A budget friendly living room makeover

Because we don’t have $20,000 or even $2,000!  

I am often amused shocked at what some interior designers consider to be average costs of decorating.  According to Laurel over at Laurel Home, you cannot update a living room for $2,000 bucks.  Her post goes on to show an update she did for a client costing over $20,000!  Wow, what a bargain.  No disrespect, but even if it were my taste, there is no way our budget could handle that kind of a price tag!  Then there is Lorri, over at Lorri Dyner, who seems a tad more in touch, at least when it comes to the cheaper end of things!   She gives examples of a budget redo of $2,000 to a high-end of $33,000.  I get it; furniture does cost money, but does it have to cost that much?

When my husband and I signed a purchase agreement on the house in which we now live, we knew we would want to change our look.  The house we had lived in for 18 years was more of a traditional style.  Our new place has a more contemporary open feel.  Moving 400+ miles away seemed like the perfect time to ditch our worn 15-year-old furniture and buy new once we made our move.  Can’t say that we gave any real thought to what it might end up costing, we just knew that is what we wanted to do.

Three months before we finally sold our house (we painfully sat on the market for eight long months), I happened to drive by an upscale house that had furniture for sale.  The wife was remodeling, and the 2-year-old furniture “simply had to go.”  Oh, the problems some people have!  Now normally I would get the heebie-jeebies even considering used furniture (can we say bed bugs?), but this leather flexsteel furniture was precisely what we had in mind for our new house.  A quick search on my phone showed me the identical pieces with a list price of over $4,000.  Not only was this furniture in pristine condition, but the asking price was also only a 10th of the list price.  After having done my research and checked it out, any potential bed bugs made a quick departure!  Although my husband was less than thrilled with moving such heavy furniture (we did it together), we ended up getting both pieces for $425.  I’m sure this helped us dodge a bullet of doing even more stupid and financing new furniture.

Once moved, our new-to-us furniture didn’t (gasp!) fit quite the way we had originally hoped.  Then there was the carpet.  Although brand new, I hated it.  Fortunately, the house has minimal carpet, but what it does have is far too light for anyone with pets.  Between the furniture not fitting as we had hoped and the constant need to shampoo the carpet, I have found myself wandering far too often on various interior design sites.  For someone battling debt, this could potentially be hazardous to a budget.

I can’t say it was any particular site that led me to my moment of inspiration, but the past weekend, a lightbulb went off.  Not only did I come up with furniture placement that works beautifully, but in doing so, it also indirectly solved the carpet issue.  The new arrangement created a far better view of the lake, and it also made for a sensible placement of an area rug.  Additionally, I swapped out two end tables we were storing in the basement along with two lamps.  One lamp was left by the former owner and is the perfect size to have in front of the huge picture window.

As for an area rug, I did find an 8×10 size on Overstock.com, which after an additional coupon, came to $177 shipped.  Still much cheaper than replacing the carpet, or as I would prefer, install hardwood floors.  While there are still some carpeted areas that won’t be covered by the rug, they are not areas that will get much foot traffic.

I know some people would have told me just to live with the carpet the way it is and I accept the wet noodles.  That $177 spent was money that could have gone to paying off debt.  For me though, after 18 months of trying to come up with a solution, I don’t feel this was impulsive or spendthrifty.  My old self would have probably long ago bought different furniture and replaced the flooring.  My new “want to get out of debt” self-feels I have made a compromise and found an answer to what I viewed as a problem.  I again absolutely love our new-to-us furniture and for that matter,  the entire room!  For the record, I did all the rearranging myself!

Our living room update cost only a minuscule fraction of what some designers might have deemed  “necessary” to spend to achieve the desired look we wanted.  Best of all, we didn’t go further into debt to complete it!

Have you done any bargain makeovers while paying off debt?  While until we are debt free, this will probably be it for us, I feel we did extremely well with our update.