AN interior design guru has revealed the eight mistakes that people make that can totally cheapen the appearance of their homes.
Kiva Brent expressed her dislike for everything from oversized rugs to having all Ikea furniture in your home – so, are you guilty of any of these interior design faux pas?
In a clip shared to her YouTube channel (@DIY with KB), she begins by discussing "too sparse curtains."
"The first thing that does look pretty cheap is when you have your curtains up on the wall, but they're not adequately full," Kiva explains.
"I see people all the time that put curtains up and they only put one panel on the side.
"Sometimes that's all the window needs, that's all the room can accommodate, but other times it just looks kind of sparse."
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According to Kiva, the second reason your house looks cheap is because your furniture doesn't have a back on it.
"If you're buying furniture from Ikea, Walmart or Target, if you're buying affordable furniture in general, there's nothing wrong with that," Kiva says.
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"But something that they do to skimp on you so that they don't have to spend as much money with the manufacturing is they actually don't put backings on furniture," she explains.
"…It leaves you so limited into how you can position your furniture.
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"And the way you position your furniture really has a huge bearing on how your interior design comes across."
Kiva goes on to say that having pillows that are too small for the sofa also grinds her gears, while "mismatched nightstands" are also on her hit list.
"The mismatch vibe – it's really hard to make them complement one another," she explains.
"Of course, if you can get them in the exact same colour and the exact same height it looks good, but if one of your nightstands is three feet tall and the other one is 12 inches tall, it's really just not working for me."
Moving on, the fifth interior design mistake that Kiva warns will make your home look cheap is pilling furniture, which is when the material forms small balls of fluff on its surface.
Kiva then discusses oversized rugs.
"People are buying things that are way too big," she explains.
"I see a rug going up the baseboards, I see a rug touching the baseboards, I see a rug in your living room touching the end of your dining chair…that rug is way too big.
Kiva continues: "We put a rug on our floors to create some contrast, to create some dimension…if you have one that takes up all of the room you haven't actually fixed that problem.
"So we really need an accent rug that's big enough for the space to frame it out but doesn't take up the entire floor."
The interior design whizz says another thing that looks cheap and "breaks her heart" is having everything Ikea.
"You don't need to be a designer to be able to tell if something is Ikea – it's very easily identifiable.
"That means that everyone knows how much it costs, so we don't want to get everything from one place because we don't want anyone to be able to tally up how much our home costs."
Finally, Kiva advises against over styling.
"Over styling a space means you're putting too much stuff in there, and over styling often happens when we don't do any space planning, or we don't really have an idea of scale…" she explains.
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"Over styling can look very cheap because a lot of the time it ends up being things that are not scaled correctly."
Offering an example, she continues: "You have like ten tiny little vases or a hundred tiny little discs…it really fills up the space, it makes it look super cluttered right and clutter does come across as cheap."
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