Over the past 2 years, we’ve both immersed ourselves in the world of interior design and home decor and it’s safe to say we’ve learned A LOT along the way. You can bet your bottom dollar that when we started out we didn’t know what a euro sham was, we didn’t know how high to hang curtains, and we thought the word “vignette” was strictly a theater term. Boy oh boy, we’ve come a long way.

Now don’t get me wrong, we are in NO way professionals. Instead, we’re just two gals learning what looks good as we go. But we did think it was finally time to compile some of the tips we have learned so far and share them with all of you in a fun format. And that’s how our “Rookie Mistakes” series was born.

Because many of you are also new to the home decorating game, we thought it might be fun to tackle some common decorating mistakes (ones that we’ve both made in the past!) and offer some advice on how to combat these “no-no’s.”

I consider our white sectional to be my first big “adult” purchase. While living in Wisconsin, Finn & I used an old, hand-me-down, blue, leather couch as our main seating area. But when we moved to St. Louis, I was excited to purchase a piece of furniture all my own.

Enter our white sectional (read more about it in this post).

I loved the couch immediately (& still do!), and loved that it came with 3 matching pillows. I was all set! No need to purchase any other pillows for my new couch.

Wrong! See, that was one of my first rookie mistakes as a new home decorator. Instead of using the white couch as a neutral base for patterned, colored, and textured pillows…I just let it be a big blob of white for a while.

Once I started reading blogs and looking at catalogs, I quickly realized that some throw pillows would look pretty dang awesome on my white couch #duh

My pillow collection started to grow and our couch was boring and basic no more. All of the pillows on my couch are from HomeGoods and I’ve changed them up over the past few years. Whenever I visit the store I always browse their pillow aisles to see if there is anything I simply must scoop up and bring home (not gonna lie…a pillow usually ends up in my shopping cart!)

Now this may seem like an obvious “no-no” to some of you, but I see this rookie mistake happen all.the.time. I’m not judging anyone, (everyone is entitled to decorate their homes the way they see fit), but things could be a lot more personalized, and a lot less “big box” if people swapped out their couch pillows.