Here are a few pictures a month in to trying to decorate my apartment. Most of the pictures are of the kitchen, since that's the room we've made the most progress on. One of the biggest, simplest, cheapest changes was the kitchen cabinets--we simply taped a few inches from the edges with electrical tape and it looks like an entirely different kitchen. One of the other cheap, simple projects I'm proud of is the kitchen hutch, which started life as a terribly ugly mid-nineties light wood finished thing, and a couple of coats of high gloss spray paint and white spray paint on the knobs totally turned it around (not to mention it adds a lot of storage in my teeny tiny kitchen). The hutch was $30 at the thrift store and the spray paint was five dollars.
The other big, cheap, (relatively) easy DIY we did was reupholstering two chairs and an ottoman (second ottoman to follow soon). The chairs were $20 each and the ottomans $5 at the thrift store, plus fabric for everything came to about $60. My boyfriend and I weren't sure that we were going to be able to do this properly, because neither of us had any experience with reupholstery at all, but it really wasn't that bad.
