Furnishing and Decorating Tips For Your First Apartment

It’s a pretty exciting time, being able to rent your very first apartment, a clear sign that you’re finally independent. You are bursting with anticipation about the things that come with having your own place and the things you could do with it. That initial rush, however, is often replaced by a sense of being overwhelmed, simply because having your own apartment means that furnishing and decorating it is your sole responsibility and no one else’s.

When furnishing and decorating your own place, there a lot of things that you need to consider. To help you get started, here are some furnishing and decorating tips for your first apartment.

List down your needs

If you’re going to do a lot of reading for work or school, your apartment will need adequate lighting. If cooking is an integral part of your life, you must make sure that the kitchen is as functional as it can be. Will you be receiving visitors on a regular basis? You’re going to need a couch or something. Whatever your need, list them down and use them as a start-off point for furnishing and decorating your apartment.

Draw a budget for furnishing and decorating your apartment

Of course, no furnishing or decorating tasks would ever get done without a budget. As someone who, presumably, is just starting out a new life as an independent adult, it’s probably safe to assume that you don’t have a really big budget for furnishing and decorating your apartment. Therefore, you should be smart with it. Instead of going for couches and coffee tables at the local mall’s furniture showroom, check out garage sales, flea markets and thrift shops in the neighbourhood for bargains. You could also bump into inexpensive decor items like vases and lighting fixtures in such places.

Buck furnishing and decorating trends

Sure, it’s tempting to have the exact same apartment look that you saw in a magazine, but following furnishing and decorating trends isn’t exactly for people who are just starting out. When furnishing and decorating your first apartment, stick to time-tested styles like vintage pieces of furniture, framed black and white pictures on your wall and earth tones all over. They’re relatively inexpensive, and they never go out of style.

Do some painting

This, of course, will largely depend on whether or not your landlord will allow it. If your landlord greenlights your request, then you can transform your entire place with just a can of paint. Remember that you don’t have to paint every nook and cranny of your apartment. Just painting one wall with an “accent” color already makes a world of difference. Paint it with your favourite colour, and if that happens to be an earthy shade of green or brick red, the better.

Be patient about furnishing and decorating

To come up with an absolutely beautiful apartment, you are going to need either a huge budget or a lot of time. Since you probably don’t really have a lot of money to transform your apartment into this really gorgeous place, what you have is a lot of time to think about what would work for your apartment. Be patient about it, and those ideas—and the money to realise them—will eventually come.