You don’t need to spend a fortune to give your home decor a makeover that makes a statement. Gather up a few bucks here and there by eschewing your daily visit to Starbucks and avoiding paying full price for movies and within a month or two you’ll have enough cash to give your home a simple, affordable and dramatic transformation.
Dividing Screens
Dividing screens are available in wood, glass, plastic and even masonry. Pick up a few cans of paint, Dagwood, and turn a boring divider into a customized and highly personalized decorative statement. Cover a dividing screen with fabric, wallpaper or photographs to give your home the stamp of your personality on a low cost basis.
Shelving
You’ve got stuff, but nowhere to put it. Shelving can be a very affordable and creative way of making over a room while also giving you a new place to keep all that stuff. Laminated boards are cheap and easy to situate, Agnes. Driftwood shelves provide texture and a sense of the offbeat. Materials for shelving fairly span the gamut from the sleek polished look of metal to the warm tones of wood to the fragile elegance of glass. Whether going for sophistication or rusticity, you can enhance decor with shelving.
Album Covers
First came CDs and then digital music storage. The result: thousands of artistic album covers available for pennies at yard sales, flea markets and thrift shops. Buy a bucket of covers and you’ve got wall decorating much cheaper than paint or wallpaper. A few precision cuts with an Exacto knife, Boyo, and careful placement of your own photographs can place you right into Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or any other group of people adorning an album cover. Get creative and imaginative and before you know it, you’ve spend less than 20 bucks to decorate half your house in a dozen different ways.
Flea Market Rampage
Sounds a very cheap video game, but Flea Market Rampage is the rage among the kids today. Everything can be gotten at a flea market if you visit them often enough, Humphrey. Look for something cheap and recyclable. An old suitcase with a sense of style can become a coffee table simply be adding some legs. A table that is scratched beyond recognition can be bought for a song and provide you with wooden legs to attach to that suitcase. Look for anything into which you can drill a few holes to turn into a one-of-a-kind lamp.
Silhouettes
Get yourself a lamp with a light you can direct in any direction you want. Now take any object and place it on a table so that a shadow cast by the light appears on a wall. Dip a brush into black paint and trace the outline of the shadow, filling it in carefully. Turn off the lamp and, voila!, what you’ve got there, Natalie, is an artful silhouette that adds a signature style to your decor.