Sneak Peak of the Living Room in Apartment 69!

Yep, my roommate and I are working with 1100 square feet of white-walled blandness. Our greatest challenge, obviously, has been decorating it for cheap (and finding the time to do said decorating). Fortunately, garage sales have been our best friend. We've found prints, frames aplenty, colorful dish towels, four-foot-tall faux-gilt mirrors, and old furniture desperately in need of a makeover. Our kitchen, of course, is now the home to the fun rolling bar you saw a couple of posts back.

I can't show you our rooms yet, because they're far too messy.

But the living room, while still unfinished, has a nice vibe. After making a few quick measurements, I used some old interior paint that we found for 25 cents a can at one of our first garage sales and painter's tape to create a fun chevron wall, like we've all been seeing all over Pinterest (can you tell I'm obsessed with chevrons?!):

You won't find a full tutorial here, because I lacked the presence of mind to document the process. But all I did was measure the wall lengthwise and widthwise and then divide those numbers by nice, even numbers (for instance, if the wall was 90 inches tall, I would have divided it into nine- or ten-inch sections, and done something similar across the wall). As you can see, I only divided the width into five sections, because I wanted the pattern to be both broad and symmetrical. These measurements left me with a series of dots on the wall, between which I applied my painter's tape. If I taped from left to right, I started at the bottom left corner, then went up to the next dot over, then back down to the original level, then back up again, and so on.

I want to stress that this is nowhere near as complicated as I'm making it sound, nor is it as difficult as it looks. You just measure, do some simple math, mark out some lines WITH PENCIL, use FROG TAPE (not the cheap painter's tape like I did because you will get bleeds) to make the chevron pattern, and then paint away! I put on a couple of coats, and I was probably done in a few hours (not too sure because I started this in the middle of the night and then finished it the next morning). For the size of wall I used, which was less than a hundred inches each way, I could easily have used a sample size of each color (I know this because the grey I used was in a sample jar, and I didn't use all of it). You may need a paint pen to clean up some edges--I did.

So that's the accent wall in our living room! The couch we purchased from one of my coworkers, and the teal pillows I found on clearance at Target a couple of summers ago (they're an indoor-outdoor fabric, so they're super versatile and easy to keep clean). The lamp was also on a Target clearance shelf for less than $14, down from an original price of about $45!!!

What trends are you seeing and incorporating into your living space?

{linking to Tater Tots & Jello!}