It’s really easy to look around rooms in your house and think you need to spend a fortune to re-decorate and then feel miserable because you can’t afford to spend that much. There are however loads of things you can do to improve the look of a room or a part of a room without actually spending that much money. Believe me, I’ve used many of these tricks and tips myself, and it’s saved me a fortune and helped me to enjoy rooms I felt just didn’t look great before.

Covering things up – A simple throw chucked over the sofa can really improve a sofa that’s maybe seen better days, or doesn’t fit with the colour scheme you’ve got. An even cheaper way to cover it however is to use something like a sheet instead of a throw. Loads of places from Asda and other supermarkets to places like Ikea and John Lewis sell sheets, and a King-size sheet is much bigger than your average throw, and these days sheets come in loads of colours. I had an old sofa in my dining room which was black and white and really didn’t fit with the room which was creams and browns. Simply throwing a large chocolate brown sheet that I bought for under £15 in Asda over it, throw style really improved the look of not only the sofa but the whole room no end. Another thing you can do is to use a throw on the floor as a large rug. If your carpet is ok, but maybe has a stain or two, or again just doesn’t give the look to the room that you want, a cloth throw can be used on the floor as a rug to really change the look of a room, and in the same way as sheets are cheaper than throws, throws are often much cheaper than the same size rug!

Painting things – Isn’t it scary how expensive paint can be. Especially when you have a big room to paint, or not a lot of money to pay for it with. Cheap paints don’t cover terribly well, and are often false economy. One thing that does work quite well however is to use a small tin of a deepish colour, or a bit left over from another room (or even a friends house if they will let you have it), and buy an economy sized (trade size) tin of white emulsion. Then you can tip the amount you will need into a bucket or other container, and add some of the darker colour to give yourself a new colour to use on a different room. I did this in my hallway, we mixed some deep turquoise that I’d used in my study with white and painted the hallway with it. It gave the hall a nice light and airy feel and really made it feel much more welcoming to walk through the front door. Old bits of furniture can also be given new leases of life with a lick of paint. Rather than worrying trying to get a full set of matching bedroom furniture, why not nip down to your local charity shops furniture store and have a look see what they have. Get it home, paint it all to match, and maybe replace the handles so that they match too and you end up with a set of furniture that goes perfectly with your room because of course there’s a much wider range of colours available in paint than in wardrobe colours, and also of course older furniture is often much better made and built to last where as modern flat pack chip board stuff just doesn’t last.

Adding some finishing touches – I looked round my dining room the other day and decided it needed a change as it was looking a bit tired. Rather than re-decorating it (I actually quite like the colours in there) I decided to re-distribute my ornaments, plants, and other odds and ends. I found a length of dark material to use as a runner along the length of my cream table cloth in the dining room, fished a vase out of a cupboard to replace the candle sticks I had out on the sideboard, gathered some wooden ornaments that had been in boxes in the loft, and replaced those I’d had downstairs for a while, and moved a couple of house plants from the lounge into the dining room. It only took me an afternoon to do it, and the dark runner on the table, going from glass ornaments to wooden ones, and changing candlesticks for vase made it feel so different. Total cost to me on that one was zero, and two days later a friend who visited commented on the room and asked if I’d repainted it! As you can imagine, I smiled heartily at that one!