Home Decorating: Kitchen on a Budget

Decorating a home can be a trying thing to do with the best of budgets. The fact that you do not happen to have large lots of money lying around should not prevent you from having a lovely kitchen to call your own. The kitchen is the heart of any home and you want this place to be one that invites everyone to come, gather, and pitch in (one can always dream right?). This is the reason why you want your kitchen to shine above all other rooms in your home anyway. The kitchen should radiate warmth and home to all who enter.

Truthfully, there are many things you can do in your kitchen that will greatly affect the overall look of your kitchen without changing anything structurally in your kitchen. If you have wallpaper, remove it and try paint. There are all kinds of great things you can do in the kitchen from plaster, which goes amazingly well in a kitchen, to faux finishes and textures, and glazes for added effect. The walls in the kitchen are your canvas and the world is at your disposal. Just remember to try to tie the walls to the floor and cabinets or at least to the floors and cabinets you hope to have in your kitchen someday.

In addition to painting the walls in your kitchen you may also want to consider painting, staining, or antiquing your cabinets. I know that some jaws just dropped to the keyboard. How dare I suggest such a thing as painting wooden cabinets? The answer is simple really. It is much cheaper than replacing them and much simpler than staining them. Really boils down to a matter of choice. My first choice would not be painting but then again, there are times when painting is a viable option. It will greatly change the overall look of the kitchen if nothing else.

Moving right along. Another major change that is not terribly expensive to make in the kitchen is hardware. The simple act of replacing door handles and drawer pulls on your kitchen cabinet can result in an almost instant facelift. When these changes are combined with painted or stained cabinet effects are nothing short of amazing in many cases. It's the little things that often have the greatest impact so keep this in mind when planning your changes.

The floors of your kitchen are another rather inexpensive change that can be made despite preconceptions. Remember that you do not have to go up on the line to enjoy the big changes in the look of your floor. There are laminate floors that are rather inexpensive to install, like many forms of peel and stick tile that can bring about impressive results for very little effort and without professional skills. All floors that you are capable of installing yourself will save a lot of money and can make a huge difference in the appearance and your enjoyment of your kitchen.

Perhaps the biggest coup of all when it comes to changing the look of your kitchen is the ability to apply stainless steel PVC contact paper to your kitchen appliances to give them the instant appearance of stainless steel. This is a very inexpensive way of updating the overall look of your kitchen in minutes and at a cost less than replacing an appliance. For your countertops an inexpensive and terribly disruptive alternative to replacing them all together is to apply peel and stick tile over your existing countertops.

As you can see there are many ways that you can improve and increase the warmth and coziness that you want your kitchen to convey without breaking up the piggy bank in the process. More importantly, you should think about taking on one project at a time, you can make adjustments in your own time and as finances permit.

Home Decorating: Bathroom on a Budget

When it comes to home furnishings are a few rooms that have quite the impact of a bathroom or kitchen when they redecorated. There is something wonderful about taking a tired old bathroom and make it look bright and shiny again. Most people, however, crawl at the thought of a bathroom remodel fearing the absolute worst when it comes to their financial situation, when all is said and done. The good news is that small steps can lead to big changes in rooms as small as bathrooms. These small steps do not need to have great prices to be very effective.

My suggestion with a bathroom is to assess where the worst spots and stains can be. Paint the walls can be a good place to start, but you should first determine if you are planning to remove the cabinet. This is a place where it's best to save the painting for later in the project rather than at the beginning. The vanity in many bathrooms takes up a lot of real estate. Gone are the days when chunky cabinets were the popular choice for bathrooms. Now people want the bathrooms to have the appearance of a wide open space. This means that the cabinet and vanity becomes smaller rather than larger.

Most homeowners find that the removal of bulky cabinet in the bathroom often leads to some degree of patching required for the drywall and noticeable gaps in flooring. These will need to be addressed with some urgency, which means that now is a good time to select color option for walls and floors. Smaller bathrooms do well with lighter colors on the walls to give them a larger appearance. Use towels and decorations to bring in darker accents but keep the walls light and bright. Also choose paint that can withstand high levels of humidity in the bathroom.

Flooring in a bathroom also needs to be able to withstand high heat and humidity as this room is rather insulting to the floor and walls. For this reason, hardwood is not the floor of choice for most bathrooms. Ceramic tile is an excellent choice and not terribly expensive. There are also some laminates that are designed to respond well to a high humidity environment, such as will be found in a bathroom. Choose flooring that will accent walls and overall sense of interior design you hope to achieve when decorating your home and bathroom, because this is not something that you will want to change often.

The toilet in the bathroom is quite easy to buy but I recommend you leave it be if it is not absolutely need to be changed. This is not an easy procedure for beginners and experts are expensive. In this case, "if it is not broke do not fix it" is a great motto to live by. The same goes with a shower. But if you simply can not live with your shower (or bathtub) as is, you might want to try hire professionals to come in and resurface your tub. It's much cheaper than buying a brand new tub and will have yours look bright, shiny, and as good as new. Again, you can avoid the high cost of a plumber, even though you are paying for professionals to resurface.

To top things off, you will be amazed at the difference that new knobs, fixtures and hardware can make in a bathroom. Add a couple of lamps for subtle lighting and some decorative touches of your own and you have a brand new bathroom without spending a king's ransom to do so. The shower curtain and 'guest' towels should be your largest splurges in your bathroom, because they will tie the room together. You shower curtains and towels will mix colors and patterns to create the overall atmosphere you should be hoping to achieve in your bathroom. And all this can be done one step at a time, no matter how sparse your budget may be.