Whether you’re sprucing up a single room or tackling a full home renovation, getting you home decor right is important for your long-term comfort in your home. If you’re not using an interior designer to guide your plans, even the smallest choices you make before hang your first van art photo can have a huge impact.

Here are seven simple but effective tips to bear in mind before embarking on your decor project, to help you achieve a result you’ll love.

1) Choose One Focal Point

All great room decor has a single feature as its focal point. That doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one impressive feature in a room, but decide which item is the most important and visually arresting, then build the rest of the decor plan around it.

2) Choose Your Precise Paint Last

While you may have a good idea of the basic color scheme for a room, it’s a mistake to choose a shade of paint and work on from there. Even a slight difference between colors can have a major effect when set against the contents of a room.

Instead, put your furniture, artwork, mementos, and so on in place first, then see which particular paint choice will best fit. You might find you’ll want to go a little lighter or darker than you first thought, and choosing the paint last gives you this flexibility.

3) Give Your Room Some Space

Even the best-planned decor will be spoiled if the room is overcrowded. Try to keep the amount of furniture and other possessions down to levels which give your decor choices space to breathe, and the final result will be much more pleasing to the eye.

4) Value Simplicity

Similarly, don’t try to cram too many design choices into one space. When it comes to home decor, simplicity is almost always more successful than complication. Check out these wood wall art pieces for inspiration.

5) Pare Down Your Possessions

For each room, decide whether each of your possessions really fits into the overall feel and theme. If it’s not an item of huge emotional or practical significance, can it be moved to somewhere it suits more easily? Being rigid about a room’s contents can really hinder the success of a wider decor design.

6) Don’t Hang Too High

When it comes to artwork, photographs, and other wall decorations, aim to hang them so the center is around five feet from floor level. This is the traditional hanging height in art galleries and other locations where artwork needs to be shown off to its best effect. Using the same technique in your home improves the appearance of both your decorations and the room as a whole.

7) Complement Adjacent Rooms

Lastly, while each individual room can have its own feel and design scheme, it’s important that the various spaces all work well together. Clashes between adjacent rooms’ design have a jarring effect which becomes fatiguing to live with. On the flip side, rooms which complement each other can make your entire home feel larger, calmer, and a more pleasant place to be.

There’s no need for your home decor plans to follow all these ideas too strictly. In fact, overthinking the design can make a decor feel cold and clinical rather than homely and welcoming.

However, keep these tips in mind as you put your project plan together, and your chances of arriving at the right result will be hugely increased.