More simple and budget friendly home ideas

So we are on our last day of this week, and I’ve saved the best of our house for last and have a few more simple and budget friendly home ideas. As I’ve mentioned, paint does wonders for your home. It’s the great magician. That and furniture placement can change your entire space, even down to the way you use it. Your home should change over time, because your families and personal needs change over time. Our girls bedroom, which I’ll talk about in the future.

I covered our lover level, including the bathroom and our living room yesterday. Today., I’ll talk about the rest of the main level.

I won’t go into all of the original details of our renovation in 2010, you can read all about that here, but I will talk about right now. I recently repainted the painted cabinets with fresh white paint. It was about $24 for a can of Benjamin Moore Simply White in Aura.Even though I’ve used lots of paints, that is my favorite paint for high-use areas. The handles and knobs are priced at around $3 each from D. Lawless Hardware. I have 20 cabinets so to completely upgrade my kitchen for under a $100 is completely worth it and totally budget for a higher end look.

Also in our kitchen, we recently installed open shelves and I painted the buffet.

This was an under $100 project. The boards were $25 each and the brackets were $7. It gave us a ton of storage space and really made the area very usable with out the cost of cabinets.I wish I had done it sooner!

I get a lot of questions about my island and chandelier. The island is a desk I picked up at Goodwill and I added casters to the feet for $6 each. I painted the top with a marble faux finish, and the marble baking slab is one I bought off of Craigslist for $20 a few years ago. The chandelier was my grandmother’s and I had it rewired for $60. Don’t pass by old light fixtures because the wiring is bad. A good electrician can make it as good as new. In fact, our upstairs hallway light is a vintage early 80’s fixture I bought for less than $20. I thought was kind of cool. I changed up the gold color and bulbs.

The  art were $6 thrift store finds, and the rug and white bowl were from Homegoods, and were under $30 for both.The best thing in that whole picture is the big bowl of tangerines, because they add great color and most of them were eaten. $3.99! What a deal! One place I am going to spend  a little money in the future is by doing subway tile on our backsplash. I’m ready for an update! I put the bead-board wallpaper up around 2009 and am ready for a change, so I am getting quotes now, and I can’t wait.

Our eating area has changed many times,

We added a built in as a divider for about $200 so I had  a place to work. Now, as I need a bigger space, it holds supplies and I end up working at the table (again), it was agreat and much needed addition at the time. Our current table a friend was getting rid of (free!)and was a nice change. All of the art was thrift store finds, and the mirror was my other Grandmothers. This chandelier was a road side find, but it did cost $120 to rewire. The last good picture I have is from Christmas, I’ll  have to do another update soon!

The chairs are new from (affiliate link) All Modern. Our other ones were falling totally a part, and these are solid wood, and hopefully will last a really long time!

Most of our changes have really been about paint and adding personal touches, and finding deals,tweaking thrift store finds, and sales. I hope this has inspired you to see you can make a difference by just taking a chance on cosmetic things, with simple and budget friendly home ideas,and slowly spending your money on where it really counts with form and function.