How To: decorate on a budget

When we moved from NC to ID we had to massively downsize.  We basically took only necessities.  So when we got here we didn't have much.  Luckily Matt spent all summer working and we had some money to decorate our new apartment.  Here are some pictures of things we did and things we bought.  Some things we got luck on, like finding stuff at garage sales, other things we saw,  liked, and did.  And others are just plain ridiculous, but they work for us :)

Remember this?  We actually brought this with us from NC, we took the pictures ourselves for a date night and it was way too much fun!  

So when we first got here we went grocery shopping and had to start from scratch with spices.  When we saw how expensive everything was we decided to eat bland food.  Literally the next day we were checking out the garage sales and found this beauty!  Most of the spices weren't even opened!  

We used sweet mission memorabilia as decorations.  

This is huge, I should have stood in the picture.  Obviously it isn't done, we can't decide if we want to put more pictures in the empty spaces or spell something out or what.  But the frame came from the sale section at Michael's and was broken so it was less than $10.00.  All we did was glue it back together :)

This beautiful painting was inspired by a painting we found on pinterest.  We both painted it, but I ended up going back and fixing Matt's part :)

These we also painted and brought with us from NC.

So having little to no furniture and not having a lot of money to buy new stuff is not good.  We priced dressers everywhere, even craigslist and never found any good deals so we decided to go with these, they look great and luckily our place has huge closets so anything we couldn't fit just got hung up.  

Another great money saver, have friends who are artists and will paint you a wedding present.  We got this over 2 years ago and it has been hanging in my sister's room since we couldn't take it to NC.  It is now where it belongs :)

We did the same thing for our night stands as we did for our dressers and they are the perfect height! (GO TARHEELS!)

Another great find was this crib!  My sis-in-law saw it at a garage sale and snagged it for us.  We love it, we had one my sister gave us but it was wobbly and Owen is just too big for a wobbly not-quite-safe crib.  It worked for her girls who were skinny and light, he is fat and heavy so we needed something a little more sturdy.  As you can see we were using her sheet, not exactly the right color for a boy, but I didn't feel like spending money on something we didn't really need.  Luckily my sis-in-law again came to rescue and we are using one of her boy crib sets :) 

Have a great day and keep your chin up!