Four Decorating Blocks Every DIY Home Decorator Faces (and how to overcome them)
How DIY decorating blocks plague us all, and how you can figure out yours to redesign a room you love.
Summary:
Redesigning a room by yourself takes a toll on you in four different ways, some more obvious than others. You might think you’re not good at decorating or that you’re not creative, when in reality, you and your space are just blocked. By figuring out what’s holding you back, redesigning and decorating a room you love can quickly go from stressful to fun, and you’ll get much better results, too. Learn what the four creative decorating blocks are and how you can overcome them in your unique space.
Becoming your own interior designer is a job you never asked for. Usually, when you go to redecorate a room, it feels really exciting at first, but then you actually have to start doing the work, and all those fun ideas suddenly seem more like irritating chores.
If you’re DIY decorating (meaning you’re not hiring a designer) you really do have to become your own, which means you have to not only think about how you want to redesign the room, but also how to logistically make it happen.
It’s a lot to think about, and it’s a lot to do on your own.
Last, week we talked about what designing a Magnetic Home actually feels like — you know, the one that sucks you and everyone else into the room because it’s so energetically potent.
I also shared the four “Home Alchemy Archetypes” that DIY decorators are looking for within their homes. If you haven’t read that yet, start there. It will set the stage for what we’re going to cover today.
Creative Decorating Blocks & What They’re Costing You
When you’re self-designing your room, it’s all fun and games until you hit a wall (no pun intended) and feel totally blocked in your ideas and execution.
Your vision starts to get cloudy, and you start getting confused in your own house, making redecorating way harder than it should be.
This is where I find people wasting a ton of time ruminating on the same decisions over and over, never able to commit.
I also find people spending money impulsively, guessing at what they think will work, only to create more confusion.
You’ll start second-guessing what you even like, and you might even get gun-shy about pulling the trigger on anything. (I’m not a fan of guns as a concept, FYI, but the metaphor works.)
What I help clients do inside the Home Alchemy Method is learn what specific blocks they’re having in their individual space, and then we work together to remove them or shift perspectives until they can clearly see what they need to do to design the room they want.
In my experience, there are essentially four major blocks people encounter in their homes that keep them stuck in their decorating process, so let’s knock ‘em out today, shall we?
Four Decorating Blocks & How to Beat Them
Decorating Block #1: Physical Blocks
This first decorating block is the obvious one, and it’s the physical items filling up your space.
Most people stand in the middle of a room they don’t like and try to visualize a new room on top of it. And they can’t.
That’s because your brain is too used to the familiar input of the room to imagine something over it. It’s hard to see how the room could look or function differently when it doesn’t, well, look or function differently.
On top of that, looking at more of what you don’t like continues to register to your brain that you don’t like the room, rather than cueing it to create something new.
Physical blocks don’t even have to look like “mess” or clutter, although they can. Sometimes the room looking just the way it is is enough to cloud your creative vision.
This is exactly why the very first step of the Home Alchemy Method is clearing space. I help clients remove everything from the room and decide with a lot of focus exactly what they’re keeping and why.
When they put the keepers back, they also start to rearrange the layout to essentially create an outline for themselves as to where the room is going.
Yes, a half or mostly empty room sucks, but eliminating physical barriers will free your mind immediately and help you be able to visualize the new design that’s right on the edge of your imagination.
Decorating Block #2: Mental Blocks
Piggy-backing off the first block, the second decorating block we deal with is mental overload.
Designers are trained in the logistics of the process, they know what needs to happen and when it needs to take place. If something doesn’t go as planned, they can readjust.
When regular-degular people go to design their own homes though, the logistics can be an absolute nightmare.
We all deal with quite enough decisions and planning in our regular lives as it is, so when you throw an entire second job on your resume, it can be enough to send you over the edge.
The Home Alchemy Method is a 7-step room redesign process that does the logistical planning for you so you can strictly focus on connecting with the actual style of the room (of course I help you with that, too).
This also shows up differently for everyone. For me, I’ll think about one thing I want to do, and then it opens a can of worms, and before I know it, I went from A to L instead of A to B. Personally, I need bite-sized baby steps to get big goals accomplished or I won’t even start them.
Some people can’t even see the starting point because they don’t know what to do first. Brain fog and mental load are not your fault — I can guarantee it. And you deserve a beautiful home. You don’t deserve to not make progress just because the world demands too much from you every day.
Just like with physical blocks, serious mental load can be deleted by eliminating anything in the room you know you’re not keeping. Clearing space works, and you don’t have to think too hard about things you know you absolutely don’t like. Try getting rid of some stuff today.
Decorating Block #3: Emotional Blocks
The third decorating block is where we shift into territory most people aren’t aware of in their home design process, and that’s the emotional aspect of redecorating.
Depending on why you’re redecorating the room, this block can impact you more or less.
For some of you, you’re going through something major or just got over some huge shift, and redecorating can be wanted, but it can also stir up a lot of feelings that project onto the space.
Things hold memory and feelings, so letting go or changing the room isn’t always that easy, even if you want to do it.
For other people, their emotions cause impulsivity and cloud their decision-making abilities, creating more chaos than cohesion.
Emotional blocks run the spectrum, but they zap motivation and energy, making you feel like you’re incapable of designing your room, when really, you just need to get to the root of block and address it.
Major disclaimer: I’m not a therapist or a life coach, but in the Home Alchemy Method, we do have time together to address anything that comes up that you want to share and get help with by tackling things in your space. Of course, always seek professional mental health support when you need it.
When it comes to your home, live coaching calls and community group are both amazing tools to add support and cheer you on as you take on any emotional barriers that pop up in your decorating process.
Once you see where things are emotionally sticky and allow yourself to feel it out, you’ll have a much easier time making change.
Decorating Block #4: Energetic Blocks
This last decorating block is the most esoteric, or “woo,” if you will, but it’s just as real as the others. In fact, Energetic blocks are usually a combination of any of the other three, swirling together to keep you avoiding the room.
Energetic blocks happen when the energy is stuck for any number of reasons, and addressing blocks one-three will create noticeable and quite tangible energetic shifts.
I said I’m no therapist, and I’m no neuroscientist either, but I track energetic blocks onto our literal neuropathways. We have to actually break a pathway and create a new one to do something new in our lives, and it’s hard to do!
Breaking old habits and starting new ones is hard until it’s not. And depending on your physical, mental and emotional blocks in the room, as well as your life circumstances, you could have an easier or harder time shifting the energy in your space and even finding the motivation to do it.
I want to impress upon you that this is a simple concept, but that doesn’t make it easy to get through. However, I think knowledge is power, and once you know what’s really at play, it does become easier to overcome the challenge.
I’ve mentioned the Home Alchemy Method a few times, and that’s because I designed it around these four decorating blocks to help DIY decorators redesign their rooms without hiring a designer or wasting unnecessary time and money figuring it out alone.
Learning how to work with your own energy and the energy of your home is skill that will stay with you forever, which is why I teach it in the first place.
How to Find Your Decorating Blocks & Overcome Them
After reading this, you may have already had a lightbulb moment and figured out exactly what’s going on in your home, but if you haven’t, I have a couple prompts to help you sort the room:
Physical: Remove anything you have no attachment to and clear it from the room. Give yourself breathing room
Mental: Genuinely give yourself a break and ask yourself honestly if you really don’t have any ideas or if you’re just too overwhelmed to think straight
Emotional: Notice what you want to let go of but keep passing over anyway. Sit with it and ask yourself what you feel about that item and where that feeling is coming from.
Energetic: What do you feel when you walk into the room vs how you wish the room felt? This is your clue as to what needs to change.
The Home Alchemy Method solves for all of these blocks by providing a 7-step room redesign plan, but I also built in live style coaching and a private community group to create the first ever hybrid approach to DIY design.
You’re not hiring a designer, but you’re not fully DIY-ing either. I call this approach DIT — Do It Together.
I’d love for you to get a feel for what the Method itself is like, so I created the Blueprint: The Home Alchemy Method 7-Step Room Redesign Beginner’s Manual.
It’ll guide you through decorating your room and help you eliminate these blocks so you can get the results you want faster.
Download it right here:
Next week, we’re going to get even deeper into the Home Alchemy Archetypes. I’ll walk you through exactly how they show up in your life, and how you can use yours to design the home that’s right for you and fully expresses your personal style.
Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter, the Alchemy Archive, so you don’t miss anything Alchemy of Home related. I always send out a few introductory emails, and then you’ll get them a couple times a week after that.
I hate spammy newsletters, so I always like to give a heads up that the first week or two there will be more emails than my regular cadence.
I’ll talk to you soon.
