This Cozy, Under-$100 Living Room Refresh Only Took One Afternoon
A lot of times people think DIY room transformations require ambitious wallpaper or woodworking projects, but you don’t have to make drastic changes to make a space feel new. Sarah Burchfield’s (@sarahjoyhome) living room refresh proves that. A couple of tweaks helped create a cozy new backdrop in her living room — and gave the room a new lease on life.
It all started with an art swap.
She used to have a white picture rail and black framed photos behind her sofa, and she decided to swap that for two pieces of larger artwork that she matted herself in thrifted frames. “I’ve just been craving something new in the living room,” she said on Instagram. She moved her black-framed artwork to another part of the house.
However, “I hung the art and then realized the space felt too blank,” Sarah says, and that’s where a new-to-her shelf came into the picture.
A $35 shelf from Facebook Marketplace got a glow-up.
Sarah bought a shelf that she felt would fill the space next to the sofa a little better than the slender one before. It started out brown, but she added Sherwin-Williams’ Tricorn Black paint plus decorative appliques to the corners of the shelf “to give it a little more detail,” she says on Instagram.
After that, a few other decor swaps helped the room come together. Sarah shopped her own home for this — she used a lamp from her daughter’s room, added some green stems in a vase plus a tree from her dining room, and styled her new shelf with books she already owned.
“It came all together in a day,” she says, and “it’s feeling so cozy and just updated and fresh, and that was the goal,” she adds on Instagram. The lessons here? Don’t be afraid to shop your own home — and it’s possible to transform a room in just one afternoon, thanks to small swaps.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.