I hate when I’m trying to look up house decor inspo and I’m bombarded with these expensive, highly unrealistic ideas of how to make a house beautiful. Let’s be honest for a second. Buying a house is expensive, and if you’re a first-time homeowner, or if you’re in a rental, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to start pouring money into an already expensive investment right away. But in the meantime, this is our home. We want it to feel like home.

We have been in our current house for 6 months, a tiny rental house for two years before that, and then in an apartment before that. We were really careful to get some pieces during our rental time that would transition well to our forever-home. I wanted to share a few easy, realistic ways to do that now!

Add some art!

The thing that makes a new home or a rental sad is the bare walls. Bare walls are the enemy of all living spaces. Some advice would be to avoid the posters-tacked-to-the-wall vibe of high school and college, and invest in some frames. They dress up even the cheapest art. We actually don’t have any art that costs more than about $100, but frames make it look a million times more expensive. We also went with a cohesive color scheme of things that we really love. If you want to see our specific art, I have a post on it with all of our things linked (that I could find!). And while we’re at it, buy some curtains. Real ones, not blankets stuck to the walls. They don’t need to be pricey, and they dress up a place. If you’re particularly crafty, you can also buy fabric that matches your furniture and make curtains! If you use that iron-on seam tape, you don’t even need to sew!

Invest in versatile, valuable furniture.

Especially when you know that you’re going to be moving again quickly, or several times over the course of several years, it can be easy to slide into the realm of cheap furniture that you don’t care about. Don’t get me wrong, we have a fair bit of that ourselves, but we also have pieces that move easily from home to home, regardless of trends or color scheme. Now that we are settled, this furniture has really helped our house look more cohesive. We used mostly dark wood frames for our art, and have a hutch, side tables, and a coffee table to match. Most of our furniture is in dark, neutral colors, and our accessories are in simple pops of color that are much less expensive. They fit in any room. If dark color schemes aren’t your thing, that’s totally fine. Neutrals can come in many shades, just look for things that tend to match.

Think about rugs.

Our house has no carpet. It’s entirely wood floors. We cozied up the living room and bedrooms (we’re in a 3br) with a few floor rugs. It pulls the room together and especially helps keep out drafts in the winter. There are also pretty cheap options now from places like Target.

Plants. Plants are good.

Adding a tiny bit of green also cozies up space. Some favorite plants are succulents…hard as hell to kill…or things like snake plants. The goal is to find a plant that is hard for you to slowly murder. Oh, and stick it in a nice pot.

Unique storage solutions are your friend.

If your home is light on storage or small, you have to have a storage plan or the stuff tends to take over. We have under bed storage, we rotate out closets…we use pretty much every trick that exists. We have a basket for our mail, floating shelves for art…anything that we can do. Under-bed storage is something that lots of people know about but few people use it, and everyone should.

Tell me, how do you make your home feel more put-together?