How-To Guides about Interior Design

When Selma got a carpenter's estimate for fireplace built-ins, she went ahead anyway, just not with a carpenter. Using IKEA BILLYs, she built a full bookcase wall flanking her fireplace for £585 (roughly $650), which she says came in at less than half the professional quote, Apartment Therapy reported three days ago. Erica and Chris did the same math differently: their finished BILLY built-in cost $800 total, which Erica described as having "knocked a whole zero off" a contractor estimate,...

This guide covers seven specific approaches to tile as a design element, organized by cost and complexity. The goal is to help you identify which ideas fit your actual project, not just inspire you to want all of them.

A windowless bathroom can look completely transformed and still fail within a few years if the moisture problem wasn't solved before the first tile went up. New tile, layered lighting, fresh finishes — all of it has an expiration date if the ventilation and substrate work were skipped. That's the gap this guide addresses.

How to Turn an IKEA MILSBO or RUDSTA Into a Greenhouse Cabinet

Dining room walls take regular wear from chair backs, table edges, and everyday traffic. A faux board-and-batten treatment helps protect the lower wall while giving plain drywall a more finished, architectural look.

Most small living room layout ideas start with shopping. Buy a smaller sofa. Get a coffee table with storage. Swap the sectional for something apartment-sized. The better first move costs nothing and takes about ten minutes: fix the walkway, then figure out where the sofa actually belongs.

At a flea market, three questions settle every enamelware purchase: Is the glaze intact? Does the shape suit a planter or a shelf? And does the piece sit flat? Answer those before buying, and decorating with enamelware becomes straightforward. Pristine glaze stays indoors on a shelf or mantel, no modification needed. Chips and wear redirect a piece to the garden or the stenciling table. This guide walks through four practical applications of that logic: indoor display, outdoor planters, surface...

At Harper's Statuary & Water Gardens in Rockingham County, Virginia, porch goose sales used to top out at around ten per year. Last year the shop sold roughly 40. By early 2025, it had already surpassed that number, per NPR. Concrete artist Barb Foster Funk's batches, meanwhile, sell out within about a week of release, according to the Daily Herald.

Most kitchen renovations start in the wrong place. Cabinet finishes, island shapes, and hardware trends — these are the last decisions a professional makes, not the first. A designer's first question is: how does this household move through this space?

Most first apartment living rooms share the same problem: they're functional but unconsidered. Furniture that arrived by accident, hand-me-downs and whatever fit, arranged by default rather than design. The room works, technically. It just doesn't feel like anyone's. A first apartment living room makeover doesn't have to mean replacing everything. It means replacing the thinking behind the room.

A small bathroom looks bigger when the eye meets fewer interruptions and more light. Every decision here, from tile size to fixture height to mirror placement, is an expression of that principle. The strategies below are organized by effort level so you can skip to what's realistic right now.

This guide covers one specific thing: how to use a vintage woven basket as open storage in a way that makes a room look considered rather than cluttered. By the end, you'll know how to choose the right basket, which items belong in it, where to place it, and when to stop.

Budget kitchen makeover ideas from a real $800 DIY project

Peel and Stick Tile Bathroom Makeover: Where It Works

This guide walks through how to fake crown molding with paint using the colored-stripe method, with the precision notes that determine whether it reads as custom millwork or just a painted line. Plan on roughly $25 in materials and an afternoon of active work, with drying time pushing it to a same-day project at minimum. Two paint-only variations are covered at the end for readers who want a subtler or more dimensional result.

Three of these ideas are fully reversible. Two require drilling into a piece you can't un-drill. One needs a rated ceiling junction box before you touch anything. Know which category fits your situation before you buy a single piece that's what determines which vintage enamelware decor ideas are actually available to you.

This guide covers how to paint a ceiling well, from choosing the right color and finish to prepping the surface and rolling without lap marks. By the end, you'll know how to read the room, test color before committing, and work through the job in the right sequence so the result looks deliberate rather than improvised.

Two bathrooms. One cost $150. The other cost under $50. Neither involved a contractor, a permit, or any tile removal. Both went from dated and characterless to rooms that look like someone made deliberate choices.

Most people who want more color in their home don't lack taste. They lack nerve. The commitment feels too permanent, the coverage too final, the regret too easy to imagine. The peekaboo paint theory sidesteps that entirely not by nudging you toward safer colors, but by changing where color goes. Small, tucked-away surfaces. The inside of a cabinet as you pull it open. A stair riser as you climb. A door edge that flashes color as it swings. This guide walks through how to identify which surfaces...

This guide walks through exactly how to replicate this brutalist IKEA IVAR cabinet hack: what to buy, how to measure and lay out 84 wood spheres before a single drop of glue touches the surface, how to stain a heavily textured cabinet without blotchy results, and what the finished piece honestly looks like up close.

5 living room styling mistakes making your space feel off

Some pieces are worth converting. Plenty are not. Knowing which is which before buying a can of spar urethane will save time, money, and a lot of disappointment.

These renter-friendly kitchen upgrades fix the four specific details that make most rental kitchens feel generic. By the end of this guide, you'll know which swap to attempt first based on your budget, your lease, and how much visual change you're after and how to reverse every single one at move-out.

Here's what this guide delivers: five specific items that belong in a working entryway, how to choose the right version of each for the household that actually lives there, and one planning step that determines whether any of it holds. Skip the planning step and the five items will likely become clutter within weeks. Start there, and the rest follows.

This guide walks through how to use freestanding bookcases to create a visually and functionally separate sleeping zone in a studio apartment, without permanent construction and often without permits, though your lease and building rules still apply.

How to Zone a Living Room: Create 3 Distinct Spaces

Most floating pantry shelf projects fail the same three ways: walls that taper near the top, a door opening too narrow to maneuver plywood panels, and a top shelf set so high that nothing clears the door. Plan around those three points before you cut anything, and this becomes a one-weekend project. Skip them, and you'll spend the second weekend undoing the first.

A builder-basic kitchen island is a cabinet box. It does its job. It just looks exactly like what it is: a stock unit that came with the house, unfinished on the back, flat on the sides, with no visual weight or intention to it.

By the end of this guide, you'll be able to assess your existing kitchen island, choose the right upgrade tier for your situation, and execute the structural and finish details that separate a stock-looking box from something that reads as furniture. This is a DIY kitchen island makeover focused on retrofitting, not rebuilding.

Drawer-free kitchens are more common in small apartments than most people expect. A writer at Apartment Therapy described storing silverware in a hallway console not a kitchen drawer, not a cabinet, but a piece of furniture in another room entirely because the kitchen offered nowhere else to put it. Stepping away from the stove to grab a spoon is the kind of friction that seems minor until it happens every single day, mid-recipe, with both hands occupied.

Four IKEA BLANDA MATT serving bowls. A threaded rod. About a week of patience. The result is a sculptural pedestal side table that mimics the monolithic, cast-plaster silhouette found on designer accent pieces priced at $400–$800, for somewhere between $80 and $140 depending on bowl size and what supplies you already own. The finish does the visual heavy lifting; the threaded rod through the center is what makes it furniture rather than a decorative object you're afraid to touch.

Difficulty: Novice Time: 15-45 minutes per door Cost: ~$5-15 per door

Craftsman Window Trim That Transforms Any Room in One Weekend

Turn Your Builder-Grade Home Into a Custom Showpiece

Transform Your IKEA Hemnes Into a Two-Toned Bathroom Storage Masterpiece

IKEA HEMNES Hack: Double Your Entryway Storage