are. This is a bit of extra work, but it goes a long way throughout the process of making actual selections as you can refer back to your mood board and ask yourself if it is in line with your beginning vision. A good mood board will reflect the patterns and colours that you like and this is helpful for you throughout the planning and purchasing process.
5. Timeline
– don’t let yourself work on this forever! You should give yourself a date that you place on your calendar for decision-making. Know that eventually you will have to make decisions and creating a timeline and staying with it, will allow you to do this. You should find comfort in the knowing that you have done your best and that whatever home interior decisions you make, it will still be incrementally better than the way it currently is.
6. Leave Some for Later
– while it is always better to have a well functioning, decorated home, it may not always be possible to have it the way you want all at once. You may opt to leave some of the decorating in less used spaces for another time. However, a word of caution to not ignore it too long as you are missing out on enjoying and using a part of your property that you pay taxes, insurance and likely mortgage payments on together with utilities and upkeep. It is a disservice to you and your family not to be able to utilize the entire space as it was intended when you purchased it.
7. Engage Help
– sometimes in life we need help from professionals that will in the long run save our time, energy and even money. Depending on your lifestyle, the anxiety that accompanies not having your domestic premises at their best, can mean a longer term drain on your emotions and the feeling or being disorganized. Your residence needs to be your personal retreat, to get away from it all. The peace that comes with having a beautiful and harmonious environment is not something that should be compromised.
Wishing to take care of your own interiors, but maybe help would be welcome?
