Any home design project means a certain level of commitment. After all, these projects cost both time and money. For the DIY crowd, it’s important to avoid traps in design that will make your home into a museum of regret. Before you start your renovation projects, check out our list of the 5 Worst Home Design Ideas!
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5 of the Worst Home Design Ideas: Avoid the Traps!
Are there bad ideas in home design? Yes. Ask any interior design expert, and they’ll rattle off a dozen mistakes people make in DIY home design. Avoid traps in your DIY project by learning the worst of the worst trends.
1. “More Is More.”
The opposite of minimalism is maximalism, which is when a room is filled with more of everything. The idea that “more is more” can create a beautiful, cohesive space in theory, but all too often, this trend steers toward being tacky and overdone.
You can still do “more is more,” but make sure to read up on how to do this trend with the finesse it requires. Be thoughtful in the way you decorate a space with more color, fabrics, and accessories.
2. Dark Walls, White Trim
Who doesn’t love a bold, vibrant color on interior walls? It’s tempting to reach for the richest hues and paint all four walls of a room in that dark shade, but doing that is a mistake. Not only are dark walls difficult to paint over, but they can also suffocate the room and make the space feel small.
This offense is twice as bad when you keep the white trim on the baseboards and molding. If you’re going to go for dark paint, either keep it to a single wall or extend the color from the floor all the way to the ceiling, and install plenty of light to balance the room.
3. Popcorn Ceilings
Is there any trend quite as dreadful as a popcorn ceiling? On top of looking dated, popcorn ceilings have a way of clinging to dust and are difficult to clean without making a huge mess. Popcorn ceilings are a trend best scrapped–as in literally scrapped, right into the garbage, along with all the other high-texture drywall trends that should have been forgotten in the 80s.
4. Wall-to-Wall Wallpaper
Wallpaper can be beautiful, especially today’s high quality, diverse, and eye-catching designs. Wallpaper can be a useful element to tie colors into a room and help create a sense of space in open-concept rooms. But if you are doing wallpaper, you should avoid traps like wall-to-wall wallpaper or a different wallpaper in every room.
The best way to approach wallpaper is to see it as a version of art. You wouldn’t put more than one painting on a wall, and you shouldn’t have more than one wall of wallpaper in a room.
5. One-Color Commitment
On the surface, picking one accent color and sticking to it seems simple. After all, you can’t possibly ruin a room with only a single color. Wrong. Commitment to a single color on an accent wall, accessories, and fabric is easy to create a bland space.
If you want to do color right, it’s important to find a balance between complementary colors and colors that make each other clash. Take a look at a color wheel for reference and use at least three colors to decorate a space.
Not all design trends are golden ideas. In fact, some ideas in home design are offensive to the senses and your budget. You can avoid traps in home design by balancing colors and textures and scrapping anything that keeps a room looking dated.
