It depends on what is needed. A lot of times people go overboard with description that readers don't care about because the authors fall in love with the sound of their own typing. Marshall Evans, former editor/agent/ author writes this in his book Getting Your Novel Published: "As with describing places, tell us how something looks only if it's something we haven't seen before or if it's something whose appearance we would have no way of knowing." He also suggests breaking up background and descriptions into smaller pieces rather than having paragraph after paragraph of solid text. When you describe something, you draw attention to it, and that sets up the expectation in the reader that there is something important about it. It frustrates the reader to read two pages of description only to find the description is about a place of no importance to the story. Make the descrpiton special. "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Anton Chekov There is another famous quote of Anton Chekov that says that if you have a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, you better have it go off by the third. The point is, nothing should be in your story that doesn't serve some purpose. The thing is that some readers like slow, drawn out descriptions of things. Other readers like stories that are quickly paced and move along. You need to know your audience. Of course if you are only writing for yourself, no rule applies because you only need to please yourself. And there are few rules that can't be broken by skilled or experienced writers. And there's nothing wrong with that. I have to say, however, I think the number of people who have too little in their first draft are a somewhat smaller group than those who write too much. Maybe that's just my personal experience as a verbose person. ;)