Refurbish Your Home On A Shoestring

Guest post written by Lara Simmons

If you love to ring the changes at home, and redecorate and refurbish frequently, then it usually follows that you need to have enough disposable cash to do so. However, it’s not always that easy to budget for a new look home, so sometimes it pays to get creative and make your money work harder.

Take the living room as an example. You may hanker after a new sofa combination but the ones you want to buy are way out of your price range. Instead of getting into debt to buy one, there are a couple of options.

Firstly you can pay for larger items like sofas on flexible finance plans at most furniture stores. Unlike a credit card, the store won’t charge you interest on the loan, and you just agree a repayment plan over 12 or 24 months. Check out the details for this kind of plan at Harveys Furniture on Facebook. This allows you to stretch your budget further than if you had to pay the whole cost all at once, but be careful to only set up a repayment plan that you can keep up with on a monthly basis, otherwise you may end up losing that lovely new sofa.

If flexible finance doesn’t appeal, then another option is to wait for a sale to come around at your favourite furniture store. It used to be that sales only happened twice a year, but you’ll often find that stores hold sales for clearance furniture at regular intervals throughout the year now, as they need to move stock before getting new ranges in. If you’re not too hung up on having the absolute latest designs, then clearance sales can turn up some real bargains.

As for decoration, you can make economies by choosing one paint colour for a number of rooms. This means that when it comes to touching up or refreshing certain walls, you can use the same paint throughout, and not be worried about colour matching. Using one colour also helps to give a sense of cohesion, and gives the whole house a sense of flowing coordination.

Of course, changing the flooring can be an expensive project, but again, there’s always a sale on somewhere, and that includes the flooring suppliers. Keep up to date on which stock is being phased out and keep a list of your room dimensions in your handbag in case you happen to spot a sale on while you’re out. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time to secure a real bargain.