Common & Costly Decorating Mistakes in the Family Room

We’ve all made them, and they cost time and money.  Avoid falling into decorating traps and backing yourself into a corner, literally and figuratively, when decorating a family room.

  • Don’t crowd the furniture – keep at least 24-36 inches to allow access to seating and entering and exiting the room.
  • Don’t choose a theme and decorate to it down to the letter.  It will look contrived and overdone.  What you do is choose a style, and decorate around that style.  You want to express your style, not decorate to a room recipe.
  • Don’t choose matching furniture suites.  Mix and match is a better choice, especially for more casual areas.  If one piece needs to go in a furniture suite, the whole room of furniture will need to go, and that will cost you big bucks.
  • Don’t push all your furniture against the wall to make the room look larger.  It only enhances the fact that the room is too small.  Angle the furniture in the corner – it makes the room look larger by visually extending the corner to a larger line.
  • Don’t choose your paint color first.  Choose the upholstery or furniture first so you’re not decorating around a paint color.  Choose the paint color to enhance the furniture, it’s much cheaper to change paint than to change furniture.
  • Don’t let your cords show – power cords are ugly, the more you can hide them, the better.  Use cord covers or run them along baseboards and hide them in any way possible.
  • Don’t keep furniture you don’t like – you will end up decorating around it which costs more than the offending furniture itself.
  • Don’t hang wall art to high – it’s one of the most common decorating problems.  Wall décor should be at eye level.
  • Don’t choose form over function – family rooms are for comfort, that’s their primary function and this should be considered over a particular piece furniture or style, like that couch that you love so much in the white upholstery.  Save it for a formal living room.
  • Don’t follow fads – you can keep your style up to date but if you follow every design fad that comes along, you’re going to be redecorating constantly.  Fads go in and out of style, trends are longer lasting and predict where interior designs are heading. 
  • Don’t allow area rugs to float helplessly in the room, they need to be anchored by furniture to turn it into a seating group.