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Your First House

Decorate Your First Apartment Without Breaking the Bank

Check out a dozen budget-friendly design ideas for making a rental apartment feel like home

Lauren Dunec Hoang September 5, 2017

Houzz Editor; landscape designer and former garden editor for Sunset Magazine and in-house designer for Sunset's Editorial Test Garden. Her garden designs have been featured in the Sunset Western Garden Book of Landscaping, Sunset Western Garden Book of Easy-Care Plantings (cover), Inhabitat, and POPSUGAR.

Houzz Editor; landscape designer and former garden editor for Sunset Magazine and... More

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With a few creative design strategies, you can make your first, or any, apartment feel like your own — without blowing through your savings in the process. Take a look at these 12 wallet-friendly ideas to get started, including one thing you can’t have too many of and what to do with a shoebox full of old postcards.

Justina Blakeney

1. Establish a theme. Choosing a color palette and overall style to your space can make a big difference in making an apartment look intentional rather than thrown together.

Start with an art print or piece of furniture that you love, and work from there. For example, this sunny entryway anchored around a yellow bench establishes a playful theme with bright colors, graphic pillows and layered prints. Other areas of the home echo the colors and leaf motif in one of the frames to make the home feel cohesive.

Find your decorating style

Michelle Gage | Interior Designer

2. Add plants. Then, add more. You really can’t have too many. Houseplants instantly enliven rooms, adding texture, color and sometimes fragrance, and they fill up bare spots and problem areas. That awkward corner of the living room? How about adding a potted dracaena or fiddleleaf fig (Ficus lyrata) to add height and green to the space. A bookshelf that looks empty and lifeless? Add a philodendron vine to trail down over the shelves.

To keep houseplants inexpensive, choose varieties you likely won’t kill, such as nearly bulletproof mother-in-law’s tongue and philodendron, and ask for cuttings or pups (succulent starts) from friends. Look for plant pots at garage sales or secondhand stores for the best deals.

High-Impact Houseplants for First-Timers

Jeanette Karlsen

3. Store stuff in crates, baskets, and jars. Gather up your desk or living room’s loose ends — paper, magazines, pens, pencils and electronics cords — and put them in a wooden crate or a couple of baskets. The containers will add texture to the room and minimize clutter. This works just as well in the kitchen with glass jars to hold dry goods and make your space look nice and organized.

Kailey J. Flynn Photography

4. Turn a pile of postcards into a gallery wall. If you have postcards or snapshots filling a shoebox and collecting dust, use them to create a gallery wall to remind you of places you’ve been or dream of visiting. To make a collection look cohesive, put them in the same style frame or stick to a theme (such as national parks, beaches or certain colors).

Planning Pretty

5. Put your own spin on mass-produced furniture. A fresh coat of paint and new hardware can go a long way in updating Ikea or other inexpensive furniture to fit your style. For example, the owner of this San Francisco apartment transformed an Ikea Rast chest to complement her vintage-inspired bedroom by painting the drawers different shades of rose pink, coral and off-white and swapping the handles for vintage knobs. The result looks more like a great flea market find than something off the shelf.

See similar knobs

Prettypegs

Here’s the same Ikea chest given an entirely different look. The designer started by painting the cabinet white and the drawer fronts a sunny yellow, then added a white cutout overlay in a geometric pattern to the front of each drawer. New brass handles and a set of wood-and-brass legs take the look of the piece from budget to high-end.

6. Repurpose hand-me-downs. If you’ve inherited furniture from family, friends or a previous tenant, you may end up with more of something than you need (say, mismatched chairs) and not enough of another (like side tables). Get creative with reimagining how each piece can be used. Can that extra stool double as a bedside table or a stand for a light in the living room? How about intentionally mixing seating around your dining table or using a bench against a wall as a bookshelf?

Faith Blakeney Design Studio

7. Go big with a photograph you love. A framed picture on your nightstand is great, but a wall-size photograph can truly transform the room. Landscape shots, city skylines, tree canopies, fields and beach scenes all work well on a large scale and have a full-immersion effect on the viewer — making one feel right in that scene.

Art.com and Costco both offer large-scale printing of your own photos for reasonable rates; you can also find an art photography print you like online.

Planning Pretty

8. Work with what you’ve got. Chances are your apartment comes with some existing features you love (lucky enough to have exposed brick walls?) and others that you could do without (those 1970s kitchen cupboards). Embrace the elements that you love and do what you can with your budget and rental agreement to change those that you don’t.

For example, the renters of this colorful San Francisco apartment inherited a bathroom with brown tile walls and a blue tile floor. They couldn’t live with the brown walls, so (with permission from their landlord) they covered the tile with many coats of white paint for a brighter look. Leaving the blue floor tile as is, they used it to set the scheme for the room — painting the vanity knobs, edges of the light fixture and wooden shelving unit blue, and choosing a soap dispenser and towels to match.

Before Photo

9. Splurge on great bedding. For small units and studio apartments, the bed takes up a large footprint in the room. Our advice: Make it count. For example, while the “before” shot of the bed of this Chicago studio is functional, it doesn’t add to the room or look like a very inviting spot. With the help of a generous mother who works as an interior designer, the DePaul University senior who lives in this studio was able to transform her 166-square-foot apartment into a much more inviting space.

Ania Omski-Talwar Interior Design

Mom and daughter worked to paint the walls two shades of gray (with the landlord’s permission), install new curtains and lighting and replace the twin with a full-size bed. Piled with pillows, a cushy duvet and cozy throw blankets, the bed really makes the room. One could imagine that for a hardworking student, it would be the ideal spot for taking a quick nap between classes or curling up to read or watch a show at the end of the day.

Joanna Thornhill Interiors

10. Open up shelving. For an instant kitchen update, remove heavy cupboard doors for an open shelving look. If you’re renting, store the cupboard doors to reattach when you move out.

Go a step further and place light-colored removable wallpaper at the back of the shelves or strips of Washi tape running along the shelf edges to make the space feel more like your own.

My Paradissi

11. Use shelves as a room divider. Placing a bookshelf to run perpendicular to the wall can be a useful, space-efficient way to create separation between different areas in an open-floor plan apartment. Fill the shelves with books, small potted plants and objects of interest, leaving the bottom shelves to hold larger storage baskets.

Sarah Greenman

12. Hang light, gauzy curtains. If your apartment faces an adjacent building or doesn’t have a great view, semitransparent curtains can be problem solvers. They allow light to stream into the room even if the curtains are closed, and their billowy forms soften hard edges and make rooms feel more inviting. To create this effect, choose white and off-white curtains in lightweight cotton and gauze materials. These work particularly well to “catch” light in the room, brightening the space.

Tell us: What are your budget-friendly tricks for home decorating? Share your ideas in the Comments.

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