Here's how you know you've got a problem: Months, maybe even years, after moving into your home, you still have to talk people through it. Sure, in your mind things may be nicely arranged, but that ideal bears little resemblance to three-dimensional reality. So you say things like this:
To the pizza delivery guy: "Sorry you have to step over the bicycles; they're only there until I get this stuff organized…" To your in-laws: "This'll look a lot better with hardwood floors, of course. And we want to knock out a wall." To a friend: "I wish that chair were more comfortable. It's just a placeholder until I get some pieces I really like."
Such comments are fine if you've recently sent out change-of-address cards, but some people spend their whole lives substituting apologies and descriptions for window treatments and furniture placement. It's not that they don't have great ideas; it's that acting on them is another story. If any of this sounds familiar—if you're still narrating the home of your dreams, instead of living in it—you might need a little push to get started.
First, let's figure out why taking your living room from the theoretical to the actual seems so daunting. The cause of almost all decorating paralysis can be summed up in one little word: fear. Of course, that breaks down into a host of different subspecies: the fear of doing something wrong, the fear of displaying poor taste, the fear of spending too much money, the fear that your floor will collapse under the weight of new furniture and swallow you like a bug in a Venus flytrap.
In the end, though, fear is just one more excuse to not begin. If you get cold feet when you try to start a home-improvement project, you could take the issue to a therapist and "work through it." But that'll take time—a lot of time—which is exactly the problem. I prefer quick-and-dirty approaches that allow me and my clients to overcome fear without having to dissect our various personality complexes and mental disorders. I refer, of course, to horse tranquilizers.
I wish.
Seriously, although I don't object to chemical assistance, I myself am a fake doctor (the kind with a PhD instead of an MD), so I can only prescribe behavioral strategies to break through beginners' qualms. A few of my favorites follow.
Fear-buster #1: Play make-believe
Remove the pressure of perfection and imagine that:
No one except you is ever going to see your space. You can create any look you want, free of charge. If you don't like something, you can change it instantly.
Hold this suspension of disbelief as you flip through magazines, catalogs, and design books, noticing the décor you adore when fear is absent. Then set about creating the look you love. If fear rises up, ignore it. If you can't, read on.
Fear-buster #2: Make mammoth mini-moves
Question: How did cavemen eat entire mammoths? Answer: One bite at a time. The most common source of anxiety is thinking of big jobs as monolithic events. This overwhelms most people before they move a muscle. The solution is to move a muscle. Or maybe two. Not more.
Here's how this might work if, say, the previous owners painted your home study a lovely shade of dung brown. Instead of thinking, "I've got to take a weekend and paint this room," which is a big and therefore threatening task, slice off a tiny bit of mammoth each day. Today, collect a few objects whose colors you love—flowers, fabric, a magazine photo. Tomorrow, drop by the paint store and grab some chips in the general right color range. On Day 3, prop the paint chips against the wall of the living room. Day 4, walk in and squint at the paint chips at different times of the day, observing how they look in changing light. And so on.
I'm delineating these excruciatingly small steps because that's how big projects get done. Ironically, it's the worst procrastinators who insist this is no way to proceed. "If I worked at that rate," they say in disgust, "I'd never finish!" Two years, five years, 10 years later, they're still talking people past their turd-colored walls.
The problem is, there's never time in this moment—right this moment—for a huge job. There's only time to take one small step. Tiny steps allow action to slip through the cracks in your anxiety. Take them, and things start getting done. Big things. Mammoth, you'll find, is quite tasty in small servings. Keep it around, and before you know it, you'll have eaten the whole thing.
