This weekend, we decided that our living room was looking kind of bland and lacked color and personality. So, we decided to add some color and update our design. Since we live in an apartment, we are not allowed to paint on the walls so we got creative!

Here’s the only picture I have of what our living room looked like BEFORE:

Wow, that’s a lot of white!

Here’s what we did:

1. We moved the love seat back just a bit to give us more floor space.

2. We reorganized the books on the bookshelves by color. This made such a difference and really lightened up the shelves.

3. We bought some colorful fabric to make pillows and wall hangings. We covered 3 painter’s canvases with the fabric to make simple, inexpensive artwork. Then we used the same fabric to cover existing pillows for the sofas. We took some picture frames we already had and framed scraps of fabric for the other wall.

4. We reorganized some accessories on the bookshelf and the DVD cabinet. I added a vase of red flowers which really pop against the white walls.

5. The final touch was adding a picture that I had taken of a ferris wheel above the TV. The ferris wheel had the red and gold colors that were in our fabric so it worked perfectly here.

The only thing we bought to make this colorful living space was the fabric – everything else were things we already had, we just reorganized them better. The painter’s canvases, we got from my parent’s attic. So, we did this entire transformation for about $25! And what a difference a little color makes!

BEFORE:

AFTER: