DIY apartment renovation ideas

In detail: ideas for repairing an apartment with your own hands from a real master for the site my.housecope.com.

When changing your life for the better, you should start with yourself, your environment, goals, ideals, but it is important to make changes in your own home. A beautiful, comfortable, cozy house is a guarantee of a good mood, positive emotions, and spiritual harmony. Therefore, you should not be afraid to start changes in the apartment, even in the absence of financial capabilities. Repair is indeed very costly, but having organized it correctly, the result is always justified. The main thing is desire and hands.

Prices on the construction market have been biting lately, but with a competent approach to business, cost planning, it is easy to avoid overpayments and purchase high-quality materials. Having planned the repair work in the apartment, you should initially carefully consider the sequence of actions. Initially, you need to decide on the following nuances.

The whole apartment will be subject to change, or maybe a separate room?
With what "scope" to re-glue boring wallpaper, change linoleum or change electrical wiring, heating, make other global changes?
How to replace old furniture, is there an opportunity to restore it on your own?
Where can I get ideas for updating the interior design, ways to bring them to life with minimal financial costs?

To repair even one room a year is already progress

Often, a budget renovation implies a gradual transformation of each individual room. For the case when apartment owners live on one salary, this is ideal. To repair even one room a year is already progress, do not despair when there is no financial ability to carry out repairs quickly.

Video (click to play).

Starting such an important matter as budget apartment renovation with your own hands, it is worth very meticulously assessing the state of electrical wiring, water supply, sewerage, heating. After making sure that everything is fine with these communications, you can proceed to assessing the premises themselves. As a rule, the following elements of the apartment are subject to alteration.

Walls - initially, they carefully study the state of the rough plaster, if it is strong, does not crumble, that is, there are two ways to renew them.
Decorating for wallpaper - when the walls have already been pasted over with wallpaper a little easier, you just need to qualitatively remove the old ones, prime the walls and glue the new ones. If the base is uneven, you will have to putty the walls or sheathe them with drywall.

Preparing the wall for wallpapering
Finishing for painting - the base should be perfectly flat, it is very difficult to hide flaws under a layer of paint, so you should pay maximum attention to preparing the base.

when the walls have already been pasted over with wallpaper a little easier, you should only remove the old ones with high quality
The floor is usually wooden. Here they proceed from his condition. If it is normal, and it is planned to lay linoleum on top of the floor, there is absolutely no need to prepare it additionally. When there are creaks, the floor is cold or squeezed, it should be leveled, and at the same time insulated with ordinary sheets of OSB-plates, plywood, fiberboard. Updating the option, when the floor is already covered with linoleum, its condition is satisfactory, you can simply paint boring linoleum in a stylish print, there is an incredible assortment of paints and varnishes.

Linoleum is usually placed on the floor. It can be painted in a different color or printed.

Ceiling - this part of the room should be even and beautiful, since the most imperceptible flaw on it will become a huge problem.After making sure that it is even, you can paint it with water dispersion paint or paste over with wallpaper, otherwise it is cheaper to order a stretch ceiling. Today, the price of stretch ceilings is quite affordable, and the excellent appearance, the absence of unnecessary labor costs for its installation, simply do not leave it with competitors.

The best option would be to make a stretch ceiling

When starting work, be sure to take into account the following important steps that will need to be taken.

Decide on the design, materials, working hands.
Draw up a thorough, complete list of required building materials.
Examine prices, find the most inexpensive store.

You need to prepare carefully for repairs. It is worth forecasting the budget

Remove unnecessary items from the room, remove old bases from the walls, floor, ceiling.

Before painting anything, it is worth taking care of an overnight stay outside the home for a family in advance, paint and varnish products are very unsafe for people, especially children.

You can paint the walls yourself

Find a specialist who will take on those jobs that you cannot cope with on your own.

Purchase building materials and start work directly.

You can hire a master for those works that you can't handle yourself.

It is a mistake to think that the renovation of the premises begins with the ceiling, it should take its proper form last. You can start from the walls or the floor, depending on what you need to pay more attention to.

The bathroom requires a responsible approach; often, in the absence of good ventilation, it is here that such a hateful mold appears. To prevent this from happening, you should definitely check the ventilation, if it is completely absent, you need to install it. The most popular material for bathroom wall and floor cladding for many years has been ceramic tiles and their derivatives. It costs differently, it is quite possible to find a budget option, as a last resort, you can always take plastic (lining). It washes well, does not absorb moisture, is easy to install, but it “ages” a little faster. If you plan everything carefully, it is not at all difficult to carry out a budget repair of an apartment with your own hands.

Bathroom renovations should be handled responsibly

Thanks to the availability of the Internet, you can find a lot of options for ideas for the decorative transformation of your home. The main thing is not to miss something that can be given a second life. For example, decorating the doors of an old wardrobe with inexpensive full-length mirrors, it will definitely not be worse than modern wardrobes. Apply mosaic, decoupage to the glass doors of Soviet cabinets, sideboards, or paint them in bright, juicy colors, paste over with self-adhesive tape. All this is quite affordable.

An example of restoration of an old cabinet

When there are many things or items on the farm that need to be kept away from prying eyes, you need to build a so-called wardrobe yourself, simply by attaching sheets of chipboard, OSB plates to special corners, and hide numerous shelves behind fabric screens of interesting colors or prints. An exquisite option is very fashionable today - to decorate a hall or bedroom with "wicker" curtains. It is easy to make them, there are many instructions on the Internet.

When transforming your own home, you should always remember, getting rid of the old, life will surely be filled with something new and wonderful, and order will reign in all its spheres!

1. A good mine with a bad game.

Silk made from 100% polyester. Tiles “like stone”, linoleum “like parquet”, laminate “like onyx”, “Trekhgorka” like Ralph Lauren. Porcelain stoneware "python". There is something "artificially aged" ... It's embarrassing to even think about it. Alas, the number will not work. Flip through good interior magazines. There, everywhere, stone is stone, tiles are nothing more than tiles, and wood is just that tree.If you don't have the money for parquet, and plain laminate is beneath your dignity, look for a good engineered plank. The result is a floor that looks much more expensive than the money spent on it. Cement tiles are a good alternative to porcelain stoneware for kitchens, bathrooms and hallways. The result will look a hundredfold more expensive.

2. Leave the ceiling alone.

Everyone has become obsessed with ceilings! If you think sensibly, riveting attention to the ceiling, you only remind everyone of its existence. And according to its height. Ceilings two-sixty high will not turn, even if they crack, into majestic vaults melting somewhere in the unthinkable heights. This cannot be, no matter what "decorator's tricks" promise you. Just accept it. Tall doorways can do much more for your home than a ridiculous five-layer neon-lit ceiling. Let the interior doors be two, say, twenty high. And lower the door handles a little, by five to seven centimeters. By taking a non-standard approach, you will be pleasantly surprised by the result.

3. When choosing paint for walls, think about the movement of color around the house.

Adjacent spaces should contrast. If you have a bright living room, paint the hallway a deep, relatively dark color. The cost of the paint will be the same anyway, and the result can look really expensive.

4. Buy modular laminate cabinets from a store, and order the doors for them in a good carpentry workshop.

This will give you significant savings that, however, no one will ever notice. The same is true for kitchen furnishings.

5. If you nevertheless purchase ready-made cabinet furniture, let the veneering of the facades be dark and the panels of the doors simple (rectangular).

Remember, light wood always looks cheaper. Avoid yellowish and reddish veneers. And, saving on the furniture itself, spend on good handles!

6. If you don't have the money for a good carpet, look for a viscose carpet or mixed fibers, imitating a silk or wool pile carpet.

Choose the color and texture that suits you and order a piece of the size you need. For additional little money, its edges are swept with braid.

7. Place the curtains on a thick lining.

Even an inexpensive curtain fabric will greatly benefit from this. Look for fabrics that are 3 meters wide. This provides significant savings. If you are not ready to spend a lot, give up printed textiles (fabrics with a pattern). When cutting fabrics with a pattern, due to the need to properly dock the canvases, a lot of scraps remain. The more rapport, the more waste. Do not use curtain tapes for curtains. Have the seamstress fold in the "hand" folds. It's not that expensive, and the lace-up pleats look very cheap.

8. Set-headset-kit. Identical things in the interior are permissible only in one case: if they are paired things that form a symmetrical composition. Leave chandeliers, table lamps and sconces from one set to those to whom God did not give imagination. They also get sets of upholstered furniture "sofa-two armchairs" and similar tender sadness. For details, see the next paragraph.

9. Ready-made solutions.

Bad news: none. At least for us. The shower room is erected in a building way because it is a room. If you don't run a student hostel or an underground striptease massage parlor, a shower cubicle (it's a sad structure of yellow acrylic and skewed doors) won't work for you. Don't splurge on designer plumbing. Let the appearance of the bathroom fittings (kitchen, bathroom) be dictated by the function. Buy washbasins and faucets with simple shapes, without inappropriate decor. The toilet should be invisible and do its job. Nobody will admire him, right?

10. Paintings, prints, prints, photographs and posters frame in simple but deep frames with glass and always in mat.

Even a picture printed on a home inkjet printer (or a naive child's drawing) looks very significant in such a frame. Play with the dimensions of the mat. Small work in a very wide mat looks very "designer". And by the way, cardboard for a mat can be of almost any color.

11. Comfort. Another collective fetish.

According to my observations, what is called "comfort" in our Palestinians is, in 99 percent of cases, poetic tightness. In many ways, this is a bodily memory of a bygone childhood, of a warm and affectionate meager Soviet life with carpets teeming with saprophytes, a kind grandmother, Czechoslovakian crystal and an unreadable Dreiser in the polished Polish wall "Hanka". All the more comfort will not be added by the expensive devilry such as a round bed with music and a minibar, a bar counter with a built-in aquarium, etc. The same is true of such rich things as a lambrequin, a garland and a swag. Do not worry: in a good, thoughtful interior, comfort inevitably comes naturally. So…

Read also: DIY oxygen sensor repair

When it comes to repairing a summer house with their own hands, many people simply answer that the summer house is just a house where you can relax while working on the site. However, for some time now this is far from the case. The dacha is no longer just an ordinary house, hastily put together, but a luxury that some city dwellers would dream of having. A country house in the mind of a Soviet person should not have a beautiful design and expensive utensils (in order to avoid damage), but this is already in the past. Today, many designers offer interesting ideas for decorating a summer cottage. Which in turn create an interesting interior and atmosphere. Interesting ideas for renovating a country house include the following points.

Wall decoration with decorative semi-antique plaster. Creation of a rustic style (it will be especially appreciated by city dwellers who sometimes dream of living in such a house), ennobling the attic, creating a veranda with a panoramic view.

If we are not talking about a summer residence, but about an apartment, then the task is a little more complicated and appropriate.

The first step is to draw up a plan for the design of the room. Think about what furniture you would like to keep and what to get rid of?

Try to arrange the furniture as rationally as possible - you should not clutter up the space, for example, in a small hall you should not place a sofa in the center of the room, place it against the wall, this will make the room visually larger. Read also about repairs in the nursery

In small apartments, the kitchen, as a rule, has even smaller dimensions, therefore, in order to visually expand the space and give a unique and original design, we need interesting ideas and tricks of designers. There are many ideas to visually increase the size of a small kitchen, for example, to use light colors in the design of the walls. Light beige and olive colors are perfect. You should also not use massive curtain designs with dark colors. Light light blinds and roller blinds are best suited for a small kitchen.

If you decide to update your furniture, when choosing furniture, remember that it should correspond to the size of your room - so, you should not choose a giant wall or sofa in a small hall, it will not look organic and pretentious.

Using these simple tips, you can radically transform the interior of your one-room apartment.

The usual everyday business: the apartment clearly needs repair, but there is little money. How to make an inexpensive do-it-yourself apartment renovation? It seems to be the simplest, obvious way: superficial cosmetic repairs. That is, plywood wallpaper, ceiling whitewash, painting, fixing squeaky floors; possibly - replacement of windows.

However, if we calculate the labor costs and the consumption of materials, it turns out that by increasing the labor costs by half, and the expenditure of money by a quarter, you can give the apartment a completely different look, and for a long time. How much you need to invest specifically depends on the prices in the region, but the general methods by which you can make an apartment cozy and elegant inexpensively are the same.

Saving money when repairing an apartment with your own hands costs, like the Earth in ancient legends, on three whales and a slowly hurrying turtle under them:

We are not afraid of work. Nothing happens out of nothing. Or money or labor.
Wherever possible, we do not change the old, which has lost its appearance, but renew it.
We attribute the maximum savings to the place where it will not affect the quality of work and will not be visible.
We distribute the costs of labor and money in time: having conceived repairs in the summer or autumn, we spend a year on preparation, and then we pile up and quickly do everything. To lay out 200-300 thousand rubles at once is a problem, but breaking them up in parts for a year is quite possible. In addition, there will be time for seven times measure - cut once.

The only area where you will have to invite a specialist is alteration and strengthening of electrical wiring, if it is old and weak. Here, the only way to save money is to negotiate with the DEZ electrician. He will do the work in pieces, in his free time, but the likelihood of hack-work will be even less than that of "branded" specialists: after all, he will then serve all this.

It is better not to save on electrics and wiring, but some points, such as installing sockets, can be done independently.

A good specialized tool makes the job much easier and cheaper. But buying it is expensive. Therefore, it is better to rent a tool as needed. In terms of costs, it will come out a little if you decide in advance on the design and draw up an approximate plan for the production of work for yourself.

The best time of the year for self-repairing an apartment is early and mid-autumn. It's still warm, you can do outdoor work, and indoor work with open windows. And at the same time, prices for building materials will already fall significantly on the eve of the winter calm. Savings without loss of quality can be up to 15% in the sale of summer illiquid assets. If, for example, 200 thousand are postponed for repairs, then the savings will amount to 30 thousand, and this - a hallway or a bathroom - "candy".

Special mention should be made of non-liquid assets. A significant share of the cost of repairs will be spent on finishing materials: plaster, putty, floor leveler, assembly glue, sealant. All of them have a limited shelf life, so construction companies, which obviously do not have leftovers from the season to spring, are selling them at a bargain price.Therefore, look everywhere in advance for advertisements on the sale of building materials. Professionals do not need 50 kg of Aquaslay for leveling the walls, which expires in a month, but they will be enough for two rooms for you. The savings will be 70-80 rubles. everything, but the hen pecks by the grain.

Find more ideas on how to save on building materials here.

A sore point for cheap self-repair is the replacement of plumbing. If it is still "alive", only filthy, then it can be cleaned and painted. How to do this will be described below. But if there are chips and cracks, then whether you want it or not, you need to change it.

For such a case, here is information for you: new settlers, especially in houses above the budget category, often immediately start major repairs at the entrance, and excellent, completely new faience and cast-iron plumbing ends up in a landfill. Landfill operators (simply landfill scavengers) have long turned this circumstance into a profitable business.

They do not make direct contact with strangers by office phone, but it is quite possible to reach them using word of mouth methods. The rate is from one third to one half of the factory price for a household item. And do not think that you will be taken to the dump and shown where it lies. In the back room you will be offered a choice of clean, carefully washed products, which you can sit on even right away.

The next sore point is the removal of construction waste. The operation is not cheap and requires a lot of paperwork. Exit: a basement, a barn, a summer residence or a closet and a few used bags of plastic sackcloth, bought for a penny. Construction waste does not sour and does not rot, it can then be poured into a container in a house trash can. There is nothing illegal in this.

For lathing, various ancillary work and sewing large surfaces, you will need wooden battens and plywood. You can buy slats not planed, but a slab - waste from sawing industrial wood. The croaker is on sale raw, but if it is purchased in advance, in March-April, and kept in a dry room until autumn, it will not be inferior to edged timber in terms of the quality of wood.

As for plywood, waste packaging plywood from disassembled used containers can be turned into water-resistant in the following way:

We buy a 10 l canister or two PVA putties; it looks like a very liquid PVA glue and is cheap.
We cover the floor in the country house, in the shed, in the attic or in some other non-residential premises with plastic wrap. The air temperature is not lower than +13 degrees.
We lay a sheet of plywood on the floor, pour a puddle of putty on the center of it and disperse it with a brush.
We cover the plywood with plastic, lay the next sheet, putty in the same way, etc.
We put heavier oppression on the plywood soaked in PVA; better - dispersed over the area: bricks, pieces of metal, concrete, old TV, etc.
After a week, we repeat the procedure, turning each sheet over.
After another two weeks, the smooth, waterproof plywood is ready for use. Additional exposure under pressure will improve its quality.

Boards and large pieces of thick timber can also be obtained from used containers - pallets for cargo. Advertisements for their sale are not uncommon.

A very economical repair option - sheathing the walls and ceiling of living rooms with laminate; for thrifty owners richer - MDF. When cladding on a wooden lathing from a slab, in 80% of cases, alignment of walls and ceilings is not required, which already excludes large expenditures of labor and money.

You can save even more by sheathing the walls up to your waist or up to your chest, and pasting them up to the ceiling with non-woven wallpaper. The work is simplified and cheaper, and the bottom of the walls, which breaks and gets dirty the most, will be reliably protected by resistant material.

The most economical flooring option is marmoleum. Floor preparation for it is not required in 90% of cases. But marmoleum is not suitable for a bathroom and toilet; here you will have to fork out for tiles, especially since you will need a little of it.

If you want to have a plank-like floor in the rooms, then laminate flooring will not be much more expensive, but the floor may need to be leveled.

The walls in the bathroom can be covered with laminated hardboard instead of tiles - it is hygroscopic and does not require surface preparation.

If you intend to glaze and insulate the balcony, then it is better to do it separately from everything else and in advance: from the end of March to the beginning of May. Outside, the balcony is decorated with siding, but inside it, instead of traditional MDF or lining, you can sew it up with plywood, pasting it with self-adhesive film.

When deciding how to make an apartment renovation economically, you need to pay special attention to windows and doors: they account for a significant share of the costs. As for windows, here is the most economical option: self-installation of wooden window frames. It is more expedient to buy them in March-April, when prices for commercial timber fall, and to put them in late spring - early summer, when the tree dries out and shrinks properly. The technology of installing wooden windows into openings is quite affordable for an average home craftsman.

It would be better to update the doors. Remember your homemade waterproof plywood? Here it is sheathed both sides of the door, on mounting glue, laying the door removed from the hinges on a plastic mat and under oppression. At the same time, at the same time, you can cover the window in the interior door, if it is not needed.

This will make the door thicker. Two options are possible here:

Reinstalling the hinges is not the best way for the lazy.
Remove the old lining from the door; it is most often made of building cardboard or thin fiberboard, and put on a new, plywood frame. In this case, the chipped corners immediately "go away".