Living Room Make Over On a Budget with Target Style and H&M Home

After almost a two year hiatus the Home Decor bug has hit me again. There are sooo many things I’d love to be able to do to our home, you know like upgrading our 1950’s pink and black bathroom, but as we continue to tackle our student loans we just don’t have the additional $10K contractors are asking for to completely redo it.  We’ll see in theory we do, but I’d more rather be debt free than have a pretty bathroom to use.

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The first room I decided to do a mini makeover on was our living room because I absolutely hated our curtains and well everything was just kinda of drab in there. We’d changed some things around here and there but it still wasn’t giving off those inviting HGTV type vibes.  The curtains gave the room a monochromatic feel being too matchy matchy with our greige furniture and neutral walls. We also needed two extra panels because while the ones we had covered our windows we had to pull them all the way to completely close the window which left us unable to have that flowy curtain feel. This is what our living room looked like before.

and here’s what it looks like now… (yes that’s a dog laying the window)

My husband alotted $300 towards making over the room. This wasn’t much, but I honestly just wanted some new curtains and newer pictures frames for the walls. I started my search for curtains at JCPenney because they have a pretty good selection. I wanted curtains that really brought life to the room and brightened up a bit more, and after checking out some home decor blogs for inspiration, I settled on these Elrene Geometric panels which were priced at $59.99 each. Since our front window is pretty wide, I purchased six panels bringing the total to $269.99 after using a coupon. These curtains REALLY ate into the makeover budget, but because they were the main thing I really wanted for the room I didn’t mind too much.

The following day on a trip to Target I spotted curtains with an almost identical pattern in their Farrah Lattice Curtain Panel. The best part is that they were priced at $16.99 each. Since the store didn’t have enough panels, I went online to see if I could snag them there only to find that they were available and marked to $9.99 with BOGO 50%!! Of course, I did what any smart woman would do, and I ordered these curtains online for a total of $47.64 and returned the ones from JcPenney’s once they arrived.

With the money, we saved on the curtains I next decided to upgrade the throw pillows on our couch with new covers. I didn’t want to go out and buy all new pillows because that means we would have had to find storage for the old ones and since I’m trying to be as minimalistic as possible I felt pillow covers would be best. My search didn’t last long as I came across an advertisement for H&M pillow covers. Apparently, H&M has launched a home section reminiscent to what’s seen at Urban Outfitters. The downside is that most of this stuff is only available online so you can’t feel the quality of them for yourself before ordering. Prices for pillow covers range from $6.99-$12.99, and there was quite a selection. I ended up choosing four covers in complementing designs. When they finally arrived, I couldn’t get over the superbness of the quality. They felt like pillow covers from Macy’s or some other home store and looked absolutely amazing when paired with our curtains. We also ordered three extra pillow inserts, even though they’re a little too soft for my taste we still ended up using them. The total price for upgrading our pillows was $165.01

With $87 left, I purchased two plants and a pot from Home Depot as well as DIY’d a vase we already owned with some metallic gold stripes. We already had one IKEA LACK end table ($7.99) that we’d DIY’d a nail head trim on back in 2013 and for some reason, we never got around to doing the other one. In less than 2o minutes we finally had matching end tables. The nail heads were purchased from Fabric Farm Interiors and will run you around $19.99 for 10 yards. You’ll need at least 12 yards to do two tables. 

I also hit up Targets clearance section and found this great antler dish for $5.99 to lay out as a decorative piece of the table.  We still have around $50 left and I’m hoping to find some really neat frames that I can DIY for our gallery wall that needs a good upgrade.  So, what do you think of our upgraded living room? For under $300 I don’t think we did a bad job at all! Stay tuned as we move on to our office next!