You Should Never Rush To Decorate Your Home For Good Feng Shui

The art of feng shui can have an enormous impact on decorating and planning our spaces. When confronting a new home and a blank canvas, the principles of feng shui can often offer a guide for how to set up your home in an attractive, stylish, and harmonious way that instills a room with good vibes. Too often, however, in a rush of excitement to fill a new space, we don't allow rooms to bloom and unfold naturally, filling them with brand-new furniture and belongings that actually work to counter the gains of feng shui. These choices can easily result in poorly-designed and cluttered rooms that, at best, block desirable energy flow, or, at worst, actually harbor and make a home for negative energies.

By being more deliberate in filling your space, and employing what some describe as "slow decorating," you can avoid many of these pitfalls. Slow decorating is about waiting to feel out what a new home needs and what works best in its spaces. The approach fits perfectly with feng shui principles in its deliberateness and careful consideration of what we bring into a home.

Rooms are often organic beings, changing throughout time as much as we do, reflecting our passions, obsessions, and taste. It makes sense that filling our homes with things we like might be our first inclination, but there can actually be a downside to moving too quickly and acquiring too many things in the beginning. According to Dana Claudat, an interior designer and Pyramid School Feng Shui consultant, "Lots of people tend to quickly fill every space in the home, and I find that energetically and aesthetically they should be saving room to grow," per Realtor. 

When encountering a new space, it's best to start slow, ideally saving major purchases until after you've gotten a feel for how you live in the space and how best to balance the energies of a room. This saves costly mistakes and having to dispose of pieces that you determine ultimately do not meet your needs. The more items in a room, the less of a chance to allow it to transform along with your interests, whether that is adding new art or tweaking the design with accessories.

Feng shui practice also urges us to declutter our spaces.  Another pitfall of buying too much stuff too soon, or even encumbering rooms with older or inherited pieces, is that energy can often stagnate, creating an imbalance before you even start applying feng shui principles. Clutter rules our lives sometimes, and it's always hard to get rid of something we've committed to, particularly new or expensive items. Being deliberate about what we choose is considerably easier than discarding things we already own.

Allow ample room not only for growth but for rearranging things until you find just the right placement. Keep in mind that clutter and objects in certain places are known to block and stagnate the free flow of energy, including entryways and hallways. Also discard objects, including even sentimental ones, that have negative feelings and connotations to them. Leave room to move things around and figure things out, even if that means an initial sparse decor scheme populated only with essentials. Bringing along older furniture and thrifting second-hand are great temporary options as you get a feel for your new abode.