Looking to decorate your apartment without breaking the bank? Discover budget-friendly decor ideas to transform your rental into a stylish and expensive-looking home.
If you want to decorate a cute apartment, here’s an epic roundup of ideas, hacks, and tips to sass up your apartment in ways you might not have thought of. These ideas are genuinely renter-friendly and pretty low effort. They are also affordable, sourced secondhand, or hacked from Ikea.
Social media homes look amazing because the rooms often have high ceilings or amazing architectural details. Here are ideas sourced from rooms with normal ceilings.
Transform Your Apartment with These Decor Ideas
Curtains can change your life. Use them as a divider to separate an office, kitchen, or bedroom. You can use them to create fake walls or block something ugly. Doing a full wall of curtains, floor to ceiling, can make the room feel taller. It can also mask weird things. Use king-size bed sheets to create a whole wall. Curtains bring softness and texture, and they’re great for adding pattern. If you need noise reduction, heavy velvet curtains will be your best friend. The rule of thumb is to double the size to get that nice, rich, luxurious fold.
Mirrors are a great way to move light around the space. Mirror an entire wall. This is an excellent hack for small spaces where you want to make it feel bigger. Mirror a small hallway or a small closet. It will double the size of the room and give you more light. You can use these mirrors as a fake backsplash behind a little mini wet bar. Put them on closet doors. It is unexpected and dramatic, and it can make a really cool difference.
Banket seating is overlooked as an option for apartment kitchens. They can feel really fun, funky, and eclectic. Fake a banquet with a small loveseat or a bench in pillows. You can do L-shaped seating, or consider using banquet seating across a full wall in your living room. If you need to maximize your space, consider using storage benches as your seating option. You can do fun colors and patterns. If you get a small loveseat or bench, it can also move out into other areas of the house when you need additional seating for entertaining.
Add a Fireplace and Creative Lighting
You don’t have to live life without a fireplace. You can buy faux fireplaces that plug into the wall. You can hack one. One of the coolest hacks is taking the top half of a thrifted hutch or dresser and using that as a faux mantle. Style it with battery-operated candles, books, or plants. Add fireplace autan, like a beautiful old school fireplace fan screen. You can put it anywhere. One can fake a fireplace with foam and faux brick and fill it with battery-operated candles.
There’s always a lot of talk about lighting. You can get your own custom light fixtures and swap them out. Buy converter kits for boob lights. Thrift a little bit larger lampshade, and customize that. Cover up a boob light by getting a really large paper lampshade and hooking that into the ceiling. Remember to use a low-heat LED. You want to have a fair amount of space between that bulb and whatever object is covering it. Turn a basket upside down, cut a little hole in it, and turn that into a hanging pendant. Sconces warm the space up. Buy plug-in rent-friendly sconces. Source any actual lighting piece, whether it works or not.
Screens, Washi Tape, and Cabinet Hacks
Screens can help you wall off a space and create more division. They can be put away to make more space if you need it. Put one by your doorway to fake a hallway entrance when you walk in. Use a screen as large art. Use them as headboards. Put them behind a sofa as wall art. They’re also the greatest tool when you have that weird corner or something that feels empty. Get screen dividers that have built-in shelving to use as a plant wall. There are also mirrored screens, which can do double duty to open up a space or give you a little dressing room moment.
Washi tape is a great, inexpensive, really creative tool for renters when you can’t wallpaper or paint. You can fake wallpaper designs with washi tape. Use it for fake paneling, which is the coolest, laziest way to get a paneling effect. Create fake art frames for a cool gallery wall. Add cool designs to your doors. Add a pop of color to the inside of your door. Add designs to your furniture. Washi tape is cheap and versatile because they have so many different colors.
You can hack cabinets. Cover them with contact paper. Use contact paper to change your cabinets to a different color or even a different texture. You can easily use fake wood grain to make boring white cabinets look wood. If you have wood-painted cabinets, get liquid starch and fabric, and cover your cabinets that way. If your cabinets are really ugly, remove the cabinet doors and give it a totally different look.
Fridge and Bathroom Decor Tips
If your fridge is an eye sore, make it fun and cover it in contact paper. They actually make peel-and-stick vinyl for fridge coverings. Add a fun pattern. Get fake stainless steel or fake wood. Change the color of a fridge because a lot of people will tend to have a signature color. You can even swap the hardware on your fridge.
Sass up a bathroom by swapping the hardware on your cabinets. Lean hard into textiles. Cover up the floor with a really fun, colorful rug. Lean into your towels. Go really bold and really extra and dramatic with your shower curtain. Go floor-to-ceiling. Add a bath stool. Add faux plants around. Add beautiful baskets to hold bath products, toilet paper, or little hand towels.
