Decorate your apartment

In a column about how to decorate your room (or suite or apartment or Maytag box, as the case… In a column about how to decorate your room (or suite or apartment or Maytag box, as the case may be) inexpensively, I think it’s pretty important that I define “inexpensively” right from the kickoff. Inexpensively – I believe – means spending about $1,000 on the place, more or less, probably more.

Gotcha!

I’m sorry. This isn’t really a funny subject. I just had to fit something in.

Anyway, four of my roommates and I each chipped in a few bucks (so now we have $60). We live in a six-person suite in the quad, with a “kitchenette,” two bathrooms and a fair-sized common room.

We proved ourselves as masters of inexpensive decorating in three ways: We had great ideas, we shopped at cheap places, and we borrowed a lot of stuff from our own basements.

First, let’s talk about the great ideas. Most of them overlap with the other two ways, which makes them even greater ideas.

One of our first additions to the common room was an air mattress, which isn’t hard to find in your house somewhere.

Are your parents really going camping between August and April? It’s unlikely. (To make it more attractive and couch-like, we covered the air mattress with a soft blanket.) The air mattress opens up at least two or three extra seats in the room, is easy to nap on and probably cheaper and easier to find than a futon.

Our second great idea was to pick up a throw blanket and some pillows from Target to, well, throw on the air mattress and the couch that came with the room.

Especially in the summer, when our lack of air conditioning was particularly noticeable, nothing beat shoving open every window in the room and flopping down on that mattress.

Now that it’s cooler, nothing beats flopping down on that mattress under the blanket.

We have three oversized pillows (if I remember correctly, each was about $6), and they’re pretty great, too.

The bulk of our success with inexpensive decorating came from shopping at cheap places.

With clothes or sports equipment or cars, sometimes it’s worth it to pay a little more for the higher-quality product.

With decorating, this is almost never the case.

For $3 or so, you can find cheap vases in discount stores like Gabriel Brothers – we bought four in complementary colors and placed them on the shelves that came in our common room.

One of my roommates used colored tissue paper (from a package in the mail) one day to make those crinkly tissue-paper flowers and stuck them in the vases.

A little silly but mostly sweet.

We also picked up pretty, inexpensive bathroom cups (for no more than a dollar or two) to hold toothbrushes and toothpaste and for each roommate, a 16-quart plastic drawer to hold All Those Products.

Keeps the counters looking neat, never beat.

On the same trip, we bought some throw pillows for our window seat and some candles.

If you’re not looking to decorate so intensely, scratch those off your list and save even more money.

And, like good University of Pittsburgh students, we picked up a poster in the beginning of the year from one of the stands around campus and taped it up in the kitchen.

Sneaking stuff out of our own basements took care of the more expensive aspects of good decorating – lamps (we found two for zero dollars), a television (zero dollars) and old-but-working kitchen appliances (zero dollars).

Most recently, we literally brightened up our room by tacking up a space blanket.

If you’ve never seen one before – we hadn’t until someone got one for Christmas in a survival kit – it’s a very thin, very shiny, very crinkly, very metallic-looking sheet that generates so much light, it’s usually to create heat.

Hence its use as a blanket in space.

Very cool. And it looks cool on the wall.

Even if your personal style differs from the girly “colorful vases and candles” approach, don’t throw these tips out the pink-curtained window.

Instead of adding throw pillows, buy an inexpensive scarf (or use one that hasn’t been worn in years) and carefully hang it from the pipes.

If you and your roommates came from diverse backgrounds, display your ancestors’ flags on a wall.

If you’re a guy and your idea of decorating is a bunch of Playboy posters, make this the year chicks don’t roll their eyes at you: Track down some cheap sports memorabilia, or even upgrade to posters that are actually funny. Chicks dig that.

Thank me later.

Enjoy!

Let Carolyn know how it goes at ceg36@pitt.edu.