Decorating Regrets?

[dr.girlfriend]

I posted in a thread below that as much as I agonize over decorating choices initially, I'm usually 100% happy with them once I've made them.  I'm trying to console myself with that thought as I'm currently agonizing over bathroom tile (and potentially talking myself out of tile that's $16 per square foot and into tile that's $190 per square foot). 

I'm trying to think of times when I've really just hated something and had to redo it, and not much comes to mind.  Probably the closest thing I could think of was when I replaced our nearly-new pendants in the kitchen for clear ones because I realized visually they were less obtrusive.  I'm also mad that I paid extra for motorized blinds in the top (inaccessible) windows in our bedroom because I have never once needed to close them.

So, how about you guys ... anyone have any big decorating regrets?

[laterz]

If I had extra money to throw around I’d replace some of our window treatments. They aren’t bad but we pulled the trigger on them fast when we moved in. I might’ve chosen different things once we had the rest of the house more decorated. Oh well.

[Susie]

I regretted the pedestal sink in the half bath in our last house. Should've done a vanity instead.

I'm sure there are more, I'll have to keep thinking.

I regretted insisting on cherry cabinets, quartz counters, marble tile, etc. in our bath reno when we opted to sell 3 years later. Related, I think I regret not being more realistic about the space that our last house did and didn't have. I think I could've come to the realization that we would eventually move, sooner, which would have impacted a variety of decisions.

[Pibs]

Skylight shades on all of our skylights in our previous home. We really only used the ones in the bedroom. Right now I'm hoping it's not the paint colors we picked for our guest room -- we've got a plan, but right now it's just the finished base colors and I'm a little nervous.

[dr.girlfriend]

Mar 20, 2022 17:04:57 GMT -5 laterz said:

If I had extra money to throw around I’d replace some of our window treatments. They aren’t bad but we pulled the trigger on them fast when we moved in. I might’ve chosen different things once we had the rest of the house more decorated. Oh well.

One of the things I really found out too late in life were those cheap paper temporary blinds ... they stick to the top of the windowsill like a post-it and work really well in the short term!  I don't know if they just weren't invented yet when we first moved in 15 years ago or if I just didn't know about them so I'm spreading the word!  They are like less than $20 for a 6-pack and we had them up for several months while we were waiting for our custom blinds!


www.homedepot.com/p/Redi-Shade-White-Paper-Light-Filtering-Window-Shade-36-in-W-x-72-in-L-6-Pack-3161059HD/315095764

[dr.girlfriend]

Mar 20, 2022 17:27:13 GMT -5 Susie said:

I regretted the pedestal sink in the half bath in our last house. Should've done a vanity instead.

I'm sure there are more, I'll have to keep thinking.

I regretted insisting on cherry cabinets, quartz counters, marble tile, etc. in our bath reno when we opted to sell 3 years later. Related, I think I regret not being more realistic about the space that our last house did and didn't have. I think I could've come to the realization that we would eventually move, sooner, which would have impacted a variety of decisions.

Do you just wish you had storage, or some other reason?  We have a pedestal sink in our tiny powder room now, and I'm planning on keeping it with the reno.  But, we don't have need for storage in there, and I think especially if I do the $180 per square foot tile I want to see as many inches of it as possible!  :-)

[definitelyO]

you know - I agonize over all the decisions and never feel confident in the planning stages -but I'll say that I haven't really regretting anything - at least enough to change it. but I'm also slow to decorate...

I was very concerned about our dark walls in the bathroom -but love it now.

[RockNVoll]

I sort of regret the deep red we painted the room our piano is in. We loved the same color in our old house because it really sets off the drama of the grand piano. But that house got more light in that room and in this house it's just a little too dark. I'm way too lazy to deal with re-painting it as it's not terrible, I just don't love it. I'm also a little scared about what a PITA it might be to cover over the deep red with a lighter color.

Not so much a decorating regret as a design regret, but just today DH and I were talking about the balcony that's attached to our master bedroom and whether it was worth losing the window that would have gone beneath it on the first floor. If I had to do it over again, I probably would've picked the window so there's more light in the living room. The balcony in theory is nice, but it's south-facing and tough to shade so in practice we rarely actually sit out on it and our deck and patio are plenty of outdoor space.

[deadwing]

I have some regrets about the color I painted my home office. I wanted coral but ended up with something closer to baby pink. The biggest barrier to repainting is it would require moving my desk, which weighs something ridiculous like 400lbs.

This is what I ended up with: www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/color-overview/find-your-color/color/2170-50/teacup-rose?color=2170-50

This is what I would repaint to: www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/color-overview/find-your-color/color/af-285/moroccan-spice?color=AF-285

I worked with an interior designer to do my living room when I moved into this house. 5 years later and I still love it. It's so much better than what I would have done on my own.

The other thing I might have done differently in retrospect, although I don't think I'd actually call it a regret, is not putting in columns at the ends of the seating wall on my patio. They look nice, but they cost about as much as the rest of the wall.

[mrsukyankee]

We needed to get built in storage into our bedrooms very quickly and a guy I knew from Insta could do them quickly. I'm wishing I had waited and gotten a few people to make a bid. The work done isn't awful but it isn't as great as I'd like. and I still need to paint them myself as opposed to a bigger company who would have done the painting for us.

[Susie]

Mar 20, 2022 20:21:36 GMT -5 dr.girlfriend said:

Mar 20, 2022 17:27:13 GMT -5 Susie said:

I regretted the pedestal sink in the half bath in our last house. Should've done a vanity instead.

I'm sure there are more, I'll have to keep thinking.

I regretted insisting on cherry cabinets, quartz counters, marble tile, etc. in our bath reno when we opted to sell 3 years later. Related, I think I regret not being more realistic about the space that our last house did and didn't have. I think I could've come to the realization that we would eventually move, sooner, which would have impacted a variety of decisions.

Do you just wish you had storage, or some other reason?  We have a pedestal sink in our tiny powder room now, and I'm planning on keeping it with the reno.  But, we don't have need for storage in there, and I think especially if I do the $180 per square foot tile I want to see as many inches of it as possible!  :-)

It was the storage issue.  I could/should have hung a cabinet on the wall over the toilet to ease the issue, but never did.  There literally wasn't anywhere to even set spare TP besides the back of the toilet tank.  I kept the bathroom cleaning products (toilet bowl cleaner, Clorox wipes) in the family room TV cabinet that was immediately outside the half bath, which was sort of absurd.  

Our new house half bath also has a pedestal sink, and the cabinet over the toilet does ease the burden.  But I would prefer to have art in that spot and the spare TP, hand soap, and cleaning products in a vanity below.

[kitchenreno]

I regret the custom window treatments I put in our family room. To be honest, I never really liked them but I pretended for a while bc they were so expensive. After about 5 years, we redecorated the room and put them in the trash

[simpsongal]

LOL....so many things.

I've gotten better at picking paint colors, but I regretted a lot of the ones I chose early on in home ownership (have learned about light reflective value (LRV), undertones, just googling the best colors rather than guessing what I'll like on a color chip). E.g., the dark blue gray I once painted my kitchen, the shiny blue I painted my cabinets, the purple stripes in my bedroom.

I still struggle w/window treatments (esp drapes). I've picked more ugly ones than I can even recount

The cabinet pulls in our mudroom - I hit decision fatigue and didn't want to spend a lot. I just don't really like them. The stain on the cabinets too, it's too mid tone, I wanted more depth of color. I might change this when we do the kitchen but I'm living w/it for now.

Our dining room wall paper which I let DH pick. I've learned that it's important to like patterns in a larger scale, rather than just picking based on the swatch - when we redo the kitchen we'll do the dining room too.

Some cheap light fixtures I got just for quick. Or the one in our dining room I've since tossed.

Our stair railings. I needed them up to code when we moved in, so I picked a stair company and their std stuff. The white spindles were chipping and cracking quickly and you can tell they're filmsy (I broke one when I fell down the stairs recently). I'll be ripping it out in the next reno too.

[aprilsails]

I regret the light grey paint we used on our entire new build house two years ago. I used the exact same colour we had in our last house, where it was only on the ground floor, and where we had to walk a finer line to balance warm maple and cool grey toned woods and had Northern exposure.

At this house we have warmer woods and hard surfaces. I wish we had gone with a slightly warmer undertone grey. The good news (sort of) is that the painters did a spray finish and it is paper thin and easily ruined so we need to repaint anyway. Lots of rooms we intend to repaint to new colours anyway, but repainting the foyer and the second floor hallways will be expensive and pretty well a waste.

[jinkies]

While our new kitchen is generally 100% better than what it replaced, I have some big regrets about the layout. Both of the big ones probably would have been avoided if we had hired an actual designer rather than just worked with the kitchen designer at the cabinet store. It was a huge, expensive gut job so it's a bummer that I'm not 100% happy with it.

That's not entirely a decorating regret, though, more of a design one. As for decorating, I have definitely made some unfortunate paint choices over my years as a homeowner LOL.

[simpsongal]

jinkies would you mind explaining what you would have changed? I need to plan a kitchen reno next year or so, would love to avoid pitfalls.

[Susie]

I had a funny one recently.  This was the family room and fireplace in our old house, which we owned from 2008-21.



We always spent a ton of time in this room, but I hated the brass fireplace surround.  Well, my dad disliked his surround at his house too, so for his birthday in February he asked for a new fireplace surround (and help installing it).  We got him a matte black one, with nice magnetic closures on the bifold doors that work so much nicer than those crappy brass doors on ours.  It was <$300, and took him and MH an afternoon to install.  

So although we don't even own this house anymore, I feel like an idiot for not replacing ours years ago.  I am going to notice that stupid brass in family pictures forever.

[jinkies]

simpsongal, they were mostly issues specific to our house. The kitchen had 2 existing windows, and it was my understanding that it would be difficult/costly to change the window situation, so we worked around it. As it turns out, once the kitchen was gutted, it wouldn't have been an issue at all to move/reconfigure them. That doesn't seem like a big deal, except that it affected the placement of the sink, since we wanted it in front of a window. The ideal spot would have been between our existing two windows. The sink is annoyingly far from our stove now (like, the absolute maximum distance that still falls into the "ideal" measurements).

The other had to do with whether to have an island or a peninsula. We went with peninsula, largely bc of flooring issues-- we didn't want to redo the floors in the entire downstairs, and a peninsula covered the same area of the floor that the previous cabinets did. I actually don't hate the peninsula, but it bumps into our main dining area more than I expected, and I could have made some relatively minor changes to fix that if I had understood the measurements better.

I honestly had a lot of trouble picturing what everything would look like when we were in the design phase. We took down a wall, and completely reconfigured everything, so it was just hard for me to imagine what it would feel like when it was completed.

[simpsongal]

I'm sorry jinkies - try not to beat yourself up, planning from one floor plan a new hypothetical one is very difficult. I chalked out our mudroom on the garage floor when we were planning, and even putting boxes in places to simulate cabinets/walking around space just didn't give me a sense of space or layout - I still wonder if I went w/the right dimensions and layout.

I appreciate you sharing your experience.

[lessel]

This is a small thing, but I see it every day and it annoys me. I regret the paint we used for our kitchen cabinets. Don't regret painting them, but I don't think the paint that our painter selected is holding up well. It was some sort of specialty paint he had to order from California. (Name is escaping me and I'm too lazy to run to the basement to look at the can.) I wish we would have just went with SW or BM.

Admittedly it might have been a deeper issue than just the paint itself... the cabinets had previously been painted with a "gel stain" that was nigh impossible to remove and get a good finish for him to do painting on. Whatever the issue, the nicks and scuffs are frustrating.

[bhnumbers]

In our current house, I wish I had pushed DH harder and insisted on hardwood floors in the upstairs bedrooms. He was pretty easy going about almost everything else when we did our addition, but he really wanted wall to wall carpet in our room and I just don't like it. It's nice carpet and I had to pick my battles, but it's so boring. And I'm not a fan of putting a rug on top of carpet, so whatever, we just have boring carpet, lol.

In this house I have really taken my time making a lot of decorating decisions and I've worked with a professional designer, so currently, other than the bedroom carpet, I feel good about it what we've done. But in our old house I had many, many regrets, haha. When we moved in, I just felt like I was in a hurry to get it "finished" and made some bad decisions and took bad advice.

We put in a natural slate floor (on the advice of my BIL) in the kitchen that I ended up just hating. The color wasn't quite what I had envisioned in the first place, so there was that, but also the upkeep was ridiculous.

We painted the living room two different colors--cream and like a khaki-ish gold--so basically two shades of yellow. I disliked it as soon as we were done, but it took my a looooong time to admit it, lol.

Oh and then there was the time I decided that I should paint one wall of our bedroom chocolate brown to create "drama" on the wall our bed was on. Ugh. The drama was that it looked awful!

[libbygrl109]

I regret not choosing a nicer trim pattern than the basic ranch style that the guy we used originally put in. When we had a new front window put in a couple of years ago, they used something more decorative, and I like it so much better. Our kitchen guy was going to get some for our dining room window to match.

Would it look weird if the main living areas all had one trim patterns and inside the bedrooms and bathroom had something different?

[dr.girlfriend]

Mar 21, 2022 18:18:21 GMT -5 libbygrl109 said:

Would it look weird if the main living areas all had one trim patterns and inside the bedrooms and bathroom had something different?

I don't think that would look weird.

[krystee]

dr.girlfriend we are picking out tile now and I am dying to see your $190 tile! (Although my budget would prefer to see your $16 tile!)

[dr.girlfriend]

Mar 21, 2022 21:36:53 GMT -5 krystee said:

dr.girlfriend we are picking out tile now and I am dying to see your $190 tile! (Although my budget would prefer to see your $16 tile!)

The $6 tile -- did I say $16 -- if so that's a typo, it's $6 per square foot!:



Someone in my area used the black and white version in a reno and I really liked it:

The $180 per square foot tile:

The picture that made me obsessed with it -- a stove inset backplash:


Fortunately it's a very small powder room.  I'll only need somewhere between 16-19 square feet, but it's still a splurge!

[krystee]

I like both, but I LOVE the expensive one!

[ssmjlm]

I don't like the tile in our master bath, but DH always has opinions, so I caved. We actually would both love to redo that bathroom after living here a while.

I would have reconfigured our upstairs to take away the 2 story foyer and make it a small office/reading room. It's not huge, but I think if we shifted the laundry a bit, we could have made a sort of secret door to it. Our stage in life right now and the slanted ceilings in our bonus room make having any sort of workout space difficult since our sunroom is the current playroom.

[dr.girlfriend]

Mar 21, 2022 22:15:09 GMT -5 krystee said:

I like both, but I LOVE the expensive one!

That's kind of my feeling.  For an extra $3k I think it would make me happy every time I step in there!

[simpsongal]

Mar 22, 2022 8:09:54 GMT -5 dr.girlfriend said:

Mar 21, 2022 22:15:09 GMT -5 krystee said:

I like both, but I LOVE the expensive one!

That's kind of my feeling.  For an extra $3k I think it would make me happy every time I step in there!

I know it's crazy expensive, but at least I think I can see the expense in the complexity of the tile design. I'd spring for it
And/or stalk floor and decor for something comparable. But if all you're doing is that stove inset, worth it!

[deadwing]

The expensive one is reallllly pretty. For a bathroom, would you have a mat down? I only ask because that's pretty typical in bathrooms and in a small powder room that might cover most of your beautiful design.