What to Do When You Have Too Many Home Decor Ideas
What to Do When You Have Too Many Home Decor Ideas
The struggle is real—and debilitating.
The idea-generation process can feel exciting, but when you have endless ideas, it’s easy to feel disillusioned once you realize you can’t act on all of them.
Earlier this month on House Call, I wrote about how to discover new design ideas and get unstuck. When it comes to designing and decorating our homes, some people don’t have enough ideas—others have too many. I have experience in both camps, but with work and creative endeavors, I tend to fall into the latter.
Most of my ideas come from a place of creativity and excitement. The idea-generation process can feel exciting, but when you have endless ideas, it’s easy to feel disillusioned once you realize you can’t act on all of them. If you have lots and lots of ideas, how can you narrow them down so you can begin pursuing one? I don’t have the answer perfectly figured out, but I’m getting there. It’s a topic I’m eager to explore today.
The Downside of Having Endless Ideas
In the realm of decorating our home, there’s a cost associated with trying to pursue all of our ideas. Usually, it’s in the form of our budget, energy, or time. It can also present as a feeling of shame when we don’t complete whatever we started.
In the book The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, psychotherapist Katherine Morgan Schafler identifies five types of perfectionists. I fall into the “messy perfectionist” category—someone who tends to excel in many areas but rarely finishes anything. That kind of creative excitement works at times, but rarely does it benefit me when it comes to decorating my home. Through this approach, I tend to spread myself too thin.
Consciously, I was unaware of my tendency to stay in the ideation phase so long that burnout, overwhelm, and, ultimately, failure came to foil my best-laid plans. Lately, I’ve been stuck without a way to narrow down my ideas to what matters.
Schafler says messy perfectionists tend to find themselves reckoning with the fallout of too many unexplored ideas and unfinished projects. They feel a sense of despair, see the trap for what it is, and are left to figure out a new way forward. This post is my attempt to find that way forward.