10 Reasons Why Your Home Looks CHEAP | Interior Design Mistakes and How to Fix Them!

hi guys if you're new here my name is kiva and i teach people how to achieve the luxe look for less and today we're doing something a little different i'm giving you 10 reasons why your house is looking cheap yeah i'm gonna attack you i might even hurt your feelings but trust me making these slight modifications is going to take your home to the very next level before we get into today's video please remember to subscribe like this video and check me out on instagram and if you want me to design your home click the link in my description box for my virtual design sessions let's get into today's video coming in at number one the main thing that you're doing is you're buying curtains but the curtains don't touch the floor now when you buy curtains you want them to kiss the floor you don't want them um you know six inches away from the floor or always puddling on the floor so if you're gonna do one of those two things you want them pooling on the floor it's gonna give you that really nice castle vibe i if you live in a castle i think it's good if you live in a grand mansion i think it's good otherwise it's not for everyone and the standard home but the main mistake again that you're making as you're having your curtains six inches from the floor seven inches from the floor five inches from the floor you want the curtains to just touch the floor when they don't touch the floor it looks like you've purchased curtains that are too small for your space when you have curtains that are too short it just looks like you haven't given it very much thought it also draws your attention to the floor and when you spend all this time decorating your house investing in it making it look beautiful why would you want to draw the attention to the floor and not do all of your beautiful decor when you're dealing with curtains you want them as close to the ceiling as possible if you have some type of molding definitely don't put your curtains into that that is not what i'm saying but you want to do the curtain rod as high as you can because you want to make the room feel as large as possible whether you like it or not large homes are correlated with luxury and wealth because they just cost more money so we want to make our spaces look as big as humanly possible and curtains are a perfect way to fool people into thinking your space is larger than it is so getting appropriately sized curtains making your home look big but getting inappropriately sized curtains so extra short curtains makes your house look small when you're dealing with curtains you also want to make sure that the curtains are appropriate in terms of width if your curtains are the exact same size as your window or smaller again you're making your house look small you want to make sure that they are proportionate to your window these are really slight tips and you can fix these things with items from ikea target walmart these modifications don't have to be expensive if you're buying curtains i want you if the options are too short or too long buy them too long and hem them if you have a sewing machine you can hem them and if not you can use hemming tape and hand them in that way at least you are more likely to have something that is overflowing and not something that is way too short because that is just not the look you want this is such an easy fix and i know that this is going to take your home to the very next level the next thing that you're doing that is keeping your home looking cheap is not styling your furniture now here at diy with kb you know i have no problem with buying cheap furniture i never want anyone to buy something that they can't afford if you're taking out a second mortgage to pay for your home decor there's something backwards going on let's not do that we can make our homes look beautiful on a budget if that weren't the case then i wouldn't have a job so we can make cheap furniture look good but we have to style it the number one mistake that i see is that people go to ikea and they buy a full ikea bedroom set i'm glad you got the bedroom set for 500 that's phenomenal but if you don't add your own twist if you don't add your own decor it looks like you just bought the ikea set i'm sorry but everyone knows what an ikea mom bedroom set looks like you can't fool anyone we all know what it looks like so if you don't jazz it up people know how much you paid for your furniture there's nothing wrong with getting furniture on a budget you watch me brag about it all the time like hey i got this for ten dollars and this is five dollars but you want it to be affordable but also look nice so we're gonna take the nikea furniture and we're going to style it we're going to add some vessels um some trays some picture frames some artwork we are going to style those pieces and we're going to arrange them appropriately it is so easy to upgrade really affordable furniture okay you went to ikea and you got the mom dressers let's put some handles on them then is it from ikea is it from anthropology you don't really know right there are such small modifications that you can make that cost little to no money that you're going to take your pieces of furniture to the next level i'm just telling you people can tell ikea people can tell target people can tell what those things are so let's shift them in a way where you're not drawn to the fact that someone got this exact set from this exact store and it's not just about that adding decor to your furniture to your space just represents you right and we want people to think that we spent time thinking about our home curating our home and that's what decor displays now you can do minimalist decor like me you know i'll put a pot there and i'm like aha that's it that's fine but that's still me putting my own twist on it that's still me doing something that represents me and what i like and what my family loves the third thing that you're doing that is making your home look cheap is you are buying the same art that everyone has now i love ikea i love home goods but we we are pushing the limits of their decor right so at ikea everyone has the same prince if you had that nice forest landscape that you see in every ikea i know that you got it from ikea that doesn't make me think that you commissioned artwork that you invested in artwork that you you're trying to be worldly and you know source artwork from around the world that's not relaying that to me i'm not saying you have to do those things but again we're thinking about what wealthy people do what people do with luxurious homes they spend time looking for art that is perfect that is unique right so there's nothing unique about saying buying the same thing that joe has and bob has and kim has and mary has because they all have it um so sure you can buy artwork from ikea but just know that everyone else also knows you bought that artwork from ikea but there are very many ways to fix this problem so you can always go to ikea buy those canvases and paint over them because they're really affordable and they make for really great canvases that's what i did in my most recent video if you haven't seen that yet i'm gonna link it right here you can also get artwork from places like etsy and society6 and even on instagram what i like to do is find local artists or small businesses and try to support their work because the only way they're gonna become famous is if we find their artwork and we share it with the world the same thing happens with home goods okay guys i know this is it you love sarah brooks i love sarah brooks too her artwork is fantastic but if you all have the same painting i know exactly where you got it i know exactly what you paid and then if you style it in the exact same way there's nothing unique about that right we want to choose artwork that is specific to our home i've seen so many of you diying her art you know instead of doing the pink and brown you're doing blues and blacks and whites you know adding some diversity to it my jessica j she did a sarah brooks dupe art with the lines but she did colors in her color scheme so it fit her a little bit more so of course you can buy that art that's popular but don't style it in the same way and also understand that everyone also has that artwork and you can't fool people into thinking you paid a thousand dollars for it or you commissioned it because i know you got it at home good trends exists we love trends but we can't buy into every trend i had this one client she always says to me fomo i see the sarah brooks art and i feel fomo and i'm like art is great we love the art we love the text about the art but the art does not fit in her home so we're not gonna buy it and that's okay we're getting artwork that's unique that's gonna set her apart when other people come into her home and they want to go oh wow this looks amazing now this one is a pet peeve of mine it drives me crazy it is the first thing i notice when i walk into anyone's home and that is that you are buying rugs that are too small for your space it makes your home look cheap and let me tell you why it just because it looks like you went out and you bought whatever rug was the easiest to find and you didn't scale the rug appropriately to your space if you have a living room that's 28 feet by you know 20 feet you cannot get a 5x8 rug i'm sorry i don't care if you like it i don't care if it's on sale it doesn't look right it actually makes your room look even smaller and like i said earlier when you make your house look smaller it inherently looks cheaper because you want to make sure that your rug not only is appropriately scaled to your space but that all of your furniture in your living area is able to touch the rug now if you're doing you know like a cow high rug or something like that that's different leave it on display put it you know in the corner and be like ah this is it i love it this is luxury but that's not what most of us are doing so we normally have a rug in the middle of our living area and we wanted to extend probably a foot on either side of our sofa and we want all of our pieces of furniture to be able to at least touch the rug but we want maybe at least a quarter of the chair to sit on the rug a quarter of the sofa to sit on the rug you want everything to touch the rug so that it anchors the space well and it defines it really really well especially if you have an open concept open concepts are popular now i'm happy that i have one we like to find rooms but what am i gonna do i'm gonna put up a wall in my house absolutely not to fix that i need to define my spaces and a rug is the perfect way to do it because if i have a rug that has the colors of my living area in it and then i have a rug that has the colors of my dining area in it it really breaks apart the room even though it's only one big room so that is a really minor adjustment that you can make so what i always say is let's measure before we buy the furniture or before we buy the rug we can get some blue painters tape put it on the floor and map out how big we really need that rug to be you can use an online modeling software there are tons of them that are free they can tell you exactly what size rug you need for your space and you're like oh they're really expensive rugs usa boutique rugs wayfarer they have tons of rugs that are massive in size and a 10 by 14 on one of those websites is probably 400 to 500 and i see rugs for that price that are significantly smaller in home goods all the time and people buy them so i don't think that that's that much money uh difference that you're paying you can also go to stores like at home and search in person to find rugs that are appropriate in size a rug can be an investment piece so that's why i never recommend that people buy you know the rug that's like rainbow and it really fits their style for that time because you can take the rugs with you with four years to come even if your style changes um and therefore the investment is worth it now if you went to college you know that plastic furniture is all the rage ah in my freshman year dorm i walked in there i had the twinkly lights i had the plastic storage container for my pants and my shirts i was living large i thought it was hot in there it was not if we're not in college anymore if we can afford you know more expensive furniture we're done with the plastic furniture that inherently looks cheap because plastic furniture is cheap and it breaks and it creaks and you can see through it i don't need to be able to see every single shirt that you have no one needs to see that you can have that plastic furniture in your bedroom perhaps um in your closet even better but we don't have that in the living room i don't care how nice of a cup holder it makes we're not doing it it is over and let me also say this sure we love those plastic tupperware containers the container store has got me you guys they will send me a coupon every day i'll drive near the container store and something will pop up on my watch and say kiva there's a coupon and they're trying me they're trying to get me in there and you know what they're almost always successful but i'm not buying those things and putting them on display i have those huge containers but actually my entire guest room's bathroom is full of those containers i don't know what i'm gonna do when someone comes over but i'm trying to tell you i succumb to it too but that plastic furniture especially for places like the container store and target are super expensive you can get a piece of furniture for the same price at ikea target walmart home goods just about anywhere um so instead of spending money on that plastic furniture let's spend some money on some non-plastic furniture and then you're like kiva how am i gonna store all my things well we gotta reconduit we gotta do some inventory we gotta think about the things that we need you know i'm all about minimalism here it's a process but if you have 10 plastic storage containers full of things that you feel like you access all the time you're lying to yourself you're not accessing them all the time let's cycle these things out again these are okay for your garage for your closet for spaces that people don't see but we're not doing plastic furniture in the living room because it it's not it it is not a look it's ugly and it's plastic there's no way that you can dress up plastic if you feel like you can do it please let me know down in the comments i will boost your profile i will send it into the news because you will have done something that is impossible and i want to see it now this critique is going to hit some nerves i'm sorry in advance but if you have all leather furniture if your entire living room is all other furniture it's looking cheap i know that that was all the rage in the 90s that's what my parents took me home to and that was it they were living large but it's not it anymore i'm not saying that you can't have leather pieces leather pieces are phenomenal but we can't do the all leather living room not only is it not working because leather tends to be dark and it really makes the space feel small again moral of the video small is not it but it's it's too bulky now the exception to that is like a chesterfield or um a singular uh leather piece of furniture so i love a good chesterfield toe for you guys they are they're sexy that's that is the best adjective they are sexy i love them but we're not going to do a chesty field next to a chesterfield next to another you know a piece of leather next to another piece of leather with a leather rug and a leather like fixture and all leather clothes on we're just not going to do that we want one leather piece and we want it to look locked so we want it to stand on its own when you fill a room with too much of the same thing period it looks cheap but you can't have some leather pieces i'm not saying throw it all away so what i'm going to tell you to do is spread those things out throughout your home you keep one leather sofa in the living room then you put maybe the leather chairs in the sitting room and then maybe the leather ottoman downstairs in the basement for the kids or something like that we just need to spread apart that texture so it doesn't overwhelm a space uh unless again you have your man cave your mansion your cam your castle it just really isn't speaking to the times and we want to make a space feel big and it makes it feel small the end the next thing that you're doing that is making your home look cheap is something that i'm still struggling with right so i'm offending myself right now so if i've hit some nerves know that i'm also offending myself it's having your cores exposed having cords exposed just looks bad right you're like why don't you just take the five minutes it's gonna take to run that extra extension cord or drill a hole and pull something through the other side it just looks really busy and messy look at these pictures here it looks busy that's it i mean you know the why there there is no design style and which wires are it maybe in an industrial type of home where you have wires with your chandeliers but i don't think you just put a chandelier just in the middle of the wall so for us it's not relevant now i'm not going to necessarily tell you how to fix this because this is something i'm still working on myself but edward lee films he has a phenomenal cable management video so i suggest that you go watch that i'll link that down below but having cables exposed just looks cheap look at all of your luxury stores you never see any cables furthermore you don't see any electronics and all of the light fixtures have the cables actually running underneath the furniture but those are some tips to take from there we just don't want those cords exposed because it it's very distracting right and cords tend to be black right so if you have a nice light and airy home and then you suddenly have some black it doesn't matter how beautiful you style your coffee table i'm going to notice that and it is a really quick and easy fix i'm saying this again as someone who's struggling with it it would really just take me five minutes and yet i've not done it and it has been three years so a really easy fix and something that it really just doesn't look good because it adds clutter and clutter is not what you see when you think of lux along with that something that looks a little bit cheap is not mounting your televisions now you guys all remember i went to restoration harvard one time and i was like where do you think i should put my tv and she was like oh like like we don't do that like we don't we don't do tvs and i was like what do you mean i'll do tvs how am i supposed to watch the news no let me be honest how am i supposed to watch uh jersey shore or whatever it is i watch um and they're like we just we're not doing that you know we're not watching the tv in the living room so we've eliminated a tv it's good to not do so much screen time but i digress if you're gonna have a tv on display we need to have it mounted right because we don't want it it the tv needs to be up on the wall um we want to put the tv in the place actually where it looks like a piece of artwork we want to make it look a little bit more luxe again if you mount the tv you're not going to be seeing um all of those consoles in front of your television we're going to put those in our media cabinet it's going to look really nice and crisp and clean and because it's mounted on the tv we're not going to be drawn to it we're not our eyes aren't going to automatically go there so we're not going to notice that there's a tv in this really luxurious looking home it's it's not going to be something that our attention is drawn to because it feels out of space out of place it's going to be on the wall if you want to take it even to the next level and make it look more lux you can get a frame tv now i think those are too expensive so what you can do is actually frame out your own tv they have dupes on amazon you can also go to the junkyard or to home depot and get some wood and frame it out yourself and paint it and call it a day and set a screensaver on your tv and of course we're going to put a piece of cord covering on the cord to the tv so that even looks seamless as well another reason your home is looking cheap is because you're buying light fixtures that are not appropriately sized for your space now let me show you an example i love the light fixture but the light fixture looks like you know an iphone in the sky relative to what it should look like a light fixture sisters a chandelier should be making a statement in a home so if it is too small for the space what is the point you spent thousands of dollars on it and i can't even see it so it's making your home look cheap but i know it wasn't cheap so that's that's a double whammy there right you spend a lot of money and it doesn't look like you spent that much money at all so measure your space scale it again just like i said for the rugs and it's going to make your lighting look a lot more high-end this applies not only to chandeliers but actually lamps on tables so this is an example right here i love the lamp i love the table but the lamp and the table together don't go because the lamp takes up the entire table not only does it look silly because it makes everything look really narrow and stout and small but the table now has absolutely no utility because the only thing that i can fit is this side um this lamp so those are my thoughts on that this is what an appropriately scaled side table lamp looks like with a side table i think this is really successful scale is always important it will continue to be important and i'm not saying people don't get away with it sometimes i get away with it sometimes i like really oversized furniture but also it restricts my movement so you also need to consider just because something looks good in a photo doesn't mean that it's practical for everyday living so don't think so just think about those things as you are decorating your home the final mistake that you're making that is making your home look cheap is that you are holding on to the mirrored furniture now glam was it it was all the rage we wanted the mirrored coffee table with the mirrored sofa with the mirrored mirror with the mirror i don't know mirroring everything and while that makes the room look big it just it's too shiny there's too much going on it's too distracting and therefore it looks a little bit cheap because the design isn't just that sophisticated because there's not really a focal point there's not really one place where my eye is going to be drawn to because it is too busy i'm always saying less is more simple to me is better because we know exactly what we're focusing on and that thing can speak volumes for a space and i'm not saying that i don't like the glam design because i do actually have one client i think she's done a phenomenal phenomenal job with the glam design but it's not something that lasts forever i think something else that i really struggle with with mirrored furniture is that because it was trendy it's also really really cheap now um so therefore it looks cheap because it is cheap and last but not least mirrored furniture accumulates so much dust there's dust everywhere when you look at a mirror there's dust you should see how many times i try and dust that mirror i will get on the ladder and i will just swiffer it all day long and it looks exactly the same it's so frustrating when you have a ton of beard furniture there's a buildup of dust and debris and of course that never looks nice because we want everything to look really nice and sleek and clean so if you fell into the mirror trend i'm sure you did a great job of it but it just isn't in anymore okay guys that's it for today's video let me know down below which of these mistakes you are making that is making your home look cheap it's okay i'm not gonna judge you i tell you i've made so many of them myself please let me know what modifications you're gonna be making thank you so much for watching today's video if you liked it please remember to subscribe like this video and check me out on instagram and if you want me to design your home click the link down in my description box for my virtual design sessions until next time have a beautiful day

Channel: DIY with KB

Views: 741,872

Keywords: diy with kb, diy by kb, kiva brent, Kiva Brent interior design, interior design mistakes, interior design problems, interior design trends, interior design help, interior designer, modern interior design, luxe look for less, affordable home decor, home decor, interior design mistakes that make your home look cheap, 10 reasons why your home looks cheap, cheap home, interior design advice, Kiva Brent design

Id: y_8IMXBuUwA

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021