How to renovate your new house/apartment on a budget.

Here you will find tips to learn new skills to fix up older homes and not pay someone else a lot of money to do something that you could do yourself. You will find some really easy inexpensive home improvement updates. The first tip is to add trim to basic slab doors. Normally pretty much all of the doors are just the solid panel slab doors in older homes, so you can add decorative trim on them. You will love how it elevates the space after adding trim and painting the doors, they will look brand-new and they cost way less than having to just replace the door altogether. Also painting your front door is an incredibly easy and impactful DIY that anyone can do. You cannot go wrong with a classic black door, especially when accented with brass hardware. Adding a door knocker would also be another easy and inexpensive DIY. A simple upgrade you can make in the kitchen is to add an outlet to your pantry. If you have a small pantry you can maximize the space by adding an outlet and being able to move your microwave into the pantry. This is something you could do yourself, but if you don’t feel comfortable doing electric work, you could definitely hire an electrician and it would not cost a lot of money at all.

The next tip is to paint a metal railing or small fence area, you can use a black finish for example. Most likely people will think it looks like you have replaced it altogether. Also you can use a spray paint to paint any metal fence, you may paint the whole thing in a nice glossy black and it will look like a brand-new fence. Another electrical project that you could definitely do yourself (or you could hire it out if you feel uncomfortable with electric work) is to install a dimmer switch in one of the rooms in your home or multiple rooms dimmers are fantastic in nurseries, because you don’t want the light to be blinding when you need to go in there in the middle of the night. They’re also great in a dining room or in your master bedroom. Switches are really inexpensive too and again if you do it yourself it’s going to cost you around $20. The next tip is definitely one of the most impactful ways to upgrade your home on your own and that is to paint cabinets. Painting all of your kitchen cabinets may cost you about 75 dollars for the chalk paint and the top coat. This is a really big job but it is totally doable, anybody can paint with chalk paint and it makes such an amazing difference, especially going from really dated wood to bright white.

For some reason curtain rods are so crazy expensive, so you may actually use electrical conduit pipes to hang curtains in your master bedroom and living room, all you need to do is buy the hanging hardware and any sort of finishing finials that you might want to use on the ends. This is such a cheaper alternative to typical curtain rods. Another super easy upgrade is to spray paint all of your air conditioning vent covers. Go ahead and take them all down, clean them really well to remove any dust and then spray paint with high-gloss white spray paint and put them back up after painting your ceilings white, they will look brand-new and it will save you so much more money than just replacing them. Another upgrade is to change your mailbox. You can invest in a new mailbox, it may be around a hundred dollars for the post and a little bit more for the box but the prices really run the gamut. You could spend as little as you want or simply buy some really fancy nice ones, but it really makes such a difference, especially since it’s the exterior of your home, it’s that first impression people see. But if you do have an existing mailbox that functions fine, maybe the colors are fading or the paint is chipping, you can just give it a fresh coat of paint that makes such a difference.

Last tip is to add board-and-batten to your home. If you have super plain walls with no character whatsoever you will love this decorative detail in your home. You do need to know how to work a miter saw or a chop saw and do all that kind of angle cutting, but really if you just watch some tutorials or look it up on a blog it’s really easy to do, or if you know somebody that’s handy that could help you with it that would also be awesome.