After we moved into our new house, I was so excited to decorate and start somewhere! We had moved from our condo in Kelowna to a 2500 sq ft house, and before we moved (it was across province) I sold as much furniture as I could. We essentially had a blank slate and it was so exciting! As someone who had never fully decorated a full house before, I found it to be overwhelming as well. Plus my husband was definitely wanting things to be moved in and finished right away, so we worked on purchasing a couch and table and other items like that before we really lived in the space. Well, wouldn’t you know that rushing to purchase expensive items like that didn’t work out well for us? LOL.
For example, our kitchen table… I love the idea of our kitchen table but loathe the colour. We ordered it from this shop across Canada that has the most gorgeous wooden furniture, and in the website pictures, it almost looked like this table had a red tone to it (which I’m not a fan of), but when we called to ask about it, we were told it was definitely was not red-toned or cherry wood. We were torn between this table and another (the other one we were leaning towards more), but since this one was currently in stock and the other table would have been a few weeks wait, we went with this one. Well, it turned out to be reddish. I was annoyed at the company for not being honest about it and annoyed at us for rushing this big purchase. It is a beautiful table and reselling it to purchase something else won’t work, we would never get what we paid for it. So I’m living with it and learning from my mistakes… don’t rush the process on expensive items!
The same kind of thing happened with our living room rug (sense a theme here?). Our son was 8 months at the time we moved in and we needed something for our hardwood floors so he could play. The rug would have to be quite large, around 7 x 10 feet, so it was hard finding something we liked. I knew I wanted something light and airy, we have a lot of dark wood in our home, however, I wasn’t sure if that would be a good idea with kids. I went back and forth on it forever but was so worried about having a lighter rug in a high traffic area, so Kiel and I went with a dark grey rug.
Ugh, it. is. so. dark. I didn’t mind it at first, but our house was also a mish mash of decor styles at the time. After I started to find my style groove, I just felt like our whole main floor vibe was thrown off by this really dark and contrasted rug. It did nothing for the space and to top it off, it wasn’t even cozy or soft! We kept it for a year and a half, reasoning that we bought it and would just have to live with it. It seemed silly to get rid of it and buy another rug, you know?
Well a few weeks ago I decided that I wanted to enjoy our space and that our home should feel like us. So I sold the rug (which was way easier than expected lol) and purchased the one that I originally wanted to get. And I absolutely love it! It is exactly what I was wanting and is so cozy and soft! I wish I would have just went with my first instinct and picked out what I wanted in the beginning.
Like I mentioned, we made this mistake several times in our home, and it’s the biggest decorating tip that I’ve learned: take your time when buying furniture! Learn to live in the space a bit before buying big-ticket items.
Bonus Tip: So I can see how something will look in a room, I take a picture with my phone, upload it to a photo editing site (I use PicMonkey) and then add in different ‘pieces’ of furniture to get an idea of how it will come together. I do this kind of sloppy usually, since I just want to get an idea visually of a space, but you could always take more time and tidy it up a bit. This is kind of like a mood/vision board, but I like to have the actual room so I can see what I would want to go and where.
^^ it’s a really rough idea but I wanted to see how the rug would look and if I should do a wall hanging above the piano (which I ended up doing – check out my DIY on that here!)
Thanks for stopping in and have a great day! xx Megan
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6 Comments
Great advice and we all make this mistake that is why I have now decided to paint everything.
Haha it’s hard though! And Picmonkey is awesome, I try to take a pic of a room when it’s as cleared out as it can be, then place items that I like – kind of like window shopping haha, but it’s so good for seeing how something might look 🙂
Oh how I can relate to this post. Our current couch is honestly falling apart because I’m taking my sweet time deciding on a sectional. 😂
Ps. I’m totally going to try out that pic app, I need to visualize my space!
That’s the number one advice I give all my friends too!! I’m not exaggerating one bit when I say we redid our living room in our first home 3 times in a matter of 2 1/2 years, along with our bedroom twice…we are definitely taking our time this time around.
Haha stop, we are so similar I swear haha! I have this issue all over our house and am finally figuring out what to put where, it is so annoying and I wish I had just let it be for a bit before ‘decoratingallthethings’ after moving in lol! The rug was a big one for me, ugh.
I couldn’t love this more! We are on couch number 10,000 because of rushing to buy and also our space being slightly awkward lol