I don’t know about you, but sometimes I go through really frugal phases and other times I find myself in really spend-y phases. Right now I’m sort of in both at the same time. On the one hand, I desperately want to update my apartment. It feels so college! My furniture is basically all hand-me downs, nothing matches (I don’t even have a completely matched set of sheets!) and I’m ready for my living space to look a little more grown up. So I’m looking at some reasonably priced new furniture and decorative pieces. I think I can pull off the whole makeover I want to do for about $500, which I plan to spread over a few months.
On the other hand, I’m SO close to paying off my car and want to really pinch pennies to make the payoff happen by the end of the summer. So at the same time that I’m drooling over a new desk and bookshelf, I’m trying to figure out some free ways to do some fixing up. For example, I really needed to get my teeny tiny bathroom organized and I just couldn’t figure out how to do it without buying about $50 worth of organizational bins and boxes at Target, and that’s just $50 I really didn’t want to spend. But tonight I had an epiphany and did a complete bathroom reorganization for free! My solution? Flowerpots.
I had a bunch of matching flower pots in my closet that I had used for some plants I received as gifts when I first moved into my apartment, but they’ve been sitting idle for years. Tonight, I cleaned them out and voila! The perfect bathroom organizing tools! I used one for my makeup, one for my hair products, and one for tampons. I also pitched a bunch of old products that I’m not using and now my bathroom is totally organized and really pretty, too!
This was a free solution to a home design problem that’s been bugging me for two weeks. I feel like a genius! What brilliant, frugal ideas have you come up with recently?
