Ugh, this is the story of my life and the reason why after 5 years my house still isn't anywhere near where I want it to be.

One thing that I always try to remind myself is that most things are not permanent, and your home is constantly evolving. Don't assume that rug will have to be in your living room for the next fifteen years, even if you LOVE it you might want to switch it out. I forget that there probably will never be that moment where you're straightening a framed picture and then step back and declare, "Done. FOREVER."

This could have been written especially for me.

I would add, just start with something. Start with one thing you really love know deep down in your gut is right--even if it's just a pillow--and let it go from there. You don't have to have the whole vision before you begin. What evolves is always better that what I imagine before I begin.

Re 'sleep on it'; politely ask if something could be put on hold for an hour or so or overnight (if it's later in the day). Sometimes you do want to go to the atm or get a second opinion. BUT, be sure you have the courtesy to inform the seller within your suggeste block of time that either you'll take it or will pass. I've had good luck (or smart shopping) with this mainly because the sellers know I won't leave them hanging.

I go with thr "Magic Geranium" approach. When I was little I had a book with this story in it, now I just find my "magic geranium" for each room, a print, some fabric, anything really and let it be my guide for all decisions. It has never failed :) Hope it works for you!

THE MAGIC GERANIUM

Mrs. Smith lived in a drab little house with a drab little yard in the middle of a nice little street. Her house was the drabbest in the neighborhood, but she did not know what to do about it. One day, her friend Mrs. Allen came by with a geranium in a pot. "This is a magic geranium," Mrs. Allen said. "It will make your whole house beautiful."

So Mrs. Smith put the magic geranium on the drab little table in her drab little kitchen. The geranium was so bright, Mrs. Smith thought it was a shame it was on such a drab little table. "I'll paint the table, so the geranium has a nice place to rest." So she went to the paint store and bought some bright yellow paint.

Once the table was painted a nice bright yellow, Mrs. Smith looked at it and said, "It's a shame that the chairs look so drab next to the table. I'll paint them, too." So she painted the chairs a nice bright red. When she was finished she stepped back and looked at what she had done. "My table and chairs are so bright, it's a shame they're in this drab kitchen." So back to the paint store she went, and painted her kitchen a nice bright color, and bought nice bright curtains to hang in the windows.

The kitchen was so pretty, Mrs. Smith said, "The kitchen is so nice and bright, but the dining room is so drab next to it." So back to the paint store she went and painted the dining room. When she was done she looked at the dining room and said, "The dining room is so nice and bright, but the living room is so drab next to it."

Pretty soon, Mrs. Smith had painted all the rooms in her house a nice bright color. When she was finished, she said, "It's a shame that the inside of my house is so pretty, but the house is drab. That' s not right." So she painted the house a nice bright color. When she was done, she looked at what she had done and said, "Now the house is nice and bright, it's a shame the yard is so drab." So she planted pretty flowers in her yard and soon had the nicest house in the neighborhood.

Mrs. Allen came back for a visit and was amazed at the changes. "You've done a great job making your house so nice," she said.

"I didn't do anything," Mrs. Smith said. "The magic geranium you gave me made my house beautiful."

@kathkaef What a nice story! Thanks for the smile :)

I wish I had a magic geranium to DO the painting FOR me. Now that would really be magic.

I have vowed to finish all the projects which are 20% done before I start a new one.......... that is, once the kids get back to school next week!

@ vix vax...me too! I have been working on my house for almost 5 years and am on the last room (office) but the sheer number of possibilities has me paralyzed...thanks for the article, am hoping it will give me a push to get the last things ordered that I need to put it all together. Thank God for eBay, Etsy & Craigslist...

I do this bc when you're on a budget you stress about making the right choice and not wasting money. ALSO, I love interior design and just want ALL of it that I can't decide what colors, theme, idea I love more. Do I want Modern, do I want more homey traditional, etc.? It's also hard when you live in an apartment because you know you're not going to stay there forever. What if you choose Modern bc you live in a loft and move to a traditional style apartment in a year? Then you have to start ALL over ($$ signs start to go off.) I'm always thinking ahead instead of right now. It's a bad habit.

This is me! We have a planned update to our kitchen but I just can't get started. I have a few choices possibly nailed down. Creating boards would be a good idea.

I can relate to Longorious' post..Living in an apartment is often very transitory and decorating can lead to asking yourself a lot of "what ifs?" But as a long time apartment dweller I have begun, finally, to let go of that thinking and decorate for NOW. I want an apartment I can love today no matter what tomorrow may bring. Of course, if you know you only have a six month sublet you will make different decisions than if you just signed a two year lease. But it's silly to play it safe just because you MIGHT have to move.

@kathkaef I love the magic geranium approach, probably the best advice :)

LOVE the magic geranium story!

I like what rita@thissortaoldlife said. I tend to get overwhelmed too. I like everything! But, if I start with one thing, something that I absolutely love, I start working around that. Then, from there I can start a story board.

Why on earth would you decorate in a Modern style just because you live in a loft? Sure, decorate in modern style if you love it. But don't do Modern just because it's the obvious thing to do in a space.

Most decor styles thrive on high ceilings and open vistas. There have been Apartment Therapy tours of places like Trianon at Versailles, where the style is as Neoclassical as it gets, and when you see the room as a whole it's clear the ceilings dwarf most Swedish or Danish modern designs. Same goes for any possible design you can imagine, whether it's the horrific rustic cabin aesthetic that you see in most "camp" buildings, or an English "cottage" interior, where it's obvious the house is bigger than my whole condo.

In a place with more "conventional" 8 foot ceilings and small rooms, it's a bit trickier, but it's still doable to produce a place with character. Good thing too, or pretty much every place in the US would be in terrible trouble :)

I just came back from the Miller Paint store with 4 sample colors for my home office. They are $5 bucks a sample can. Each color, paired with one of those inexpensive foam brushes, and I am free to test and try for not a lot of money. Paint selection puts me into a serious tail spin every time...that's why I used to limit myself to just white walls but thanks to samples I'm exploring color in a way that used to be too difficult and too stressful. The Divine paint people also sell small pouches of paint to try too! What a relief!

QUOTE: I have a few choices possibly nailed down.

lol @ angelinethebaker. POSSIBLY nailed down? Lemme know when you figure out how to move past that point cuz I'm right there with ya. Beyond frustrating it is, it is.

Haha- that's why my home is eclectic... We have a modern aesthetic in mind, and a lot of beautiful ornate hand-me-downs, and transitional furniture, a grand-piano... modern art, traditional art, large bright paintings that don't match anything... It's ALL changing...

I like the before and progress shots. Not the before and after. My home is changing ALL the time. I take what I like and shift it from room to room until it feels JUST right.

Never done.

These are great. I am with Longorious - it's hard when you are on a tight budget and don't want to make the "wrong" choice, but cannot necessarily afford everything you want. My biggest challenge is IKEA. I will decide which system I want and then go to buy it and get distracted by all the other great/new systems...!

I'm struggling with the combination of a limited budget and a new house that needs EVERYTHING. Spending $50 on lighting fixtures, which we need, seems like it's taking $50 away from curtains, which we also need, and rugs, which we also need, and new gutters, which we also need, and seismic retrofitting, which we also need... and pretty soon spending that $50 on earrings instead seems like the easiest option.

This is exactly my problem at the moment! Especially the "stop looking" part, Pinterest is both my best friend and my worst enemy! And I LOVE the Magic Geranium story :).

I have this problem big time and the answer is to invite my mom over for the day. She helps me get beyond my indecisiveness and just do it: hang the pictures, paint the walls, etc. Aside from any huge purchases, everything can be changed later.

On another note, although I love sites like AT and Pinterest sometimes the sheer volume of possibilities makes decision-making that much harder. But I think the answer is just to go with things that you are naturally drawn to.

I know nothing about planning an over-arcing design and executing it... I get what I love and what I think will work for my space. I'll be obsessed with changing two or three elements of my home at a time, and will be furiously on the search for something to fill that hole in my life. Or, I'll mosey through a store and will trip over something that's OMGSOAMAZING and get happy accidents that way.

So I guess I'm with JDAD on the "eclectic" style... not that I don't want it to look put together, but I would rather my home look like me than a page in a magazine. :)

Actually I think waiting is the solution. I am addicted to decorating, as probably most people who look at this site, but I can't count the number of projects that I have had in mind (2 houses and probably 6 apartments later, some owned, some not) that I couldn't do for lack of money or time, and I subsequently realised that they would have been disastrous. I agree that the number of choices/colours/beautiful things out there is mind-boggling, and I realise now after years that there are lots of completely different ways that I could make my living room, for instance, beautiful and relaxing/inspirational/etc etc.

You can call analysis paralysis but you can also think of it as doing the hard mental work to come up with something that you will love long term at the end. Why should that be easy. Sometimes a couple of months of stewing is what is needed. Then set a deadline or wait till you come back from holidays so that you see your living space with different eyes.
An expert and very tasteful carpenter that does work for me always says "don't do something unless it performs a function", which guides me a bit and curbs my excesses.
I also now put my money in structural changes if I can, as structural changes improve the functionality of the space long term, and not furniture etc as I don't trust myself not to change my mind down the road....

I'm in the same boat with our kitchen. We want to remodel but the options seem endless. It is such an investment I don't want to be hasty pick the wrong counter tops or back splash and then look at it everyday with regret. So much pressure! lol....

AT are you in my head? This is the second article this week that feels like it was written for me... (the "No more excuses" article was spot on.)

Just sit with it until you are ready to make a decision. If you don't before you move again, money saved.

It ended up that I started with one thing I found that I liked. For me, it was an oriental rug in colors I liked. The couch, when I bought it, I chose fabric to go with the rug. Other fabrics - pillows, table cloths, rugs in adjacent rooms, new fabric for my dining chairs, all followed from that. If you asked me what colors I wanted to decorate in, I'd have had no idea. But when looking at rugs, I found one I liked. Same for couch fabric - having one thing chosen already that I wanted to look good with it (the rug) really helped narrow down my couch options (bring swatches - I pulled together some paint chips and pages torn from magazines that represented the colors in my rug and took them shopping with me. Get a little swatch of any fabrics you order to take along with you, too.) Now I know the four main colors in everything (though there are other minor colors in there) I have that I love - but I figured it out the organic way - by finding stuff I like. I say start with rugs or couch/chair fabric - these are the hardest, paint to go with it comes in every shade, pillows and other smaller fabrics (curtains, chairseats, throws) can also be found in a variety of colors. I picked paint colors, and in 8 years never quite decided and so never painted (had the place painted off white just before I moved in, as the old paint job was dirty, and I wanted to paint, but had no idea what colors to start with then. When I was finally ready to paint, I could see selling in sight, and brokers said to leave it off-white for easiest sale.) Next place, the living/dining room was already painted with a color that goes well with all my stuff, and is not one I had considered when choosing paint. I'll paint my next living room that color, now that I know - I've even identified what it is, since restoration hardware has just a few colors, and it is clearly one of theirs.

I just made sure all my dining/living/study rugs and fabrics were in shades that look good togther, as I knew they'd get all mixed up in the next place...I keep that in mind with guest room stuff, too. Worked for me. My bedroom is separate, so it is in a different color scheme.

Yes, I got turn of the last century styles for my main stuff, as my apartments were that era. I was looking at modern houses lately, and I realized it will all look great in one, even if, had I started with a modern house, I might have chosen more modern styles. And mid-century and more modern looks great in traditional style homes - it is all over brownstones and 100 year old apartments. I probably wouldn't move into a place that completely clashed with my stuff, but it, as most styles, will work with a variety of home styles. Have a little fun!

Oh my God, I'm so glad there are other people out there...!!! We unpacked in December and the house is STILL a godforsaken mess...

And things just keep piling up, you know? Like the beautiful floor baskets that can't be left on the floor because the dog (that arrived in May) won't leave them alone. So WHAT DO I DO with the bl***dy floor baskets now? And the baby blue Ikea lack bookshelf that looked so good in our modern apartment and now sticks out like overgrown doll house furniture in our old-fashioned house?

This is great, the article, plus all these comments! (A side note: these may be the most well-meaning and positive comments I've seen on AT. Maybe because the subject strikes a chord in so many readers, and brings out the empathy?)

All the choices, that's what I struggle with too. I know what I like - I'm not going back and forth trying to find a style - but it's hard to *pick one*, like so many others here have said.

Sartre talked about "the vertigo of possibility", so it's not just a design thing!

Great post! Five years ago when my honey and I started building an off-grid cabin we had so many ideas and possibilities running through our heads that we had a hard time knowing where to start. We came up with some criteria/guidelines that helped us out and helped us stay patient in what has been a long but enjoyable process. The 7 keywords we came up with were: loveable, low-impact, logical, low-cost, long-lasting, local and lots o'uses (versatility would have been a better word but we were already on an L roll so...) It's made searching on craigslist for the perfect thing feel like a part of the story, not a frustrating delay we'd spend our way out of if we could. (you read about our adventure at http://7lcabin.blogspot.ca/) Go slow, stick to your values and keep watering your magic geranium!

For me, if I can't make up my mind it is usually because I haven't seen exactly the right item yet. I have gone years waiting to buy a sofa or lamp. Once I find the right piece, I know instantly. And if at all possible, I go ahead and buy it no matter the price. Those are the only pieces I absolutely love and never regret. Anything I buy just because I needed something to go in that space -- I end up regretting the purchase.

If you're really overwhelmed by a plethora of options, I suggest pairwise comparisons. I did this with paint colors once: look at any two, decide which one you prefer. Compare your winner to another option. Take the winner of that one and compare to yet another option. You can narrow things down to one or two pretty quickly, and discard those you like less from future consideration.

Thank you for this post!!!! It's the gentle nudge I needed. I have loads of great ideas but have the great fear of "doing it wrong." Perhaps I need a little bit of the "wrong" to have it be right.

I'm in the same camp as Longorious and KathieC. I'm no spring chicken (bwak!) but have NEVER had a pulled together "look" in any apartment. This time I am determined! I have chosen a theme I like which I think I can do on my budget rather than what I aspire to (Joan Rivers' Manhattan Versailles!) and have started to piece it together a little bit at a time. Will paint my IKEA billy furniture since it's cheaper for now than replacing. I bought a pillow in a color I loved at Pier 1. Then two pictures at Home Goods. Then slipcovers for my upholstered pieces until I can upgrade the l.r. furniture. Then back to Pier 1 for a couple of inexpensive accessories that coordinate with the pillow & artwork. Then a basket that works. This weekend I will buy paint for the room, from the swatches I picked out. Have my eye on a couple of different side tables. Then a Louis Ghost chair knock-off. Using a variation on the N. Berkus $50 out of every paycheck idea, I buy/plan for at least one thing, price-dependent of course, each paycheck.

It is the baby step method to be sure!

Alot of Maxwell's book helped me with this. And I don't know if this is the "right" way to go about it, but I am really trying! To get it together, that is - LOL.

Jdad, I am the EXACT same way. My husband is about to tear his hair out because I keep moving things from room to room until everything finds its perfect home. My house is in constant transition until objects annd furntiure pieces "tell" me where they want to be.

I have to agree with @AJS Germany and @Textiles: wait it out. There really is no rush. As a life long procrastinator, I never do things the quick way and I now see the value in it. By waiting and sitting with an idea, I can really learn it's value to me and it's appropriateness for my life and home. Many projects have been eschewed for much more practical solutions this way: trends that seemed "perfect" for me are found to be a flash in the pan and simple re-dos take the place of expensive remodels that were previously deemed "necessary".

I am always astonished when I read House Tours that say the people have only lived in a place for a year or two. Kudos to them for buckling down and getting it together! I doubt that I would ever be able to do it that fast, or if I did, I am fairly certain that it would not be the same decor/design that I would want after living in a place a little longer. I have been in my house 5.5 years and I feel like I have finally figured out how I want it to look and work. Some of this delay comes from having a miniscule budget and wanting to make my choices count, but a fair bit of it is also just allowing my style to evolve at the pace I am comfortable with. I guess Iike life in the slow lane. :~)

Oh and ditto, word for word what @Parnassus said: I buy what I love and plan for the long haul. I would rather do without than make do with crap.

And @RedBegonia: I am stealing your keywords! All of it, but I especially like "loveable" and "long-lasting". These are things I aspire to in my life, not just design.

Huh - timely. I have 13 paint sample colors on my kitchen wall right now. They range from green to brown to blue. It's making me crazy! To me the hardest part is trying to make multiple decisions at once - paint plus curtain fabric, etc.

What seems to work best is taking my time, and starting with one thing (as others have mentioned) - do the paint color first, or choose the upholstery fabric first - and complete that project - before doing the next step. Trying to imagine the finished result with too many balls in the air is just impossible for a novice like me!

@YELLOW COFFEE CUP Oh, I see it all just perfectly..: ) Thanks for the smile...

I just went through this when painting my living room! http://bonnieprojects.blogspot.com/2012/08/choosing-paint-colors.html

I start by collecting ideas. I adore pinning anything I see onto my pinterest page. Their iphone app allows you to add your own photos, too!

Then when I get ready to start a project, I browse through all that inspiration and get a general idea of where I'm headed. Next I do some research to make sure the choices make sense for me and my lifestyle. Shag carpet with a pet? Nope! Red walls in a tiny bedroom? Nope!

Then I collect up options, like several affordable coffee tables or dozens of paint colors, spend a day thinking it over, and make the leap!

I agree that once you've made the decision, you shouldn't look back. However, if you do find something better that you can't live without, there's always Craigslist!

That's me. Sheila P. The P is for procrastinator. And for problems. I procrastinate partly because of my problems. I've got a bad back and foot thanks to a car accident, so my abilities are limited. My husband's abilities are limited because of a stroke. My bank account is limited, because of, well, isn't everyone's? But, my to-do list? Now that's long, and getting longer by the day.