bedroom-redo

Have you tried shopping craigslist? (www.craigslist.org), secondhand stores, goodwill -- those kind of places?

Paint only costs a little and just about anything can be painted.

Do you live anywhere near an Ikea?

Lots of cheap and interesting options there.

Hi blondie421 and welcome to A2K.

Do you have a Target or an Ikea near you? Those might be places to start. Another idea is garage and yard sales. Once the weather warms up, you might start to see garage and yard sales. Memorial Day weekend is often a good weekend for 'em -- your local cheap newspaper (like a Pennysaver type of thing) may have ads for them. You may need to be a bit handy as you might have to do some sewing of a cover or something like that, but it's another option. In particular, if you can sew, you could possibly make a cover if you ended up with a chair not in the right color. Even if you're not that handy with a needle and thread, you still might be able to make curtains as regular tab top curtains are mainly measuring, cutting and hemming. That's the kind of thing where you wouldn't have to make pleats but it could still look good (personally, I'm pretty bad with a sewing machine, but I can sew a more or less straight line so this is the kind of thing even I can do and believe me, I'm a sewing klutz when it comes to pretty much anything fancier than this). Also, you might be able to just hem plain fabric and clip it up -- even easier than making tabs. Fabric could also be hemmed and clipped over your bed if you wanted to make a kind of canopy.

There's a place near us which rents out furniture, and they have a sale every year, right at the end of the school year, of the stuff that was returned that year. That kind of thing might exist near you, too.

One option for color and a quick pickup is paint. Paint can be cheap or expensive but the general thing is that the really cheap stuff is going to need to be redone more quickly. On home improvement shows, they always show people prepping and putting down a coat of primer. I'm thinking that that would help everything to be spread more evenly?

Another color option is a few small scatter rugs. If you're putting them over a bare floor, you should get underpadding so that they don't slip and slide everywhere.

Sometimes it's just a few things that really change the look of a room. In my house, we have a lot of hand-me-down and cheap furniture and small rooms. Recently I bought a set of four nesting baskets. They're now in three separate rooms and then changed things because I was able to put away some clutter and free up a different basket for something else (while I was removing clutter, I also threw out some old junk). These changes all happened for a whopping $20 or so in expense.

An unpainted bookcase wouldn't be too expensive, neither would an unpainted night stand. Desks cost more (even unpainted) but, heck I'm typing to you from an old dining room table on which the computer is perched. The only thing wrong with the table (free, my brother gave it to us when he got a new table) is that it has no drawers. Hence we need to get a filing cabinet.

Let us know how it goes.