How to Update Your Home Interior on a Budget

Homeownership brings many joys—the wonderful feeling of having your own place, expressing your own style, and getting settled in. But if your home is looking a little too, well, lived in, consider updating with a few inexpensive interior touches.

Add Paint

Refreshing your home’s interior with a new coat of paint is one of the first things you might think of when you’re considering how to update your home interior on a budget. But don’t neglect floors and ceilings. Get creative by stenciling a pattern on your wood floor or even by painting a pattern on a rug. Kitchen cabinets are another area that can really benefit from a new coat of paint. Brighten your dark kitchen or add some character to your white kitchen with a new color.

Switch Out Cabinet Hardware

Even if your cabinets don’t need paint, maybe they could do with some new handles or drawer pulls. Keep utility in mind, and detach a sample of what you’re replacing before you head to the hardware store. Cabinet handles and drawer pulls can redefine the whole feel of your kitchen by adding a note of another era or modernizing with cleaner, simpler lines.

Update Light Fixtures

This can be as simple as switching out a lampshade or adding a few accent floor lamps. If you want to change a wired fixture, you may have to hire an electrician, but the new look will be worth it.

Reupholster Dining Chairs and Footstools

For a fresh change, consider covering the seats of your dining chairs or ottoman with a new fabric or color. Reupholstering a dining chair is a pretty simple DIY project. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on the latest designer fabric, either—just find something you like, or even mix and match some scraps. For ottomans and foot stools, you can even use thin, inexpensive patterned rugs.

Display Plates on the Walls

Decorative plates are meant to be seen. If you’ve got a collection of decorative plates of different sizes or a stash of souvenir plates from your travels, don’t keep them hidden away. Install inexpensive display shelving, or equip plates with plate hangers and arrange them in an exuberant jumble on an unused wall.

Throw Some Pillows Around

Recovering your old or stained pillows is a great way to add some pop to a chair or couch. Updating your bedspread or adding a colorful throw to the back of a chair adds color without much cost, and it can really brighten a room.

Don’t let concerns about cost keep you from taking a fresh look around your home. Your creative juices will flow, and you’ll begin to think of how to update your interior on a budget in many more ways.