Living room makeover for $350!

Sometimes working on a shoestring budget can be a challenge.
Especially one of $350. Yes. That’s correct, there are no zeros missing at the end of this budget.

In this case it was more a just changing a few things and adding a few things into the space to really give it some fun punches.

This living room belongs to one of my best friends in San Francisco. We were chatting over a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning in her space, which she really wasn’t happy with. I might have had a few too many cups of coffee, as I said that I was up for a challenge and could come up with a few things that she could do that would be simple and not cost a lot.

So that’s how this project all began. I am thrilled that Better Homes & Gardens decided that it would be fun to write about in this brand new feature section that they are doing- July 2010.

Adding fun bright colors to really bring the room to life. I called my fabulous seamstress Madina Aryeh Custom Sewing to rework a table cloth and to sew up a few pillows. One way that we really saved money was just taking the current pillows from the sofa and adding a ribbon trim.

One idea we had was adding window treatments, but that was going to be costly. The space didn't have any privacy issues, so we passed on them all together. I guess that you could look at these photos and think that window treatments would have been nice, I do agree as well, but when you are playing around with $350, that is really hard to add in. One idea that we had was using bamboo shades, which would have been an affordable, but then we thought that maybe it would be too much wood with the prominent wood trim already around the windows.

Sometimes a room just needs a few things added and a few things taken away to really make it sing. This living room is in a rental, so they didn’t want to invest too much at all to the space. The best part of all is that now on Saturday mornings for our coffee dates, we can really enjoy her new space together!

Sometimes it just nice to help a friend do something fun to help spruce up their place in a weekend. Sure if money was no object, I am sure that I could have done something very different. But for what it is and for what we spent, I think that we did a good job! Helping a friend and seeing a big smile is priceless.









Here is the living room BEFORE




Here is the AFTER (but still before we painted the walls pale blue)



We used the current pillows that were on the sofa, but just added 2 layer of ribbon to really give the pillows some life.



I was really inspired by the photo of peonies framed on the side table. So I printed the same photo in a larger scale to make more of a statement and hung it on the wall. I loved the bright color and pop of pink- which led me to add in the pink pillow.



Just added a simple placemat from CB2 for a pop of color



I loved the white pottery that they already had- just adding a little arrangement of fresh flowers really can make a difference



Pulling colorful books off of your bookcase that you already have can add pops of color. We picked up the bright yellow tray at West Elm to organize the table top



I really liked the color of the blue gourd style lamp that they already had








**** WIN THIS PINK PILLOW in the photo! Just leave a comment to this post and I will select a winner randomly and send the pillow out to you- the week of June 14th.

UPDATE: Congrats to Cristin at Simplified Bee for winning this pink pillow!


(photos by James Carriere for Better Homes and Gardens)