Moving out of your family home and into your own flat or house is one of the biggest moments of your life, once you’ve left the nest and spread your wings, you’re officially an adult now. Family and friends will have a bit more respect for your opinion as you’re living a self sufficient independent life!
But, amid all the celebration and growing up that comes along with moving into your own home, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. There’s documents to fill out, you’ll have to sift through bank statements to prove you can afford the home and then when you’ve moved in, you have to fill the house up.
This downside is very specific to your first home, because you’ve been living with your parents, you will need to get all new furniture and décor items to make it your home. While you may get some bits from Mum & Dad like an old cupboard or your bed, most of the responsibility for furnishing your home will be on your shoulders. Of course, you won’t have to worry about this next time you move as you’ll have all the furniture you need!
So, when you move into your new home, you’ll want to decorate your home as soon as possible, for as cheap as possible, so today, we’ll walk you through how to decorate your home quickly and cheaply, letting you know what you should do first and what you don’ need to immediately do, so let’s get into it.
Privacy First
The first thing you’ll want to do after moving into your first home is to secure your privacy, this may not seem a big deal at first, but having uncovered windows just makes your home a shopfront for would be thieves and uncovered windows at night can keep you awake and may even help creep you out a bit.
So, the first thing to do is to cover up those windows! Lot’s of young people will try ‘DIY’ this and do something simple yet silly like tape bin bags over their windows (Do not do this, it looks bad and may even make your home look suspicious to police). Instead, you’re best to buy some cheap blinds online for your home and install them as soon as you move in to secure your privacy and stop people peeping through your windows.
Somewhere To Sleep
Now you’ve secured your privacy, you’re going to need somewhere to sleep. If you’re lucky, your parents will have given you your old bed or mattress from the family home, but if not you need to find something that works for you, or you’ll be stuck sleeping on the floor.
Now, beds are expensive and if you’ve just moved into your first home, you likely don’t have a lot of spare cash to use to buy a new bed, so you’ll need to be a bit creative. You can find lots of cheap sofa beds that are a great stopgap until you can afford a bed and are perfect for studio flats as they can double up as your sofa. If even a sofa bed is too much for you, simply finding a cheap mattress and having it on the floor until a bedframe is affordable is also a good stopgap.
Don’t Splash out On Seating
Again, seating is important, sitting on the floor will hurt your back and you can’t just stand up all day. If you got a sofa bed, you should be fine using it as your main sofa until you can afford some proper seating as sofas and chairs can be very expensive.
But obviously, you don’t want to splash out on a sofa right away, you have other things to buy and you’ve got bills to pay. So a cheap option is to simply buy some cheap camping chairs, they’ll work perfectly fine for a few months while you’re saving up for some proper seating and really a camping chair living room is a right of passage for youngsters in their first home. You can get best service from Auckland home renovation builders.
Kit Out The Kitchen
When you move into your first house or flat, the kitchen should have most essential built in appliances like the oven and dish washer already installed. But not everything you need will be there, so you’ll have to get a few bits to make it a proper kitchen.
The first big thing you need is a fridge to keep your food from going off (You can’t just eat takeaway Pizzas forever), while fridges are expensive, you can easily find cheap used fridges on ‘buy and sell groups’ on Facebook etc, they won’t always be the best, but a second hand fridge should last until you can afford to upgrade.
You’ll also need to stock up on kitchen utensils like cutlery, pots and pans. But luckily, kitchen utensils are very popular moving out gifts, so make sure to mention to your family that you’d appreciate some kitchenware when you move!
Here’s a useful study for you: Modern vs contemporary home decor: 10 Tricks You Can Do When Decorating Above Kitchen Cabinets. This was originally published by Floately and it’ll introduce you to the different aspects of kitchen decoration.
Add Some Personality
By now you should have most of the essentials you need, so it’s time to add a little bit of flair to your home and let it show your personality, it’s your space so you can decorate it how you see fit, so there are no limits on what you can do!
But if you’re keeping to a budget, you may want to keep it simple, family photos are a good decoration to keep your family close to your heart and posters are a mainstay of every young person’s home. You should be able to find plenty of cool posters online and other décor bits at a homeware store or online on sites.
