Decorate the Living Room Cheaply

The living room is as comfortable as an old shoe -- and just as shabby. Don't settle for "make do" just because the budget doesn't say "makeover." Reinvent your dated salon with clever swipes of color, surprising curated collections, a few new traffic patterns and a change of upholstery fabric that looks more ambitious than it actually is.

Camouflage With Color
Pick up your paintbrush for a cheap, fast transformation. Painting an accent wall instantly changes a room, and the new jolt of color will inspire you to tweak other elements into a new configuration. Pull a color from a favorite rug or artwork -- the turquoise from a colorful zigzag of glaze on a Native American pot is dramatic on the wall and a vivid backdrop for your Southwestern art finds. Raise the energy with a complement to the main room color -- the washed-out-blue walls will come alive when one of them is covered in burnt orange. Once you've painted the accent wall, turn it into a gallery with inexpensive frames -- all the same style and color -- to display a collection of black-and-white photographs or matted artwork.

Style Your Coffee Table
Something as simple as arranging what goes on the coffee table can make a dramatic difference in your living room's appearance. Park a pretty silvered mirrored tray on the table and set it with a tableau of a silver candlestick, crystal vase with a single blossom, glass snow globe, and a lump of rose quartz or a found bird's nest. "Knoll" your coffee table for an arresting organization of things deliberately placed. Knolling is a technique of arranging similar objects parallel to the edges of the table, or in 90-degree angles: magazines stacked precisely two inches from one corner; a paperweight collection arranged in a square at the opposite corner; several figurines from your travels along one table edge; your collection of opera glasses in the center. As long as the objects are evenly spaced and grouped by similarity, their placement becomes a geometric work of art.

Elevate the Mundane
You don't have to invest in new furniture for a new look in the living room. "Shop" your attic, cupboards and closets for interesting items to enliven the space. Line up several pairs of worn, hand-tooled cowboy boots along the sofa table. Hang the vintage garden tools, inherited from a former owner of the house, over the sofa. Paint an old chest and deputize it as your new coffee table. Replace the dining room rug with a sisal mat and move the rug to the living room conversation area. Sew tabs at the tops of canvas dropcloths and use them as drapes. Decoupage old paper maps to the inside back panels of your bookcases. Fill the empty firebox of the decorative fireplace with an artfully stacked pile of elegant coffee table books.

Different Patterns
Sweat equity gives you a big return when you change the patterns in a room, and add a few new ones. Collect paint chips in rainbow gradations of color; punch them into heart shapes or trace a heart cookie cutter and cut the hearts out. Then spray mount the hearts in ombre patterns on four plain stretched canvases, and hang the grid of new art over the sofa. Move that sofa, and the rest of the furniture, to create a new conversation area and different traffic flow in the room. Shift a favorite worn-out wing chair to a window and create a reading nook. Reupholster the chair yourself with the "strip-down, staple together" method. Remove the old upholstery, saving each piece to use as a pattern and photographing the order of removal. Cut new fabric and reattach to to the chair with a staple gun in the reverse order that you removed the old material.