So, you’ve moved to a bigger apartment and you’re excited that your room will no longer look small, clumsy, and unappealing or you’re still in your old space but you’ve tried to spice things up by adding a piece of art here, a sculpture there and you generally just want your room to reflect a bit of your personality, but there is one huge problem – your room still looks small and uninspiring.

Frankly, we’ve seen smaller rooms look better and even bigger than yours.  Not to worry, this article is going to show you all the mistakes you’ve been making in this DYI décor intervention of yours. It’ll show you trendy design ideas that will make your room look bigger, more sophisticated, and generally make you eager to invite friends over to your fabulous place.

Wrong Color Selection

One common mistake people make is choosing dark colors and tones to paint the entirety of a small room. Dark color shades like black, dark blues and navy greens shrink a room. The solution to this lies in the psychology of colors and design. Light color shades and tones, especially when they interact with great lighting tricks the eyes to give an illusion of a bigger and more spacious room. Colors like white, nude shades, and beige work wonders in this regard. There is so much that something as minute as color choice can do to the perceived size of a room.

Inadequate Lighting

This is closely related to the dark color problem. Everyone who walks into a dark dingy room always think it is smaller than it really is, because you really can’t see the length and breadth of a room when it’s dark.

When light flows into a room, it expands the room size. The trick that makes this work is to add more lighting features to your room. You can fix extra light bulbs, clear away anything such as a library or furniture blocking a window and your room will instantly feel bigger. You can also achieve this if you replace tinted dark windows with clear ones.

Having Too Much Junk

This might seem like a pretty obvious mistake but you’d be surprised at the number of people that keep trying to fit too many things into one crowded space. Your junk could be one too many chairs for the size of the space, too many utensils in your kitchen or art pieces all around your room, a large number of seemingly cool but unnecessary stuff in your place. People often have good intentions. They start out by trying to give their room sophisticated or classy looks and end up putting too much décor – over 7 large art pieces on a side wall and literally give the room zero breathing space.

A cool tip that works is working with a minimalist design template. Minimalism basically believes that less is more and honestly, it is. Choose few but highly thought out and intentional décor pieces and you can literally see your room double in size and look Avant Garde.

Inadequate or Wrong Storage Choices

Storage spaces are so important in decluttering any room. Having to place all your items directly on the floor or stacked on top of each other is obviously not doing wonders for the size of your room. This particular mistake is so extensive that it doesn’t only make your room look smaller – it actually makes it smaller because you’ll have less space to work with, walk around, or hangout in.

The solution to this can include getting a book shelf, installing overhead cabinets, getting a wardrobe instead of just using storage hampers or getting a bed stand instead of placing your bed directly on the floor. It is important for the design savvy room owner to know that choosing the right storage space is equally important. For example, overhead cabinets give you much more storage space in areas that can’t be cluttered because no one walks on the ceiling.

Too Many Walls

If your house has too many walls and partitions, it’s just normal that your rooms will look smaller. Embracing the concept of open designs where you have a single large space that you can break up or demarcate by putting appropriate furniture and appliances is a great way to make a small room look bigger.

A typical example of an open design concept is having a large living space where you can see both the dining area and the kitchen from the living room. This however requires strategic planning and a good sense of interior design to pull off. Basically, you might need to start breaking down some of those walls.

Having Low Ceilings

Low ceilings close in on a room and give the illusion of being in a compact or cramped space. It gets worse when you have a large ceiling fan in a room with a low ceiling. Nothing feels more size restricting than that, plus, its not even tall people friendly. You don’t want to be the friend the basketball team can’t visit!

High ceilings on the other hand, open up the room. It magnifies the space and makes it look 10 times bigger. One other cool thing about having high ceilings is that you can install extra windows in the room, which brings in more lighting to the space and this definitely makes it look bigger.

Wrong Furniture Arrangement

The way you arrange your furniture and where you place it, has a massive effect on how big or small your room looks. Setting your furniture directly against the wall or in front of windows instantly constricts the size of your room.

Placing it in front of windows particularly disrupts the effect of natural lighting in the room which would usually help open up space. One of the things that helps, especially in an open space is to place your furniture 3 inches away from the wall or use a rug to create a vignette and arrange all your furniture on it. This adds volume to the perceived size of a room.

Another thing people do wrong when it comes to arranging furniture is placing all your furniture beside each other without any space, like a chain link. The solution to this is quite simple: leave space between every large piece of furniture.

Noting and correcting these small but common décor mistakes can do wonders for the perceived size of your living space and transform it into a place you’re proud of and want to show off.