Inexpensive redecorating

Posted on | August 12, 2009 | 2 Comments

Our girls share a room and when we first moved into our house we painted it pink. I then hand painted flowers and butterflies around the room as well. It was really cute and girly and I loved it. My girls loved it too, but as they got older – not so much. So we recently re-did it and painted it a blue that they really love. The challenge was sticking to a small budget. Just a side note, I will never paint anything on our walls except regular paint again. We had to sand down the flowers and butterflies to make the surface even, it took forever and was very messy!

It took a little compromise and patience, but we were able to do this project very inexpensively. So far I have spent under $100 on paint (3 gallons total, tape, brushes, rollers), 2 new comforters with pillow covers, a stool, and a storage bin.

First we bought the paint. Home Depot and Lowe’s has what they refer to as oops paint. It is paint that they have mixed for customers. Sometimes the customers leave the paint in the store and sometimes they return it. It is high quality paint, but since it is already a certain color they sell it cheap. Usually less then $10.00 a gallon, our stores have most of them for $5.00 a gallon.

We were very lucky this time, we found a gallon of a beautiful blue the first time we went looking for $5.00. It was very dark and we needed to lighten it up. We bought less expensive white paint to mix with it and tried a few different concoctions until we found one that everyone liked.

It is so hard to get good pictures of their bedroom, but at least you can see the color. There are still touches of pink, but for the most part it was a pretty drastic change. I found the comforters with matching pillow cases at T.J. Maxx for $16.99 each. I would normally try to get an even better deal, but the color match is perfect and the quality is outstanding so I splurged.

The curtains are a light blue that we recycled. My mom gave them to us when we first moved in and didn’t have a lot of stuff. They were for much larger sliding glass doors, and I had kept them in the linen closet when we took them down. My mom took one panel, cut it into two curtains for each window and sewed them to a perfect fit. I then painted the curtain rods they had to match the new color.

We were going to change the carpet, but decided to save the money for now. If you are handy you can save when doing new carpet as well. Home Depot, Lowe’s and carpet stores carry what they call remnants. These are large pieces of carpet that were left over from larger jobs or cut for a job that they never did. Sometimes it’s just the amount that was left at the end of a big roll.

They sell these remnants at a fraction of the original cost, and many times you can talk them down even more. Especially at smaller stores. We found a great carpet that was 13 x 16 for $90.00. My husband knows how to lay carpet, so we wouldn’t have had to pay to install it. We would have had to rent the equipment and buy new padding which would have been about another $100. New carpet for a 12 x 14 room for under $200, not bad at all. The carpet in that room is still in pretty good shape, so we opted to wait until we really need it.

You can make lots of changes on a budget, you just need to have patience and be willing to go with the flow. With the comforters, they only had one the first time I went, but I bought it in hopes that I could find another one. I was fully prepared to return it if necessary. It took a few weeks, but I found another one. You can’t control what is available on sale, and you may or may not find something you like. Garage sales and consignment stores are great places to look for furniture and pictures for the walls. T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, Tuesday Mornings, Home Goods and other similar stores are good places to check as well. Keep looking and eventually it will come together.

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2 Responses to “Inexpensive redecorating”

Cassandra Nicholson
August 12th, 2009 @ 10:27 am

That blue is nice!

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Grace
August 14th, 2009 @ 3:48 am

It’s a very cool room, Liz. You sure can tell that the girls who live there are not little kids.

When my daughter was that age I painted her room her favorite color navy blue. We lived in the Southwest then, and with all that sunlight and with light wood furniture, it worked.

(And I just learned the adding-the-white-paint trick this spring, out of desperation, to repaint a room that really needed it. The color was a little sunnier than I had hoped, but then again, I was using the tail ends of paint cans I’d already paid for.)