Avoiding Buyer’s Remorse & Purchasing Paralysis: a house log

Q: “How do you know when you are investing in the right piece for a room? I am paralyzed to pull the trigger and then later realize the table, curtains, or rug I am right now eying are not ‘the answer’ for my room and then spend years regretting them.” – Melissa

We get a lot of questions like this one. So after around six years spent decorating two houses on a fairly modest budget, with a pleasant heaping portion of mistakes and trial and error worked in there, here is what we have learned. We certainly do not get it right every time. Sometimes we are too risky, and sometimes we are too safe, and sometimes the proportion or the size of something is wrong and we simply cannot see it until we get it home and stare at it for a while. Sometimes there is an item that we think will be functional and it ends up leaving much to be desired. In short: you win some and ya lose some when it comes to making your house a home. So if at first you do not succeed, try, try again. And again.

Mistake #1. The fluffy green rug in the living room. Cost: $425 (it is an 8 x 10′ wool rug).

We moved into this house and had never even attempted to decorate a giant 25 x 15′ family room (for comparison’s sake our first house’s family room was compact, simply nine feet wide) so – surprise! – we did not get it right the first time. We picked up a especially shaggy rug that was way too small for the room and while the shag was pleasant for a baby, it was terrible for a food-spilling’ toddler. So we did the only thing we have ever found to fix issues like that. We course corrected and chose that we do not need to be married to our mistake and invested in a better rug for the room (more on that here).

I think everyone has those oops moments when they are decorating a house – even if you are going slowly over time and doing your best to only choose things you think will work well for your family. You simply cannot see the future – and we are certainly no exception! The end result is that we enjoy the living room a ton more with our new much-larger short weave rug that adds pattern without dwarfing the living area. And we will either reuse the first rug in another room (it could work in our guest room and then the yellow rug in there could end up in the sunroom) or we will likely end up selling it on Craigslist if we cannot find a spot for it. So knowing there are other options besides “simply use the wrong rug that we hate forever” takes the sting out of it a little bit.

In general, reusing things in other spaces or Craigslisting them if they simply do not work is a pleasant little backup plan that allows us to simply figure things out along the way without being fully out of luck when we do not get everything right on the first try. And recognizing those two alternatives allowed us to go for it (instead of being shaking-in-our-boots-scared) when the right rug came along. So if it took a buying one item twice (knowing we can craigslist or reuse the first rug somewhere else) to get to the end result of this room, we are 100% cool with that. I in fact do not think we have ever redone a room without switching something out along the way. So getting everything right on the first try is akin to seeing a unicorn in the front yard to us.

Mistake #2. The stools in the kitchen. Cost: around $150 including four stools plus primer and spray paint to later make them blue.

After we accidentally found stools that we enjoyed more (seriously, they came out of nowhere) we in fact sold the original stools on Craigslist for the whole amount that we spent. So one hundred and fifty beans are back in our pocket, and we have new stools that we enjoy for $140 (so I guess in the end we made ten bucks, haha). The only thing we are out is the time it took to spray paint them, but that is totally worth the opportunity to essentially “test drive” two pairs of stools to us – and then land on the right ones that we enjoy to pieces. Bonus: they swivel and are contoured so they are the most functional/comfortable as well as the purtiest.

Mistake #3. The chairs in the dining room. Cost: $400 for eight chairs (including the $25 chairs themselves, the slipcovers, the dye, the spray paint, etc).

You folks likely remember this switcheroo, but we eventually realized (after about a million attempts to make them work that included slipcovers, die, and spray paint) they simply were not The Ones. Sometimes we are dense and it takes a while. So instead of continuing to spend money and time struggling to make them work, we at last cut our losses and set them free. Guess how much we got for them on Craigslist? $200. Yup, we recouped the whole original cost of the $25-a-pop chairs. We considered listing them for $50 each to try to get back the whole amount, but we thought that in order to sell them swiftly and simply cut our losses, $25 each was a fair price.

It was pleasant to know that they went to a loving home (their new owner is a reupholstery master and is planning to recover all eight of them!) and we ended up with six loungier especially-on-sale Target chairs that we enjoy to pieces. We are so glad that the table is a lot less cluttered (99% of the time there are simply three of us sitting here) and we even got two extra chairs in that new set that we could not use (there were eight but we only hoped six) so we craigslisted those for their original cost of $62 each. We were not even turned off by having to buy too many of something that we thought would be ideal because we knew we could consistently Craigslist those two extras for the full price (there are many much uglier chairs on craigslist for $75+ so we knew ours would sell).

So the $400 chairs ended up being a $200 mistake (since we only earned 50% of that back) but in the end we enjoy our dining room, and if it took that mistake to get us from here…

… to here, we will take it.

Sure, we lose sometimes (and you have to hand it to us, we truly bomb on occasion) but it pays to keep trying and not simply give up and settle for something that does not work until you at last get those “this is IT!” butterflies… even if they do not come straightforward. In the end, we are simply glad that we also made a bunch of big purchases that we enjoy without needing any do-overs. So although a few things do not work out for us, many many things are strong from the moment we get them. For example, we enjoy:

• our Corian counters
• our cork floors
• Ed the bed
• the big patterned rug in the bedroom
• the upholstered headboard we made
• Karl the sectional
• our giant living room storage ottoman
• our kitchen appliances
• our laundry appliances
• a bunch of new lights that we made/picked up
• our new dining table
• our craigslist buffet
• all of the curtains we have made/picked up throughout the house
• the console we built in the living room
• our thrift store media cabinet
• our Ikea bookcase in the sunroom
• our office built-ins
• our office chairs
• the round jute rug in the office
• Clara’s secondhand dresser and chair in her nursery
• Clara’s crib
• our new craigslist dresser for Clara’s big girl room

So even with the loss that we took on the three mistakes that we detailed in this post (including all of our desperate attempts to save them) in the end we have enjoyed far more items than we have picked up and regretted. I think sometimes you simply have to try the wrong things and live with them to learn that you did not want to live with them. Haha. It is like how you have to get that glittery purple eye shadow to learn that no (NO!) it is not gonna work, and you should likely try something else. Heck, I rocked some winking airbrushed jeans for a while as a teen. And then realized… uh, not good. That is course correcting at its finest.

And in fact, when we remember that we had a yard sale last fall and made $350 as well as selling $750 worth of old kitchen stuff on craigslist to earn money to put into that remodel (we got $90 for the old black microwave, $60 for the old fireplace insert, $120 for our old dining table and chairs, $90 for our old bisque dishwasher, $350 for our old granite, $40 for our old bisque wall oven) we have certainly used resale opportunities to the fullest. So those three mistakes above hurt less when we look at the $1,100 that we have made by not being married to a bunch of other things that we no longer want to live with.

Hopefully this post makes it easier to see how no purchase has to be forever, and things like reusing them in other spaces (be flexible!) or Craigslist can be excellent alternatives if you are not exactly rolling in money for a million do-overs. In short: do not sit there paralyzed with fear, afraid to get something. Obviously try to think things through and only buy things you can afford, but simply do not torture yourself by believing that mistakes are not allowed. If you do that you will never buy anything and your house will never move forward. Not only are mistakes allowed, they happen to everyone. The odds are that you will likely enjoy most of your choices and regret a few of them. But that is normal, there are ways to remedy it, and it is fully worth it in the end.

Creating a room that you enjoy thanks to some obligatory trial and error can truly be way more “valuable” than committing to a few items ten years ago and desperately trying to decorate around them (even though you no longer enjoy them) instead of letting them go. Sometimes getting new curtains and pillows and other little accessories to “accent” a piece that you do not even like can cost more than simply biting the bullet and switching the bad item out for something you enjoy, you know?

And the good news is that the whole house-sprucing journey typically has a glad ending if you keep on keeping on. So try to keep the faith, get back on the ol’ horse, and remember that there are consistently returns if the pillow that you thought you’d enjoy ends up being the pillow that you loathe – and there is consistently Craigslist and yard sales (along with tax-write-off donations) for any of that non-returnable stuff.