How to Style your Living Room on a Budget

The hardest part of creating a budget-friendly living room is the limits you will be working under. When expensive decor isn't really on the table, coming up with a design that uses affordable living room furniture can take a lot more effort than you might think - unless you are smart about how you style the living space. Here are some quick tips on making your living room feel like an expensive stylish interior without forcing you to go beyond your budget.

Rearrange Everything

It is easy to forget that interior design focuses on style and space. In many cases, you don't need to get a new sofa or re-buy expensive rugs and other decor - you can just move what you have around. A quick update to the layout of your living room furniture and some re-decorating efforts can do wonders for your home: you might even create a brand new feel that you weren't expecting at all.

This is at the top of the list for a reason: it is cheap (free if you don't buy anything new), can usually be done by one person, lets you try different things without having to choose ahead of time, and can mark the turning point in your house design. Once you are comfortable with how rooms are laid out, it can become much easier to get an idea of how they should look and what decor would work.

Always start with placing the largest piece of furniture first: a sofa and sofa cushions are always going to be more defining than a small stool, so choose where to put the biggest things first, then work backwards until everything fits together properly.

Paint Living Rooms

One of the most obvious living room ideas is to just repaint things. Walls, furniture, floor tiles, and all sorts of pieces of decor that don't normally fit into your house: it doesn't' take much to repaint their normal colours and create a brand new piece of furniture or art that can fit in with your new style. Unless you go for expensive paints, it is also a cheap way to give your room an update for less stress and cost.

Paints have an impact on lighting, too. Light wall paints can help deflect your lighting and bounce light around a space - you might be able to direct it back to your coffee table and brighten up the room, or use it to bounce light in from windows at angles where direct sunlight isn't possible. Dark paints can do the opposite, sucking away excess glare and brightness that makes a room hard to use.

You can't repaint everything (cushions, for example), but you don't always need to. Sometimes colours that stand out from each other are still going to make the room look amazing.

Add Plants

While some rooms suffer from low light, living rooms usually don't. That means that you could quite easily fill your living room with plants to break up open space and make the area feel fresher, as well as adding some extra colour in the process. Some plants can be surprisingly affordable and don't really take much effort to care for, but you can also swap to cheap artificial plants if you really need to. Even one small pocket of plants can make an entire room feel different.

Plants are one of those living room ideas that should be done last: make sure you are not using noxious paint or other chemicals near them if you can help it. Living rooms look amazing with some easy-growing plants, but dead ones can suck the life and comfort out of the space very quickly. Use plants that are suitable for your climate if you can, too.

Create a Feature Wall

The wall is an underused area for decorating, giving you a flat surface that you can cover in almost any pieces of decor: eye-catching rugs, hand-painted murals, multiple colours of paint, or even something as basic as some new wallpaper. Decorating a room without decorating the walls is like only painting one side of your furniture: hang up a rug or slap on some freehand art and you can completely shift the feel of the room.

It is very budget-friendly, too: you can add whatever you want, so you can coat your walls in old paint or a certain colour of fabric that you already own, and it essentially costs nothing. It is a great way to update your walls that is affordable, stylish, and flexible.

Tweak Other Living Room Ideas

There are no all-rights-reserved limits on the ideas behind some low-budget living spaces, so you are free to look at what other people have made in their homes and copy it. If you find a colour scheme or floor tile pattern that you love, go ahead and copy it, then make whatever changes you think could improve it: you might find a way to create the same top quality for less, or something that can improve the look of the living room dramatically.

It is a good idea to remember that the living room is usually a central part of your home and part of the home that many people will see first. A limited budget can make it harder to produce a great living room, but it is not impossible, and something as simple as trying to add decor to the wall can give you great results in almost no time.

Make the Space Yours

It is absolutely fine to ignore the "rules" of interior design, and it is also perfectly acceptable to stick to the trends that we've all gotten used to. There is no problem with either conforming or not conforming, as long as you create a space you feel comfortable in. Not all tips work with every look, and some people won't want to add certain things to the look of their room.

Don't try to force a style or colour scheme on yourself if it won't work with your preferences: as long as you try and give yourself a better-looking living room, there is nothing wrong with keeping the same old cushions or sticking to designs that you like. If you need examples of what you could try, have a look at some Payday Deals furniture offerings to get a few new ideas.