If you are moving into a new house or want to change the look of your current interior design, there are common decorating mistakes you will want to avoid. They can be easy to make, mostly because they are often things that you just don't think about until you see it.

Our interior design specialists at the Lake of the Ozarks have 7 of these mistakes explained in today's blog, plus a few tips on how to avoid them. Once you know what to keep an eye out for, it will be a lot easier to find the perfect pieces for your home when you shop at John Elliott Interiors.

Choosing Wall Color First
If you want to paint a room in something bolder than a light neutral, it's a good idea to decide on the pieces from our Lake of the Ozarks furniture store that you want to include in the room first. It's a lot easier to pick a wall color that looks good with the fabric on your furniture from the many paint colors available today. On the other hand, if you pick the paint first, you are narrowing your choices of the types of furniture you can use in the room.

Not Measuring Furniture
It's terribly frustrating to fall in love with a particular piece of furniture and later find out that it does not fit in the space you wanted to place it in. Take good measurements of the room you are furnishing so that you know what size furniture will fit in it comfortably and make sense with the scale of the room. If you find pieces that you want before you get room measurements taken, measure the furniture instead. Then you can go home and double-check whether or not it will fit. You can always ask if a specific piece is available in different sizes too.


Using the Wrong Size Rug
The scale of the rug in a room needs to work with the scale of the space as well as the furniture. It should be large enough that you can place the front feet of each piece of furniture surrounding it on the rug. Generally, a little bit too big is better than too small.   

Dark Furniture in Small Spaces
Dark pieces of furniture used in a small space can give it the look and feeling of being cramped and smaller than it actually is. Lighter fabrics and finishes are better for making the space appear more open.

Hanging Art Too High
Pay attention to exactly where you decide to hang your artwork on the wall, don't just look for an empty open space. It should be placed so that the center of the artwork is at eye level, or as an average about 60 inches from the floor. If the art is going in a child's room, you may want to aim a little lower. For pieces hung above a sofa or headboard, the bottom of the frame should hit about 6-10 inches above the back of the furniture.


Being Afraid to Mix and Match
Furniture manufacturers make shopping for an entire room easy by creating matching sets that are meant to go together. These are beautiful and always look lovely in a room, but you don't have to buy all of the pieces in that set. Mixing and matching different pieces of furniture that work well together is a wonderful way to incorporate some of your own personal style into a room's design.

Too Much Clutter
In this case, we are not talking about messy clutter (although you should have proper storage solutions for hiding all of that.) You can have too many knick-knacks placed around a room which makes it look busy instead of decorative. Go through everything that you have and choose a few favorite pieces to keep out, then move the rest to other rooms, get rid of them, or store them away to use another time. You can keep a room's look fresh by changing out the decorative pieces on display each season, every holiday, or simply when you feel like a change.


Now that you are thinking about the design tips we talked about above, you will be on the look-out for possible problems in those areas and hopefully avoid making those particular mistakes. The experts at our Lake of the Ozarks home furnishings store are always here to answer your decorating questions and happy to give advice where it is needed.