Five Cheap Ways To Make Your Apartment Look More Expensive

You know that friend whose apartment makes you feel like a small, messy child? You go over for dinner and leave feeling like their apartment could kick your apartment's ass. The worst part is that It's not just because it's cleaner or bigger or has a newer kitchen, there's just something about it that that makes you feel somehow less evolved. 

Know what that something is? It's a bunch of tiny little things like knobs and shower curtains, dishtowels and cheap but awesome prints for the wall. And it's not hard to do yourself.

It's time to stop feeling like your $3k/month one bedroom is just a box you live in. Read on for five quick, inexpensive ways to make your apartment look 80% more awesome in a single weekend.

1. A fresh coat of paint can do amazing things. If you’ve been living somewhere for a year or more, spend an afternoon repainting a room or two. Spend about $60 on supplies, sucker a friend into helping and get to it. If you want to be extra fancy, try an accent wall, which involves painting just one wall– like the one behind the couch or your bed– a color. For renters who later have to paint back to the original color, this is a good compromise between painting everything a fun color and painting nothing at all.
2. Change those sad little Home Depot knobs on your cabinets. Anthropologie and Ebay have all the options you could want to substitute for the boring, junky ones that come standard in most apartments.
3. You don't have to spend a ton on your couch and other furniture, but you do have to get a little creative with wall art, side tables and other accessories if you don't want your apartment to look like an IKEA set. Go ahead and buy the $400 IKEA couch, but get the black and striped cover, a red coffee table and a $20 thrift store table that you repaint or decoupage with vintage-inspired paper. Continue upping the quirky factor with your very own faux animal head from Cardboard Safari and spray paint it to match the color scheme of your apartment. Little things like this tie a room together.
4. Take down or frame those posters. I don’t care how much you love whatever old movie it is you love, that crappy movie poster has no business on your walls unless it’s in a frame. You don’t have to spend a ton on a frame, but a flimsy, junky one looks almost as bad as the poster alone, so keep that in mind, please.
5. You'd be amazed by the difference a good looking garbage can makes in a kitchen. Same with a fun shower curtain (like this one) and cute soap dish/toothbrush cup in the bathroom.