5 Things to Stop Buying for Your Home

Some of the smartest design decisions have nothing to do with what you add. These are 5 things to stop buying for your home to save you money and sanity.

We love buying things for our homes. We buy things to make them prettier, more organized, more functional, more seasonal, more us. And sometimes we buy things

because HomeGoods put a red sticker on them and we apparently lost all ability to reason.

Here’s the problem: more stuff doesn’t necessarily make a better home.

After years of designing, styling and transforming homes, I’ve learned that some of the

best design decisions have nothing to do with what you add. Sometimes it’s what you

stop buying.So before your next Target run, Amazon order, or innocent little trip to HomeGoods that somehow costs $247 — here are five things I think we can officially retire.

1. Single-Purpose Kitchen Gadgets

Somewhere along the way, we decided every food needed its own tool. Avocado slicers.

Strawberry hullers. Banana slicers. Egg cookers. Herb scissors. We have entire drawers

devoted to devices that do something another item in the kitchen already does.

We already invented the knife.

That doesn’t mean every specialized tool is ridiculous. If you use it constantly and it

genuinely makes your life easier, keep it. But before you buy another one, ask yourself

one question:

Do I already own something that does this?

If the answer is yes, it probably doesn’t deserve the kitchen real estate. Your drawers

will thank you.

2. Cheap Seasonal Décor

It’s August. It is approximately the temperature of the surface of the sun outside. And

somehow there are already velvet pumpkins appearing in stores.

I love changing a home with the seasons. What I don’t love is the idea that your house needs an entirely new personality every three months.

Your house can acknowledge fall without fall throwing up in it.

Instead of buying boxes of inexpensive decorations every year, invest in a smaller collection of pieces you genuinely love. Then create seasonal change through the things that naturally rotate anyway:

Flowers and branches

Candles

Pillows and throws

Tabletop accents

A few intentional swaps can make a home feel completely different — without requiring a

closet devoted to ceramic pumpkins.

3. Anything Just Because It’s on Sale

We need to discuss our relationship with the word sale, because retailers have

convinced us that spending money is saving money as long as the original price has a

line through it.

Let’s do the math. Something costs $100. You don’t need it. It goes on sale for $60. You

buy it. Congratulations.

You didn’t save $40. You spent $60.

A sale is valuable when it reduces the price of something you already wanted or needed.

A discount on something you never intended to buy is simply very effective marketing.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can bring home from the clearance aisle is absolutely nothing.

4. Furniture You Haven’t Measured

The internet has made buying furniture dangerously easy. See sofa. Love sofa. Click sofa.

Then the sofa arrives, and we discover an unfortunate collection of facts. It overwhelms

the room. The coffee table no longer fits. You can’t comfortably walk around it. Or my

personal favorite: it doesn’t fit through the door.

Before you buy, measure the room, measure the piece, and measure the doorway. For

anything large, measure the entire route it has to travel to reach its final destination —

stairways, hallways, elevators, tight corners.

A sale is not a floor plan.

Scale is one of the biggest differences between a room that feels professionally

designed and one that simply feels filled with furniture.

And while we’re on the subject of online furniture: read the return policy before you click

buy. Not afterward.

5. Storage Bins You Haven’t Earned Yet

Now we arrive at perhaps America’s favorite form of procrastination: organizing the things we should have gotten rid of. We decide the house feels cluttered, so naturally, we go shopping. Baskets. Bins. Drawer dividers. Acrylic containers. Labels. An entire organizational system worthy of its own Netflix series. Everything gets beautifully categorized, labeled and tucked away. There’s just one tiny problem. We still have all the stuff. Buying containers is not decluttering. Sometimes you’ve simply organized your

hoarding. Before you purchase storage, go through what you actually own:

What do you use?

What do you need?

What do you love?

What have you been moving from container to container since approximately 2007?

Get rid of what no longer deserves space in your home. Then organize what remains. Only then can you know what storage you actually need.

Edit first.

Organize second.

Buy storage last.

A Better Home Doesn’t Always Require More

Good design absolutely involves beautiful furniture, great lighting, incredible art and objects that make a home feel personal. I make a living helping people make those choices.

But good design is also about restraint. Every item you bring into your home requires something from you space, storage, cleaning, maintenance and, eventually, disposal.

So the next time you’re standing in a store convincing yourself that you need another basket because it’s adorable and 30 percent off, ask yourself: does this actually make my home better?

If the answer is yes, buy it. If the answer is no, put it back.

You don’t need to stop shopping. You just need to shop better.

Start here to get organized before you buy.