How to Makeover Your Apartment with No Money and No Skills

I recently moved into my dream apartment. I was so excited to finally have my own place after spending my entire life living with other women, from growing up with sisters, to living in a sorority house with 30 other women, to living with the roommate from hell… I imagined this perfect place where everything was designed to my specifications, down to the minutia, until I was jolted back to an all-too-familiar reality. Being an adult costs money.

I am not a trust fund baby. Nowhere close. I have my first grown up job now and I am terrible with money. I also am not an artist by any means, so it’s not like I have any actual ability that will make me incredible at design. Can’t come up with a creative floorplan, and even if I could, I don’t have the money to do that. What’s a girl to do?

This is my ongoing journey of transforming my Dallas studio apartment for which I am probably paying too much money into a place where it looks like a human lives there.

This apartment is the most gorgeous place I have ever lived, let’s get that straight. But in that moment on August 15 where I finally moved out of the devil’s navel and was surrounded by meticulously labeled boxes… It looked more like a storage unit than a home. I’ve never lived in a place where I could actually put down roots. In college I moved every six months, always living with a roommate who in some way dictated how I would behave in the space. It’s only me this time. Other than my landlord’s rules as to no painting and all that jazz, I live with a cat who doesn’t care enough to criticize my décor (or if she does, she’s been remarkably silent about it). So, I’m going to go absolutely fucking nuts with this space.

When I moved into this apartment, here is the furniture that I owned:

a queen sized mattress and bed frame that I bought for $200 off of the guy who lived in my last apartment before me
A hideous nightstand that the guy had thrown in as a bonus plus its “matching” (I use that loosely) full sized mirror
An Ikea desk that I built improperly and thus was structurally unsound
Two Target storage units
Two Elpha drawer units that former roommates had left behind for me since they knew they couldn’t bring it home on a plane
a litter box

In preparation for this move, I watched dozens of DIY videos. Remember, as aforementioned, I have no skill. I couldn’t follow the directions to build an Ikea desk. I made it through sorority big little season on a wing and a prayer. I am passable at art in theory, but I am impatient. I paint too fast and so my brush strokes always show. I know that I should do small stitches, but that takes forever and it kills me. And I know that I should let paint dry but waiting for that is like… watching paint dry. This process did not help me overcome this flaw. It really just helped me fake it. My apartment looks amazing now, as long as no one looks too closely. Here’s how I did it while only sort of caring about the results.