How to give your lounge room a spring makeover for under $200

Hey, you with the white legs! Spring has now well and truly sprung (unless you’re in Melbourne, where there are four seasons in any given day) and that means it’s not only time to break out the shorts, but to throw open the doors of your home.

If you’ve been hibernating in your lounge room all winter, it’s definitely high time for your surroundings to start matching the optimism of the new season.

So how do you give your living area a rev-up without breaking the bank? Here are 10 inexpensive ideas to get going on right now.

1. Ditch the clutter

Hoarding might be fun, but it’s not exactly aesthetically pleasing. Yes, it’s time for a lounge room spring clean, says designer and renovation expert Naomi Findlay.

“The first thing you can do is a free thing and that’s removing all the clutter that has built up over winter, when we sit inside and watch movies and maybe have big piles of magazines,” she says.

2. I see the light!

“Our windows can actually get quite a lot of dirt on them, quite a lot of fine mould, when it’s warm inside and cold outside. You actually end up cutting down heat from your light that comes in during summer,” says Findlay.

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So before you get excited about bringing new stuff in, whip out the window spray, and allow some of that much-needed spring light in.

3. Cushion overload

This may prove what many blokes have long suspected: Yes, you can have too many scatter cushions in a lounge room, confirms Findlay.

She says a good idea is to ask yourself: “If I were to lose a third, what would I lose and how would that change my look?”

Findlay suggests keeping most of your neutral cushions, but bringing in new accent colours. “You might only need to buy four cushions.”

4. It’s easy being green

Kermit lamented that it’s not that easy being green. But bringing some greenery into your lounge room is something any old muppet can do this spring.

Findlay says introducing some plants – perhaps something tall and structural, as well as one for the coffee table – can change the feel of your living quarters.

“I’m loving the rubber tree,” she says. “My hit prediction is that it’s going to take over the fiddle leaf, which everyone loves.”

5. Switch up the layout

“A lot of people only think about bringing stuff in, but you can do so much by changing the spatial layout,” says Findlay.

“Is there a different way your lounges could face; could you swap over your armchair for your main lounge chair?”

6. Colour-code your bookshelf

“If you’ve got bookshelves, without sounding too OCD, I like to stack them up in colour and height,” says Findlay.

There might be colours in there that you dislike, and don’t want to add to the room. In that case, face the spines inward to add a bit of texture to the whole arrangement, she says.

7. Pull out the painting clothes

There’s nothing like a fresh lick of paint to breathe new life into your lounge area, says renovator and TV personality Cherie Barber.

“Paint is my number one change because anybody can paint,” she says. “Paint’s relatively inexpensive and it transforms a room like no other change.”

8. Throo for your cartch?

Prue and Trude, of Kath & Kim fame, were on the money: a throw for your couch is still a game changer.

“A lot of people have an old lounge but to actually replace the lounge is quite expensive these days,” says Barber.

If you’ve got an ugly couch, she suggests investing in a few good-looking throw rugs. “You can camouflage quite a lot of old lounges that way.”

9. Use wallpaper

The wall behind your telly is usually the spot for some strategic wallpapering, says Barber.

If you’re not sure if you want to keep the wallpaper long-term, she suggests trying removable wallpaper, which she says is “literally like sticking a Post-it note on the wall”.

Barber says if you choose a cherry blossom wallpaper print, for example, you could match it up with some cherry blossom cushions for design continuity.

10. It’s curtains

How to finish off that lounge room makeover on the cheap? Barber says off-the-shelf curtains will not only keep you firmly under budget, but pull the whole thing together.

“Adding curtains into your lounge room (even if you already have blinds), it just adds another dimension, it adds another texture,” she says.

“It’s very rare that a designer wouldn’t put curtains in a room, because they know it’s about layering.”