The Vine: June 15, 2007
Hi Sars,
It’s my apartment. I just moved into a new place, and decided I need to actually decorate this one, now that I’m sort of an official grown-up now at the grand age of 27.
Only problem is, I am relatively poor these days (paying down my credit card debt isn’t leaving me much room in the budget for funky room decor). Do you or your readers have any advice for decorating a boring white-walled apartment on a low budget? I already have a lot of decent furniture, but I need help with what to put on the walls and cute little accents everyone else manages to put in their homes so flawlessly.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Thanks,
The only difference between this and an institution is I don’t need to tongue any meds
Dear Tongue,
You can do a bunch of different things — posters; framed photos; shelving with colored glass and toys mixed together; collages pinned to bulletin boards that you can redo when the mood strikes; squares of cork or colored fabric with pictures and postcards pinned to them; clocks or album covers or vintage ads — so the first thing to do is figure out your style, what goes with your furniture and what you’d like to look at every day. Maybe you want one pricey item that sort of unifies the space, and you go off that; mine is a vintage anatomical poster of a hen — heh — but most of the rest of my wall decor came from eBay, or it’s photos and vintage ads I matted myself because I’m cheap. Maybe you want to collect a whole bunch of posters and pictures, and rotate your collection now and then. Up to you.
Then you can start collecting — stoop sales, eBay, haunting Crate & Barrel.com for clearance sales, razoring cool ads out of vintage mags you got for a buck, whatever you want to do. A framed-photo array is always cool-looking, or if you collect toys or snowglobes or something you could do a staggered series of shelves and arrange them nicely. A friend of mine made a mosaic out of the free promo postcards you get in bars; it cost her nothing but the price of a pack of art-tack and it looked awesome.
Readers?
Tags: Ask The Readers retail
Ikea sells both art and very reasonably priced frames. Some of it is cheesy, but some of it isn’t bad, and most is colorful and cheerful.
A really cheap and easy way to fake matting for pictures is to just head to a scrapbooking store (or an art supply store) and find a piece of paper in a complementary color. You can get an amazing variety of colors (and prints, if you want) for 20 cents a sheet or less. Stick a photo, picture, postcard, or whatever on the center of the paper and frame it. No one will even notice that it’s not truly matted unless they’re looking really closely.
I have 4×6″ postcard prints of three paintings by Emily Carr hanging in my kitchen, framed in plain 8×10″ frames that I got on sale (also at the art supply store). You’d never guess that the entire project – frames, background paper, prints – cost less than $20.
Museum gift shops of any kind are a great source of interesting postcards that are cheap and easy to frame. Happy decorating!
I’m super cheap and wanted to frame art prints and photography. Buy calendars (especially when they are deeply discounted in early spring)! The images are large enough to be frame-worthy and you can buy simple enough frames at a craft store. You also get 12 or more options, so you can change it up when you want something new.
If you’ve got a good color printer, get some of the photo printer paper and check out Flickr.com. If you browse through the photos uploaded there, you’re sure to find something that catches your fancy. There are some incredibly talented photographers posting pictures there. Republishing without permission is obviously a no-no, but I don’t think most people would get bent out of shape if you just printed out their photos to hang on your wall. You can get cheap mats and frames at Michael’s or another craft store. Oh, and for a unified, slightly more upscale look, you can use just about any photo editing program to transform digital photos from standard color to B&W or sepia tint. My living room walls have several B&W photos I took while on vacation, printed out, and matted with plain white mats in plain black frames. It looks really good.
Buy some cute, funky fabric in graphic patterns. Then get some canvases from an art store, staple gun the fabric to the canvas, and hang it up. Instant unique wall art!
I love artwork and want originals, so what I have done is gather old already framed pieces from estate sales and second hand stores. Also, I have wonderful friends who framed photos they took while traveling. (Who needs a cd for a present? Gimme art!) Then I have one beautiful piece I bought from the artists framed professionally. It’s kind of eclectic but very personal.
In my town there’s a company that sells plastic materials to companies, and they have a showroom with remainders, overcuts, etc. for deep discounts. Plexiglas and lucite in different colors mounted with cheapo shelving brackets, especially staggered, make great focal points for displaying tchochkes. I’ve even done a display of random matchbooks and boxes that I’ve picked up at restaurants and bars, interspersed with interesting wine corks to good reviews.
Of course, my parents already know my predelictions, so it doesn’t faze them too much when they come over.
And on Snarkmeister’s note, a friend of mine made good printouts of color photos that she’d taken and bought pre-stretched canvases which she then painted a background color on and gluesticked the photos to. Looked amazing with one wall painted an interesting color.
That’s all great advice. One other thing I discovered makes fantastic and affordable art is the covers of old sheet music–they always have bins of the stuff at antique stores, flea markets, etc. Lots of the covers are boring, but there are always a few wonderful ones mixed in to the bunch, and as a bonus they’re a standard size so you get (1) an instant sort of unifying feature and (2) easy, cheap frameability. Odd-sized things can be a real headache to fit into a ten-dollar Target frame, but 8 1/2 x 11 is never a problem. If you pick out two or three with a similar feature–for example, mine all have orange as a main color in them somewhere–they’ll look good together effortlessly.
Another thing you didn’t mention but that goes a looooooong way toward making a space more comfy is houseplants. And believe me, I am NOT good with plants, but there are a few out there (the ones you see in offices, like spider plants, jade plants, and pothos) that you would really have to make a concerted effort to murder.
For cheap frames, buy framed pictures at yard sales and second-hand shops even if you don’t like the picture. You can always throw the picture out (or donate it back to the shop without the frame).
Use colorful old quilts, sarong cloth, or even used prom dresses as wall hangings.
Try Hastings, they have large poster sized art prints, that are generally totally awesome
I concur about buying old frames. I got about 20 from one seller at a flea market (some empty, some not) and just resized a bunch of my personal photos to fit. I painted the frames the color and then just hung them all over my couch in a funky geometric pattern.
I also highly recommend the fabric squares over canvases. It just depends on how personal you want your space to be.
I don’t know where you live, but if it’s somewhere that has Half-Price Books, they often have packages of several themed art prints (my fiance recently brought home one that was Space Babe-themed; now our bathroom has a delightful pulp-sci-fi-novel aesthetic) that are a relatively easy size to frame — we had to go to a craft store to get the right size, but once there, it was easy to find a cheap version. You’d find them near the registers.
I’ve found some great stuff on the cheap by frequenting flea markets and thrift stores.
I don’t know how much this happens elsewhere, but in NYC, there are a lot of down-on-their-luck people who sell things off blankets in the street. I have a series of paintings that were apparently done by art students who didn’t keep the wood framing behind the canvas for their next attempt and just threw them out, and I bought them (all at different times) from a homeless guy who used to hang out on my street. The biggest is about 15″ by 20″ (too lazy to measure), and I got it for $10. The colors don’t jive, so I keep them in different places around the apartment, but they’re always the first thing people notice.
Starting a “collection” of a certain kind of wall thing is cool, too. I bought a calendar of Monet artwork, cut the pages apart, and then made a series of 12″ x 12″ frames using brackets and wood edging I bought at Home Depot and spray-painted black – don’t remember the cost, but it was affordable on my student budget. They also make it easy to redecorate whenever you want – just buy a new calendar, and you get twelve more pictures. You can also place them in a bunch of different combinations – I started out having them in one big group of three rows and four columns on a big empty wall. Right now I have four over my desk, four over my bed, two in the hallway, and two in the kitchen. You can also buy that shatterproof plastic stuff there, too, and have someone cut it out to use in place of glass. If memory serves me correctly, that part cost quite a bit more, but you can always add it later. They always looked fine without it. If you want more info on that, Sars can give you my email addy.
If it all possible, PAINT THE WALLS, if they are indeed just white. Even changing the walls from white to an off-white will make a huge difference and warm the place up, but the best small city apartment I’ve ever seen had walls in the brightest, craziest colors, like lime green and bright orange. I myself, though, am not that crazy, but use tans and yellows and some red, too. Have some fun with it!
IKEA is the best for apartment living; they have lots of fun little mod things that are very cheap (especially candles, which are fun knickknacks). Go to places like TJ Maxxx as well to find cute funky, cheap things. Pier One has good stuff too.
Buy a philodendron – extreeeeeeeemely low-maintenance plants that don’t need a ton of light to thrive and, given time, will put out many many trailing arms.
As the trailing bits get longer, put the plant on a high shelf and use white thumbtacks to support the shoots against the wall. Does that make sense? You put the thumbtacks in the wall and then rest the branches on them.
Anyway, I first saw this in a friend’s bedroom, where she’d done this to create a sort of living border all along the top quarter of the walls. It was gorgeous. I tried it in our old place and it worked beautifully – within a year we had the top of one wall of the living room covered, and by the time we moved it had crept halfway around the room.
Oh, and if you have a friend who already has one of these, you can just ask them to snip a few cuttings off – they will root quite happily and make new plants for free.
Ditto on framed calendar pictures. Aaron Bros. routinely would have frame sales and I would pick up identical frames and put different items inside — the frame unifies the group, while the “art” can be as different as you want.
I have an extremely large wall over my fireplace. What I ended up doing for that one was getting four large 18×24 frames, putting prints inside two of them, then matting two placemats in the other two. One is deep red bamboo, the other is a nubby earth-toned canvas. They look cool (3D under glass instead of just flat prints), and the whole project cost me less than $100, mostly because of the large frames. The hardest part was sketching out the math on where to put the nails to hang them at the appropriate distance from each other…
Etsy has lots of well-priced original art.
Elisa beat me to it, but calendars. Buy a cool calendar and frame four or five of the pictures, then hang them in a cool configuration. They’ll already be thematically matched and it’s cheap as hell.
When I first moved here and was in the same situation with the insane asylum walls, I used things that you wouldn’t normally put on the walls as decoration. My family feels I should wear more jewelry, so I had a ton of gaudy necklaces that didn’t suit my wardrobe, but livened up the decor nicely. I threaded them around thumbtacks in a sort of spirograph pattern (remember that toy?) in one area. I also took a scarf and wrapped it around some cardboard that was in a sheet set I bought for decoration.
“WHAT OF MY HEN???” Man, that never gets old.
Keep an eye on poster-selling websites, particularly around the start of semesters; they usually have really good deals in September and January for college dorm decorators. Rooting around you can find some really nice art prints for cheap.
The word “accents” also makes me think of stuff that’s not two-dimensional; scour garage sales and thrift stores for stuff like old plates or glass that’s unique and pretty. Bowls would look great on top of a bookshelf or coffee table, and interesting plates could be fantastic for a kitchen. Heck, you could even smash it all up and create a mosaic on a big piece of particle board and then hang that up.
DrinkingTea has a good idea–I have a ton of jewelry even though most days I only wear earrings (I’m a sucker for shiny objects), and my mum bought me some really cute hooks shaped like dragonflies, hearts, etc. and then we hung necklaces, bracelets, fancy scrunchies, etc. from there. I’m a big fan of things that are both purposeful and attractive, which also explains my cat-head-motif CD holder. Stuff you already own, whether it’s jewelry, CDs (I heard once about someone who got a big see-through case to hang their CDs on the wall–nifty!), knickknacks, clothes (get one of those trees and hang your favorite scarves/hats/bels from it!) a) costs no extra money and b) obviously matches your tastes.
Also, I dunno where you live but if you live anywhere where they have street fairs, keep an eye out–totally cute jewelry, clothes (including lots of flowy stuff I might not wear but is so beautiful I might just buy some to hang up in my room), and knicknacks for crazy, crazy cheap.
Another idea is taking stuff you own and just making it cuter–my mom (I’m a college kid) surprised me by taking my gauzy purple curtains and gluing tiny mirrors on them. So, so much cuter, not expensive at all. Hunt around some craft or DIY sites for ideas!
Also, if you’re in a small enough area, as most apartments are, even something small can be a big addition–my cute, coordinated office supplies toally brightened up my dorm room this year (they were a touch pricy, I admit, but they were both decorative and functional!)
Finally, as for plants: I think cactuses are super, super cute. But, um, if you have pets, maybe not.
If you have a theatre nearby, go hang out by their dumpsters the day after they close a show. Though many places keep a lot of stock pieces, they still destroy a lot of stuff the day after closing, during strike. Knick knacks might be harder to find, (props departments keep EVERYTHING) but large drops and random chunks of architecture make for cool conversation pieces, particularly if you saw the show. A theatre department nearby did The Seagull, and had HUGE 10′ x 14′ wood backed postcards of tinted Victorian images that were thrown away. Even a piece of a cornice can make a wall look interesting…
Instead of offering specific advice, I’m just going to recommend the home decor forums on craftster.org. You can get lots of great inspiration there. If you’re not really crafty, don’t be too intimidated because many of the projects have tutorials breaking down the processes to simple steps.
When my husband was just a bachelor living with 3 other guys in a group house, they ended up making a big mosaic in their den/basement of postcards people sent them. Sometimes they were funny ads or slogans, and sometimes they were lovely photos of far-away places. Granted, they were up there with scotch tape, but you could do something nicer and less bachelor-pady if you have some good postcards of your own or those that others sent you.
People enjoy my home now because we have framed photos everywhere. You can put up those frames with multiple areas cut out for photos. The front opens up on a hinge so you can change them out as you see fit. Seeing your family and friends all over your place can give it a real homey feel.
My sister bought a copy of her favorite children’s books and framed the illustrations. It looked really cool and cost very little. I would cruise garage sales or eBay/craigslist, whatever for used books.
My sister decorated the main hallway in her apartment as a “Hallotics” where she keeps a ton of political memorabilia. Old buttons, new buttons, signs from protests she attends — it’s really cool. However, she asked that I mention that it’s only for the truly political, and not just for a conversation piece. That would be “a bastardization of the Hallotics,” she said.
I second the recommendation of painting. Color will make the room immediately less sterile, and take some of the edge off needing to find decorations asap. Throw an interesting looking rug on the floor (ikea has them cheap!) and you’ve got a ‘look’. Then just keep an eye out for stuff you like. I’ve been living in my apartment about a year now, and it has gradually filled with paintings and knick-knacks. Money won’t be such an issue because you’ll be buying things over time (I’m a grad student, so I totally understand that dilemma). And this approach has the added bonus of keeping your apartment interesting for guests: whenever they come over there is some new addition!
Freecycle! A lot of towns of reasonable size have a freecycle, for people who have stuff they want to get rid of, and people who want free stuff. The downside- it might take a while before you find anything you want, unless you have a clear idea of what you’d like and post that. The upside- it’s free! The freecycle where I live has a yahoo group.
I shop at Cost Plus World Market (I think it’s a national chain). They have really cheap tchotchkes, rugs, lamps, bedding, artwork, etc. They also have inexpensive furniture that’s sized well for small apartments at, what I think, very reasonable prices.
I second Olivia’s idea — some children’s books have really phenomenal artwork, and if you choose a book you loved as a child the pictures will be both aesthetically pleasing and emotionally significant. For my apartment, I scanned/enlarged/color-laser-printed a bunch of images from “When Sheep Cannot Sleep,” my favorite childhood book, and hung them around the apartment (in cheapo frames from IKEA, with scrapbook paper as fake “matting”). An added bonus is that the book is about a sheep exploring a house, so in each room I hung the analogous image from the book: Woolly coloring at a table is hung over the desk, Woolly cooking up some peas is hung in the kitchen, Woolly taking a bath is hung in the bathroom, a triptych of Woolly falling asleep is hung over the bed, etc. Definitely the thing that gets the most comments from visitors.
It also helps to have a rudimentary understanding of sewing (and even a cheap sewing machine), because you can get some pretty cool fabrics from vintage stores/garage sales. At a garage sale, I found a couple of unidentified sheets of fabric (presumably from a child’s room) that had cartoon squirrels embroidered along the bottom; I turned them into awesome curtains for my kitchen, and it barely took any time at all since the edges were already finished.
I, too, love IKEA for decorating. I avoid their “art” since it’s obviously hanging in thousands of livings rooms across the country — but they have great (and cheap) little glass vases and potpourri bowls and creatively-shaped mirrors and such that add nice little accents to a room. Plus, everything has a funny Swedish name.
Gotta throw this in here as a former apartment manager: DO NOTHING PERMANENT UNTIL YOU LOOK AT THE LEASE.
I don’t know the laws in your state, but my boss’s rule was that you could paint if you wanted to, but any damage accrued (paint on the carpet) or decorations left behind came out of your damage deposit.
Plenty of people want to paint when they move in–they’re all fired up about their new living space and want it to look cool. They all SAY they’ll repaint the walls white when they move out; do I have to say that not one person ever, ever did so? You’re too busy packing and signing new leases and transferring phone service to even clean the bathroom, much less paint.
Don’t use those sticky hooks that supposedly glue to the wall-they never work and just peel the paint off (damage deposit!) And don’t use humongous nails that leave giant holes in the drywall (D.D.!) Don’t hang plants or anything else heavier than a paper lantern from the ceiling unless a) the lease specifies you can and b) it’s hung from a load bearing beam, otherwise, hello huge hole torn in ceiling, goodbye guess what? Don’t use contact paper on kitchen shelves and drawers unless you’re positive it will come off without stripping off the cheap fakewood veneer… essentially, before you do anything that can’t be taken back, stop and ask “Can I afford to move out of here without getting that D.D. back?”
Sorry for the long bummer post, but seriously, a little thought beforehand can save a LOT of grief later.
Apartmenttherapy.com is a good site, too,with photos of real apts. But I disagree about calendars, generic posters, etc–they don’t look personal or interesting. Figure out what you really love–what images speak to you, what colors, etc. and then search them out, replacing the C+ stuff with B+ and working your way to A +.
A dear friend of mine collected old ads showing young women in the 50s as “career gals” which reminded her of her mother. Framed and hung with family photos, “wall planters” of the same era, and other memoriabilia, the display told a personal story.
Don’t rush to decorate. Go to museums, galleries, antique stories and junk stores and see what speaks to you. A small object may start a life time of collecting.
If you have cable, there are some great ideas on HGTV, specifically on the shows “Design on a Dime” and “Decorating Cents.” Also, HGTV.com has lists of projects from the shows, including material lists and instructions.
Another easy idea is to get an aquarium. Wal-Mart usually sells the starter kit for $30, and you can buy some of those background-picture sheets for around $5. You don’t even have to put fish in it, really, so long as you make it look pretty and have the sound of running water from the filter.
If you like putting together puzzles, why not use those as decoration? Place 3 sheets of newspaper under a finished puzzle and apply an even coat of Mod Podge (looks like school glue, available at craft stores), let it dry, and then frame it yourself. We found some beautiful wizard and dragon themed puzzles that fit in 16×20 and 8×10 frames.
For you floor, try buying or making a handmade rug. There are instructions online for crocheting rugs made of fabric strips (I love making those). It’s not hard to do, and you can use any colors you like. If you’d rather buy than make, try Etsy.com.
If you can’t paint the walls, canvases aren’t that much money — you can just paint them a solid color and hang several in an arrangement to add color to the room.
Another non-painting solution: put a curtain all along one wall. The wall doesn’t need to have windows. Fabric is fairly inexpensive, and the wavy curtain adds texture and a color to one wall.
Stuff you already own, as people mentioned, can be great for decorating. Pegs for pretty scarves, or shelves (ikea shelf supports + lumber from home depot + paint for the lumber) with handbags or cute shoes or tin wind-up toys or whatever you collect.
Has anybody mentioned http://www.digsmagazine.com? They’re full of advice, and the forums have lots of pictures of people’s houses and apartments.
Galleries and print stores may cut you a deal on slightly damaged prints and posters–I’ve got some up to 50% off because there was a piece of clear tape folded over on one corner.
Find one you like and of COURSE that teeny tiny tear on the corner was there before you got there!
for cheap decorating – someone else mentioned Craigslist, but one of their categories is FREE. It doesn’t get cheaper, and some of the free stuff is good.
I hung a collection of maps in my long bland white hallway, simply tacking them to the walls. Most of them are souvenirs from trips to Ireland, very cool Ordnance Survey maps with topographic lines and symbols for standing stones. They have great color and texture, and visitors will ask, “Uh, what’s with the maps?” giving you an opening to bore them with your vacation stories.
Re: painting the walls. Personally, I’d make virtue of necessity; _assume_ that the landlord is going to keep a big chunk of the security deposit, and make it worth the money. Paint the walls! Put up shelves! Even if you leave the place cleaner than you found it you’re still going to get dinged for carpet cleaning and wall painting, so you might as well have a nice place to live.
Re: painting – consider just painting big squares or rectangles of color on your walls – like 7 x 7 or whatever scale works in your place. Typically the drag of painting is doing the detail work – this way you can either tape off the square or even do a rough brush finish and do the fast fun part and forget about trim, edges, cutting in, etc. Also if you get sick of the color or need to repaint when you leave, that’s super fast too. (Provided you can match the original wall color with no problem.)
All the ideas are good, but no one’s mentioned Blik, at whatisblik.com yet. They have some fun wall art that is easily put up, and (important for a lot of apartments) easily removable. It can be kinda pricey, but if it’s something you really like it could be a good investment.
My favorite place to shop online for little stuff to ‘fill in the corners’ is Novica.com. You can buy directly from the artist so it’s cheaper for you, and the artist actually sees more of the money too.
It’s the BEST place for gifts as well – I’ve gotten hand-carved wooden statuettes, Thai silver jewelry, wall tapestries, picture frames, even incense from this place. The shipping is VERY reasonable, and you get a little thank-you postcard from the artist!
I second the recommendation of http://www.digsmagazine.com ! They have great ideas, and the forums are full of super helpful friendly folks with great ideas too!
I too am living in my first apartment on a fairly tight budget. The walls are off-white, the carpet is beige, the venetian blinds are pale blue, and I’d like my security deposit back someday, so everything I do to the place has to be temporary.
I’ve bought those sticky 3M hooks that promise to peel off without damaging the paint, and hung cover art posters of my favourite albums from them (I’ve also used those plastic poster hanger sticks and some string, as frames are stupidly expensive and probably too heavy for the hooks). All my furniture is cheap wood in pale brown (YAY Ikea), which I can’t do anything about, so I’m on the hunt for nifty fabrics I can turn into tablecloths. I’ve also got a disgustingly-patterned third-hand couch that’s nonetheless super comfy, so I found some bright royal blue blankets and used them as a throw, and I’m currently (attempting to) crochet a bright purple blanket to throw over the top of that. I picked up some pretty Indianesque cushions with gold accents at the markets for super cheap, that match my blue-and-purple colour scheme, and last week I found four tea-light lanterns for $2 each at one of those cheap junk shops, and I stuck them on top of my bookshelves, and they look awesome lit up or not. Markets and cheap junk shops are also great for stupid knick-knacks and interesting artwork… as are artist friends. :-)
Oh my gawd, garage and estate sales. Seriously. And don’t be too skeptical of seventies art — in the right context, some of it can be pretty awesome, and it almost always comes in frames that you can reuse even if you really do hate the picture.
Our arpartment is all white too so when we moved in we splashed around a lot of colour.
I work on a University Campus and at the start of the academic year there is a poster sale. Mostly movie posters and stuff but I got 5 prints. all simple ones done on white with lots of colour in them, just stuff I though looked cool. I bought some A2 sized card in blue and red and used it as a mount to bring the white background of the art off the wall. Blue in the living room to match the curtains. Red in the bedroom to match the sheets. I’m now making blinds for the bedroom in a colourful stripes on red fabric and it livens up the room a treat.
I also had a bunch of cards by the same artist, black on white scribbles, and mounted them in the frame that was on the wall when we moved in with an ugly print in it. all it cost me was 0.75p for the card again.
All up £15 for the pictures, £4 for the coloured card, and about £17 for the curtain materials so less than £40 to make the apartment feel lively.
The other thing we did is to buy cheap bookshleves and fill them. Books look cool in a stuffed bookshelf and add to the room instead of sitting around cluttering the place up.
Don’t paint the walls without the landlord’s express written permission! It would look great, sure, but not getting your security deposit back? Not so great.
Back when I lived in industrial-beige hell, I got a mirror and a couple of wall sconces from Pier 1, which totally made the room. My office at work, which I definitely didn’t want to spend tons to decorate, had the same problem, so I got some inexpensive vintage ad reproductions and inexpensive frames and arranged them on a wall.
Good luck!
I bought old frames I loved and had mirror glass put in for a fun, antique looking collection in my bathroom. If they’re not too large it can be quite affordable. You could also try framing large squares of wallpaper.
If you like an artist, go to the gallery – if they’ve had recent exhibits, they’ll often have posters for the event with the artist’s work on them for free.
Curtains, carpets, tablecloths and bed linens make a huge difference to a space, esp. if you can’t paint the walls. Don’t know what your style is, but a lot of Asian and Indian importers have bolts of fabric you might like. An old sari makes a fantastic table runner, or a cover for an old sofa, or pinned up as a headboard behind your bed.
Get decorating mags from the library and start thinking of a “look book” so that as you start to buy long-term and big ticket items, you’ll have a firm ideas of the colours and styles you like.
hang curtains, not just blinds or shades, but real curtains – they’ll take any apartment from that “I’m just here temporarily” to the “I really live here” feeling. Plants are another way to make a rented place that can’t be painted feel like a real home.
I tried to post this last night but I think the internets ate it.
If you’ve got a printer and plenty of ink, you could take a photo or other image and “rasterbate” it. http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ The website has a program that will take your image and rasterize it into a huuuuuge picture that you print out as separate pages and then mount on your wall, door, whatever. Check out the gallery there for examples and inspirateion.
I have a French memo board with full of postcards. The memo board is cheap to buy or make yourself (board, fabric, ribbon, tacks or buttons). You could put photos, poems, or cards in it. I also found some bamboo wallscrolls at a garage sale. Other suggestions I don’t think I saw in the other posts: A great mirror, a clock, colorful silk or pashmina scarves (a friend of mine used Italian scarves to cover an exposed pipe in her apartment).