Interior designing and overall decoration of your home or apartment is usually a very expensive affair. Making an empty apartment a home is 1000s of dollars business usually. However, if you just moved into an apartment pretty much empty handed and do not want to spend too much along the same, you may consider these cheap decorating methods.
1. Garage sales
Picking up cheap used decorative items from garage sales is a great way to quickly fill your apartment with some of those necessary decoration items. During the home shifting season, make sure that you go around on garage sales every weekend until you have found all that stuff that you need for your apartment.
2. Dollar stores
Dollar stores can help you with unimaginable cheap decorative items for your home. It’s not that you get extra ordinary stuff there but some good plastic plants, small fancy lights, cheap craft items, murals etc can be spotted in such places.
3. Cheap DIY furniture
Furniture is the most basic interior decoration item but is usually expensive to buy brand new hardwood ones. Other than the garage sale options, you might want to check out some of those do-it-yourself furniture that can add a good dimension to your apartment pretty quickly.
4. Craigslist, Ebay and other Online classifieds
I must admit that I am a craigslist addict. No other online used stuff sales portal is as exciting as craigslist because it is highly localized and fast. Furniture, electrical appliances, lamp fittings, electronics – you name it, it’s all there on craigslist at throwaway prices.
5. Use your collectibles
If you have the habit of collecting stuff like bon china articles, needle work, clothe-paper craft, souvenirs or even bottles – it may all be useful for decorating a home in an inexpensive way. After all, they pile up and occupy space, why not make use of them in a better way? Recently, I saw a beautiful pattern created with beer bottles in one of the houses. It was simply awesome!
6. Draw colorful patterns on your walls
If you happen to move to a rented place or apartment recently, but don’t want to spent on painting the whole place, you may opt to paint certain colorful pattern to one or two walls alone to give those walls more focus. I have seen people creating easy geometric designs with multiple colors that go well with the rest of the decoration.
7. Use colorful (any color) curtains
Cheap window blinds can make your apartment look even cheaper or like cheap business places. Curtains are a great way to minimize the boring looks of your window walls and even creating a few folds around the blinds would make it look superb. You can use curtains on walls as well to reduce their plain appearance.
8. Use a couple of focus lamps, increase wattage of existing lighting
If you do not want to spend on new set of light fittings for your apartment, at least consider replacing the low wattage bulbs with brighter ones. Also, you may buy a couple of cheap focus lamps to divert the attention to whatever minimal wall fittings you might have.
9. Cheap floating shelves to fill walls
Floating shelves are cheaper – at the same time very effective – way of decorating your walls pretty quickly.
10. Add some flora
Adding a couple of live indoor plants will give your rooms the much needed green and organic feel which again helps your home look a lot better and plesant.
11. Consider painting one of the over-exposed walls
We already talked about wall patterns. Even if any pattern cannot be arrived at for your wall, you may just paint a theme wall in the room in a different but matching color to organize things around that particular wall. Theme walls, even without any pattern can be extremely attractive even without any major decorative items.
12. Wall murals
Wall murals offer a great way to furnish your apartment without spending much. They can be found in dollar starts, garage or yard sales.
13. Use wall stickers
Well, wall stickers are those amazing readymade art work (big ones) that you can paste on your walls (ideally only one wall) and can dramatically add to the better look of the room.
14. Use focus lamps or tower lamps to divert attention
We already talked about focus lamps. In addition, tower lamps (pedestal lamps upward projecting) can help take the attention away from the floor and walls to the ceiling.
15. Use cheap and colorful floor rugs
Talking about diverting attention, you can use cheap and colorful floor rugs to divert the attention more to the floors than anywhere else. Use this focus diverting techniques on the wall, floor or ceiling to effectively do the focus management.
Hope these tips were helpful to you. Good luck with decorating your apartment!
