I’m an interior designer and painting furniture is such a waste of time & other DIY quick fixes to avoid
IF YOU want to spruce up your home but don’t want to break the bank a quick DIY job might seem like the perfect quick fix.
But it turns out you could be making a huge mistake and even end up making your home look worse.
That’s according to interior designer Garrett LeChic, who explained exactly why painting your own furniture is a massive no-no and some other cheap tricks to avoid.
“I’m all about a wood piece of furniture, leave it alone, leave it be, there’s nothing wrong with a wood piece of furniture,” he said on YouTube.
Even though painting your coffee table, bedside table or even kitchen cabinets might seem like a fool proof way to give your furniture a new lease of life it’s not as easy to pull of as you might think.
Garrett explained: “It usually doesn’t come out so great when you DIY this yourself.
“Unless you’re having this professionally done by a company that actually knows what they’re doing and is using quality materials then you might not be getting the finish you think you’re getting.”
Not only that, but you could destroy your furniture altogether by trying to upgrade it, and it’s not always easy to reverse that damage.
But that’s not the only budget friendly DIY hack you might want to avoid – painting tiles can also be a total disaster according to the home pro.
“You might cause a lot of damage to the space that you’ll then have to go over and pay someone to do correctly,” he warned.
Creating the look of fake marble on your kitchen countertops is also a waste of time and money for Garrett, who explained that it always ends up looking worse than the original granite.
Peel and stick options or epoxy coating can look cheap and need much more upkeep than people realise.
The pro said: “Not everyone is that talented to fake the look of marble and it ends up looking kind of crazy and a little bit messy.”
In fact, if you’ve got granite worktops you might want to leave them alone because they’re coming back in style anyway, he noted.
“Don’t be afraid of keeping the granite in your space because not every granite looks bad, it might just be you’re looking at the current trends,” Garrett explained.
“At some point the trends will shift back,” he added.
Other interiors fans agreed with Garretts tips and tricks, with one adding: “Over the years I’ve found that some ‘cheap and easy’ DIY projects end up costing way more than you thought they would and fixing errors is another added cost.
“Actually it’s often cheaper in the long run to have a professional do the job right the first time.”
A second agreed: “I made the mistake of painting my stair rail hardware and railing, and now I am about to tackle the stripping process after realizing that it looks so much better as it was!”