Fast, Cheap or Good

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The story below is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

The three challenges of home decorating.

Whenever we have someone over for the first time, I often find myself in the kind of deep-cleaning mode that only seems to activate when I’m seeing my house through the imagined lens of a stranger. In what starts as a run-of-the-mill attempt to vacuum the living room, one-too-many Lego pieces on the floor prompts a full-scale toy clearout. This snowballs into rearranging half the furniture downstairs and deciding I don’t have enough lighting. But lamps seem to be available in two categories: cheap but ugly, and cute but expensive. The ones I like cost as much as the rug in our dining room — which I remember is washable, so I decide right then is the perfect time to pick it up and throw it in the laundry. Seeing the room half-arranged and the floor empty, I wonder if maybe it might be better to actually flip the living and dining rooms completely, just to breathe some life into the space.

When my husband finds me an hour before our guests arrive, I’m surrounded by piles of books, baskets, shoes and toys, sweating and crying about what a wreck our house is. My husband is confused. Didn’t I just… create this mess? But what I’m actually upset about is the gap between what I want our home to look like and how it actually is — and how my attempts to bridge that gap in this last-minute, frenzied attack with no time, budget or plan somehow failed to produce positive results.

Normally, I’m pretty happy with our home. As long as we keep things tidy-ish and clean, I am largely pleased by the blend of functionality and aesthetics we have cobbled together over the years. We are a family that collects things, with many beloved items displayed or actively in use in every room. We have a young child and two dogs, plus all the ephemera that comes with them. So while this means that our spaces are cozy and busy, it also means that it doesn’t take much to tip the scale into “overwhelming disaster.”

Still, this doesn’t typically get to me unless I know someone else is going to see it. It’s about so much more than just whether there’s a mess or not. Our homes, like our clothes, say something about who we are. They send a message through a hundred visual cues about our priorities and our preferences. So when you find yourself unable to create a visual message that aligns with what you’re hoping to project, feelings of panic and despair can creep in, sometimes coming together in a spiral of urgency that might spur a bunch of hasty purchases or the ill-advised room shuffling I have been known to attempt.

There’s something about showing others your home for the first time that ignites the desire to make sure that whatever it is they are seeing aligns with what it is you want them to know about you. So what’s stopping us from creating a space that’s exactly what we want from the start?

The three most common roadblocks are time, budgets and taste — or, as the old adage goes, wanting something to be fast, cheap and good. In business, the conventional belief is that you can’t have all three at once, and you have to pick two.

This can feel true about our homes, too. High costs are an obvious barrier for most of us (see the lighting section of any home goods brand), but it isn’t always the hardest one to overcome. Even when money is no object, people often run up against the issue of not knowing what it is they like, want or need — in other words, not completely knowing their own style or taste preferences. And then time sneaks up and sabotages us at every turn, whether from the sense of urgency we might feel to “finish” our homes by a certain deadline, or to buy items during a flash sale or simply from our own impatience with how long it can take to properly design and decorate the home of our dreams.

If you have struggled with any of these feelings about your home, you are not alone! Here are some ways that you can approach the challenge of creating your dream spaces at home without maxing out your credit cards in a panic purchase or ending up in a heap under everything you own moments before guests arrive.

Wishlists & Shoestring Budgets

One of the fastest ways to kill my spirit happens once I’ve decided on a vision before I know that the cost is far beyond my price range. And home decor is one of the areas where this happens most.

Furniture, lighting, rugs, window treatments — everything I like seems to cost as much as a month-long vacation in the south of France. More times than I can count, I’ve found myself scouring the internet for a cheaper version of the bobbin picture frames or the sculptural floor lamp I saw on Pinterest, only to learn that they just don’t exist in my budget.

I am a fairly practical and frugal person, but I am also impatient. So while the answer here for anyone who really has their heart set on something too expensive is to plan a budget to save up and buy it, I almost never go this route. Instead, I get as creative as I can with what is already available to me.

These are my rules:

  • Pause. Set yourself some time to sit with the question and imagine all the various ways that you can answer it — with and without the too-expensive item.
  • Spend as much time as possible in the space itself, taking note of how you use it and if there are any functional needs that need consideration.
  • Think about everything you already own and whether you have something in another space that could be swapped in.
  • Consider DIYs if that’s a skillset you have or whether you know anyone who might be able to help.
  • Get in the habit of checking out estate sales, thrift stores and online marketplaces. You would be surprised how many items are out there that people sell or even give away that are often like new!

Sometimes making myself work with what I already have opens up so many new possibilities I’d never have discovered if I was able to just haul off and buy the beautiful midcentury coffee table I saw on Pinterest. Maybe I’ll try a vintage trunk that’s been sitting in my basement for a little while and discover it’s the perfect height and also the right weight to withstand the dogs knocking into it without moving it all around the living room. Or maybe we find a DIY plan online and spend a few weeks making one with a friend who has a garage full of tools. Either way, what could have been a simple but less interesting purchase has the opportunity to become more of a story — which says so much more about me than whether I was able to afford something or not.

Game the Internet

The internet is one of those tools that can just as easily help or hinder you on your decor projects. Sure, it can provide inspo and information, but it can also muddy the waters in ways that can cause real burnout. The two biggest traps? The illusion of urgency and the seductive power of a styled home feature on Pinterest.

Online sales and limited-time deals are one of the key pitfalls to creating your ideal home space. You might have started out just browsing, but the sense of urgency created by the promise of saving money can sometimes lead you to purchase something that isn’t quite right. So while you might save a little bit up front, living with something you don’t love or isn’t serving your needs will eventually lead you down the road of needing to replace it — possibly costing much more than the pre-sale price on the item you actually want.

Pinterest is one of the best ways to get free ideas for home decor when you aren’t working with a designer — but it can also be one of the easiest ways to confuse your plans and cause a general sense of dissatisfaction with your home. Everything is so gorgeous! It can be easy to imagine that if you just had that green velvet sectional or that whimsical accent wallpaper on your dining room ceiling, your entire home would transform into the professionally decorated and styled photoshoot that inspired it.

Just like seeing a beautiful outfit on a model can create an unrealistic expectation in our subconscious of how we might look wearing it, Pinterest can likewise mess with our minds. We pin beautiful interiors for inspo quickly, without pausing to necessarily analyze what we are looking at, what is attractive to us about it and whether or not that space is remotely comparable to our own.

Here is how I make the internet work for me and not against me:

  • If I’m browsing or looking for inspo, I am on a strict no-spend mission. No matter what sort of sale I encounter or how cute and available something is on Pinterest, I am not allowed to purchase it at that moment.
  • Review your inspiration boards and use visual thinking strategies to pin down (pun intended!) exactly what it is you like about these images. VTS is a technique that starts with naming what you see — as precisely as possible, down to every last detail. “A living room” is not VTS, but “A room with a large blue velvet sectional sitting on a gold tasseled rug” is. Name everything and then describe what it makes you think of, what the image suggests: “A ceramic pitcher with wildflowers looks like someone was picking in their garden rather than purchasing something expensive from a shop. I like how free-spirited that feels and how it isn’t in a vase but in something colorful that looks handmade, making it seem sentimental or personal.” You might discover there are things you really love that are more accessible to you than you realized and aspects of the image that you actually don’t like at all.
  • Write everything down and start to notice patterns: did you write the word “clean” a lot? What colors were you drawn to, and did you like moodier, dark rooms or bright and airy ones? Start to group together the images that you like and narrow down exactly what it is you might still need to purchase.
  • Take a break from the internet. With your new insights into your tastes, spend some time in your rooms visualizing. Move things around; experiment with what you have. Make notes.
  • Once you know exactly what you want and what you’re looking for, start your internet searches. But go in with a commitment to finding exactly what you want — no side quests allowed! Search for the precise item or product and don’t let yourself get lured by the siren call of something adjacent or a sale for something slightly similar.
  • Make your budget for what you actually want and list out the non-sale prices. My rule about sales is this: Do I love it so much I would buy it full price? If the answer is no, I won’t buy it on sale either.
  • For big ticket items, wait for the holiday sales: Memorial Day, President’s Day and, of course, Black Friday. Otherwise, put out a Google alert and bide your time.

If you’re decorating your home on your own, remember that it’s okay to take your time. It’s okay to live in a work-in-progress and to work with what you already have. No home ever truly looks like a Pinterest image because people don’t live in Pinterest images.

There is no true deadline for your home being “done.” If you can love the space you live in now for being what it is — the place you call home — then however much time and money you spend to put the care into making it shine is always worth it.

And even better? A well-loved home, no matter its state, is already a really, really good one.

The story above is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!