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Creative ways to stay on budget.
Decorating on a tight budget requires resourcefulness, some smart shopping, and an admirable can-do attitude to upcycling and DIY. And while it can be challenging, it is usually where you find the most original decorative touches and thoughtful updates that make the most of what you have to hand.
Before heading to the high street to start shopping, consider some thrifty ways to decorate without spending much at all. Be economical with paint, consider everything in your home as worthy of display and decoration, scour vintage shops for the best secondhand furniture and get creative with some foraged flowers.
Here, we share 22 thrifty decorating tricks to help you stay on budget.
If you’re not already shopping secondhand for your home, you are really missing a trick. Some of the best-dressed homes are full of inherited, secondhand and vintage furniture, and interesting knick-knacks picked up along the way. This is the fabulous seaside cottage of eBay’s pre-loved style director Amy Bannerman, who decorates entirely with secondhand pieces, upcycling and repurposing as she goes – here she has covered a dining room banquette in checkered upholstery from Colours of Arley.
Pictured: Checker fabric in jewel & trip at Colours of Arley
When using cheaper materials, there may be a temptation to hide or disguise them with paint or a bit of upcycling, but there is an argument for embracing and even making a feature of them. This fitted wardrobe was made from a single piece of plywood, and left in its raw state for a totally bespoke finish.
Pictured: Design by Studio WANDA
Coffee tables always look so chic with an abundance of decoration, but for maximum impact and minimum outlay, go for coffee table books over expensive vases or decorative objects. Prop your most attractive cover on top and bolster with a stack of magazines below.
If you’ve over ordered on tiles, wallpaper, or paint, don’t let any of it go to waste. Wallpaper looks chic at the back of a display cabinet or lining a wardrobe, and it’s always a nice bit of visual trickery to paint doorframes and radiators to match the rest of the room. Extra tiles are a real gift, because you can add a sweet splashback in a kitchen or small bathroom.
Paint is one of the most affordable ways to revamp a room. A quick lick can add definition to skirting boards, you can recreate a panelling effect without the financial outlay, or mimic this eye-catching hallway designed by Studio Rhonda with a creative use of stripes, colour blocking and painted borders.
Pictured: Design by Studio Rhonda
Try as you might, real plants and indoor trees can easily wither and droop. For the not-so-green-fingered, a faux tree is far more cost effective, and it will last a lifetime. If you’re worried about it looking too fake, a faux olive tree is your best bet because the leaves are wonderfully soft and textured rather than shiny and leathery.
Pictured: Artificial Olive Tree at Dunelm
You can barely open Instagram these days without seeing a brilliant Ikea hack. Their beds, wardrobes, side tables and modular storage has been glued, painted, upcycled, and otherwise totally transformed into fabulous features that belies their modest price tag. #ikeahack has over 700,000 posts should you ever fall short of inspiration.
Read more: Step-by-step: A clever makeover of Ikea's £100 Bestå sideboard
A storage footstool is a nifty three-in-one piece; you can use it in lieu of a coffee table, to store all your living room clutter and increase the lounging area of your sofa exponentially. The definition of getting more bang for your buck...
Scent is a powerful mood enhancer, and a creative cheat code in interiors. Walk into any luxury hotel or spa, and you are greeted by beautiful aromas that make everything smell expensive. Use your most evocative scents in key areas like a hallway or bedroom.
Pictured: Tortoiseshell Essential Oil Electric Diffuser, Oliver Bonas
Foraged branches can look just as chic as an expensive bouquet in the right vase. Always keep your eye out for nature's offerings – dried herbs, interesting shells from a beach walk, or some wildflowers from a country stroll are the ultimate in affordable decoration.
Pictured: Flora hand painted jug at Rowen & Wren
We are unanimous in our belief that a home without art is unfinished, but the good stuff can be prohibitively expensive. Instead, get a bit creative with what you frame – silk scarves and wallpaper samples can be just as impactful, quilts can hang unframed, so too can vintage robes. Bonus tip: Good quality picture frames or framing services can be astronomical. Seek out secondhand art from charity shops, forgo the prints and just buy the frames.
Pictured: Strawberry Ikat Scarf at Bimba Y Lola
Limewashing adds depth, texture and character to walls, and while pre-mixed limewash can be expensive, thinning a chalk-based paint with water works just as well. In design terms, those rooms that need a considerable amount of warming up, such as a bathroom or an overly clinical kitchen would do well with limewash walls, or in large spaces that run the risk of looking quite sparse. It's also a great choice for bedrooms because its chalky texture will soften underlying colour and create something quite cocooning.
Pictured: House Beautiful Breeze Carpet at Tapi
Sink skirts are having a real moment in interiors, popping up in kitchens and bathrooms as a way to soften harsh materials and add a dose of colour and pattern. And they are of course much cheaper than cabinets. This has to be one of our favourite examples – from the brilliant creative mind of textile artist Jessie Cutts (@cuttsandsons) who designs and makes the most fabulous quilted artwork and wall hangings at Cutts & Sons. She had this striking sink curtain remade from a quilt found on eBay.
Cupboard doors (plus hinges and hardware) can be quite dear, but the frame itself is invariably a bargain. Make like interior designer Jodie Hazlewood and do away with doors completely, embracing instead colourful open cubbies.
Instead of investing in matching cushions or pairs of table lamps which can effectively double your decorating spend, embrace a mismatch of things. This style suits slightly rustic interiors that can mix vintage, antique and new pieces at will.
For an area as hardworking as a splashback, you might assume that only expensive materials and a professional fitter will do, but innovative ‘peel, stick and seal’ splashbacks are made from heat-resistant toughened glass and require little DIY acumen beyond sticking in place and adding some sealant.
Pictured: Country Living Peacock blue matt splashback at Splashback
Black hides a multitude of sins – it’s a great way of disguising scuffs, scrapes and imperfections on skirting boards, staircases and wooden furniture. It is particularly useful for features in your home that are costly to replace – a dated fireplace or old-fashioned wood panelling can be modernised with a coat of dramatic matt black paint.
Adding decorative panelling to your walls is a deceptively easy DIY task (read our step-by-step guide to wall panelling), and it's a great design solution for contemporary properties that might lack character. There are plenty of affordable retailers like B&Q that will pre-cut your wooden panels as long as you provide measurements.
Pictured: Design by Topology Interiors
Refillable glass bottles and jars save money and the planet. Ceramic soap dispensers for your bathroom or rows of glass mason jars in a kitchen or pantry are miles more attractive than shop-bought plastics, and refills are considerably cheaper.
Pictured: Washing up liquid dispenser at Zara Home
An affordable way to make a small space look bigger. Colour drenching is a design device that sees walls and ceilings – and often window frames and radiators – painted in a single or similar colour. This is a bold statement in itself, but it has the added effect of blurring the boundaries of a room, so you're less likely to notice a low ceiling or pokey proportions.
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