Tips to Decorate Your First Grown-Up Apartment

By: Kyla Coan

Hey Hardrockers!

I hope everyone had a great 3-day weekend! I spent most of it packing up because Cody and I are moving into our first place together on May 1st, and while I have been living in an apartment for a while, my roommate had pretty much already decorated it while I was on co-op. So this will be my first chance to do anything decor related and I am super excited! With that in mind here are some tips I have learned on how to decorate your first grow-up apartment!

1. Start with thrift shops first! For some reason decor is ridiculously expensive, so, unless you have an unlimited budget, start with thrift shops and work from there.
2. Avoid anything easily breakable or tear-able until post-grad. You will still be moving around a lot and its not worth the money or heartbreak that comes with a beautiful expensive piece of decor.
3. Look for multi-functional pieces! One of my personal favorites is a cute set of coat hooks that come on a painted wood board with a cute saying, as well as a several pretty boxes that I use to store cleaning supplies, or old textbooks.
4. You don’t have to over every piece of white space. More is less in a lot of cases.
5. Make it personal! I recently found an etsy shop that does watercolor skylines of cities across the globe, so I was able to get a skyline done of Munich, which was only 20 minutes away from the base I grew up on, as well as one of London, because we used to take trips there all the time when I was living in Germany. (Flights were only like $50 and we would stay in a cheap flat and cook most of our meals, so it wasn’t expensive for us.) I also recently found a cute piece with the quote “I love you to the moon and back” on it which I picked up because my favorite necklace from Cody has that saying on it.
6. You don’t have to buy your decor all at once. Take time to shop around find pieces you love. We are young, and nobody expects us to have the perfectly decorated place of our dreams yet!
7. Try to have an idea of what you want before you buy. Pinterest exists for precisely this reason! You don’t want to end up with a bunch of stuff you will never use!

That’s it from me today Rockers, have a good Monday!