Interior design can be terribly overwhelming. Even renovating one room can make you think you need to spend years of your life and thousands of dollars training at a university to be well enough practiced to execute a simple project with ease.

But while it may at time feel that way, it is not that way. The internet has made it easier than ever to find the guidance you need to execute your dream renovation. There is not a skill in existence that is out of your reach if you can find it.

This list exists to offer a few basics to get started.

1. Lighting is Everywhere. Diffuse it.

Yes, lighting exists. Is that the whole tip?

Well, almost. It is easy to point out that lighting is everywhere, but hard to internalize it. Lighting is, as you might expect, the effect created by light falling on objects within your home.

Even that definition sounds a bit odd though, doesn’t it? Light is so omnipresent that there is no way to define it without the definition feeling insubstantial. But at the same time, it is an important thing to define within the realm of interior design hacks.

So, permit that definition of lighting for now, if you would please. It’s important.

The thing about lighting is, while it is everywhere, it does not look good everywhere. This presents you with an opportunity: You can either change the lighting or change what it lights.

For that reason, it is best to experiment with different methods of diffusion. Diffusion is when lighting is softened by the material it is bouncing off of or passing through.

You can use white sheets to diffuse light coming through a window. This will allow light to pass through while being far less harsh than direct sunlight.

Or, you can change what the light is lighting. Change your sheets to be off-white. Paint your walls to be a lighter shade of blue. In other words, make it so that even if your home is receiving direct sunlight, it does not radiate like direct sunlight.

This will soften the appearance of your home, giving it a warm and healthy glow.

2. Storage Areas are Picture Frames

This tip is a mindset change with plenty of practical applications.

Everyone has coat hangers, shelves, drawers, even laundry hampers that are used to decorate their living spaces whether they know it or not. Strangely, the interior design hacks that make use of these particular aspects of home design are few and far between.

Perhaps it is because they are necessary. But something being necessary doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. The hack here is to turn your storage areas into aesthetically pleasing focal points.

This doesn’t mean you should adorn them with gaudy decorations (unless that’s your thing). Rather, keep them orderly. Position them to create interesting shapes and to draw the eye.

You will likely, at some point, feel uncomfortable with putting them out in the open. That is the puritanical feeling created by years of interior design hacks neglecting these basic aspects of human living spaces. Don’t listen to that feeling.

The goal of this particular hack is twofold: Obviously, if you have no choice but to have certain pieces of furniture in your living space, then it is best to make them look as good as you can.

But secondly, you also want to get comfortable with making something beautiful that ordinarily just exists to serve a utilitarian purpose. A coat rack isn’t a cowhide floor mat—you don’t buy it because it will tie a room together. You buy it to fulfill a role.

However, if you can start viewing the items you buy to fulfill a role as possibly tying a room together, then you will unlock more possibilities than you could imagine.

3. Fabrics are not Just Fabrics

If you find yourself in love with a certain fabric, it can be easy to overdo it.

Placing not just cowhide floor mats, but cowhide pillows on a cowhide couch requires too little effort when you are shopping online or out of a brochure. When you have no real-world context for what your materials will look like once they’re all together, design is almost impossible.

To start with, you can (and should) get in the habit of “testing” out how fabrics look. You don’t want to reupholster your couch with something that clashes with the rest of your living room.

To test out a fabric, consider a part of your living room that has nothing to with your couch. A rug, a blank spot on the wall you’ve been meaning to fill, a chair, anything. Then, order a cut of the fabric that covers this part.

The best thing to use this on is undecorated parts of the wall. It may sound strange, but basically placing a rectangle of fabric as if it were a painting will give you a strong idea of whether the fabric adds to the room, or subtracts from it.

And that’s the calculation you are essentially trying to do: Does this change add or subtract?

It’s a hard estimation to make with something as simple as a fabric. You can’t figure out if a fabric works with theory. And if you can’t figure out whether or not a fabric works, then you certainly don’t want to change your furniture on a guess.

And you certainly do not want to be buying new furniture on a guess. Displaying that fabric as if it were a painting will turn that guess into a certainty.

As you can probably tell, most of these tips are meant to adjust your mental situation as much as your physical situation. This is because home design is, at least in part, a mental process.

And if you don’t practice the mental aspect, all the money in the world won’t keep you from making mistakes once you get to the physical aspect of actually decorating.