Decorating a small apartment on an even smaller budget can be a tricky task. The goal is to create a living area that is comfortable, and enjoyable, while at the same time maximizing your space, and minimizing the amount of cash spent on the whole design project.

Kudos to teacats and bbstx. We are renovating a very old house and have been taking pics before,during and after every room project.(down to the studs and everything in between). We use a "cloth" crafters measuring tape-looks like a tailors tape-that is 10' long in all of the photos,very convenient to find studs,electrical and plumbing later when it is all covered up. Also, with all of the finished room measurements it is easy to bring along the pictures when looking at furniture and other "stuff" for it.Tapes are cheap too about a buck at Micheals. Also we use a nifty program from Benjamin Moore that lets you insert your room photos into it and "paint"the room and trim from their colors-Note,the colors will not be exact to the true colors due to monitor variations-but we have found it very handy.You can also hang fabric swatches in the room and work around them with color combinations.Think it was around $10.00 several years ago for the download but has saved us a lot of time narrowing down colors and or fabric. Cheers

My Chicago studio apartment (where I lived alone, 1992-93) and the first Boston-area apartment DH and I had after we were married (1995-97) were both in the area of 200sf. At the Chicago studio I was in culinary school so I HAD to be able to cook - a lot! - to test recipes for class, in the Boston apartment we were too broke to go out to eat ($10 takeout Chinese was a monthly treat; our grocery budget was a corset-tight $25/week) so we had to be able to cook there too, so cooking equipment took up a good deal of space that could have been used for other things. Had the Boston apartment been in a good neighborhood and had we not been squeezing every nickel till the buffalo farted we'd have stayed a lot longer, as we were quite happy. It gets my hackles up to hear a very small living space described as a "jail cell". You don't need a thousand square feet per person (and I know some of you have FAR more than that!) to be happy! The only mirrors in either apartment were in the bathrooms. I really dislike mirrors in living areas - I don't think they make a room look bigger at all, IMO, I think they make it look even more cluttered/cramped by reflecting all the stuff that's in the room. BTDT (two houses ago an entire wall of the tiny DR was mirrored in a IMO-futile attempt to make the room look larger and brighter), covered the mirrors. I'd much prefer to have a great deal of color and artwork (I was not allowed to paint either apartment but they were a riot of artwork), but they may just prefer minimalism. Oh, and there were cats (just one) in both apartments. Chicago was playing "hide-the-kitty" for a friend for weeks at a time, Boston was when we got Random to keep me company when DH was working double shifts.

It's worth the money to buy good, large amaryllis bulbs. They are far more likely to re-bloom. My two favorite are Cherry Nymph and White Nymph. They are double blossoms, multiple ones per stem and multiple stems. I pay about $18 for one bulb and it will rebloom for several years if treated properly. It's a lot of bag for the buck.