$1000 Living Room Challenge
Do you think it’s impossible to create a stylish apartment on a tight budget? I’m going to show you how design a living room on a small budget.
With a one thousand challenge, I’ll guide you to prove that with a little creativity and some smart choices, you can transform your first post-college space into a home you’ll love. We all spend a lot of time in our places. We all deserve spaces to be a relaxing place we like to be and to invite friends over to enjoy a well decorated room.
You might think this is the opposite of the sustainability argument, but it’s not. One of the things that can keep you in a tight budget is to find some of these items secondhand. But for the sake of this argument, these items that I’ve sourced are all new.
I got an email from someone asking for a little help decorating their first post-college apartment on $600 or less. And of course, that did not involve changing anything with the floors or the wall color. So, this is a classic example of why I think coming up with a design plan before you go shopping can save you a lot of time and money.
Living Room Design on a Budget
The first step to a design plan is going to be the floor plan. It’s important to measure rooms. You don’t want to make the mistake of getting something that is way too big or way too small for your space when you’re on a tight budget.
For example, look at this room that is long and narrow. There just isn’t a lot of room for furniture. She already had the couch, so that was a big part of the budget. The rest was only $600. With that $600, we needed to find a rug, a chair, some artwork, curtains, and a lamp. You can see with just these five things, you can change the look of a space.
Living Room Example 1
She described her style as French provincial, Coastal, or Colonial. She knew that she wanted to incorporate green toile into the space, which is a traditional French style fabric. With this first look, it was a much darker rug, a brass floor lamp, botanical prints, and green striped curtains. The botanical prints are a traditional French provincial style art, so they created a cohesive feel just like the fabric.
Here is a list of the items I sourced:
Living Room Example 2
In the second example, I used a chair from Walmart that is traditional French style. I also incorporated pale neutral drapes, Coastal artwork, and a table lamp instead of a floor lamp. In this case, the rug is a much lighter pattern.
You can see the contrast between these two rooms. You can change a lot just by changing a few small details if you are intentional about it and pull together the pieces before you go shopping.
Here are the furnishings for the second room:
If you’re thinking about working on a room and you just want a little bit of help, think about joining my weekly calls where we plan a room together. We cover everything from floor planning to putting together a mood board and coming up with your style inspiration. See this link to join the group.
Which one do you like? Or do you like neither? One reason why I think it’s important for people to learn to do this themselves is to get a design you like. You are your own best designer if you just take the time to figure out what style you like and do a little bit of homework at the front end. I’ve written a post about learning your design style. You can read about it here: What’s Your Style? Take the Quiz.
