5 DIY Apartment Projects for Roommates

By Madison White on January 15, 2017

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There’s nothing like bonding over a DIY project. When you’re living with someone for probably at least a year, you’re going to want to fix up the place you’ll be living in together. But what can roommates do that won’t break the bank?

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Luckily, tons of DIY apartment projects exist that are perfect for roommates to work on together. With a bit of craftiness, they can often be done for a very low cost and are quite fun as well. See a few examples of DIY roommate projects below!

1. Gallery Wall

Luckily for me, my roommate happens to study art so our apartment has no shortage of wall decoration. However, for some of you who aren’t so lucky, you might be looking for something simple and easy to liven up your space. One of my favorite projects my roommate and I did together was creating a themed gallery wall.

First, we picked out some clippings of pictures that we really enjoyed. These can often be found in magazines with advertisements or even be printed off the internet for little money. Then, we scoured our nearest thrift stores for the cheapest picture frames we could find. They didn’t have to look great (yet) but we wanted many different sizes and trimmings. After that, we chose a color palette of about four colors and bought some cheap paints. We painted the assorted colors onto the frames, stuck some of our pictures in them and had a beautiful gallery type wall for our living room.

2. Tie-Dye Tapestry

Some roommates may have large walls and lots of space without much to put in it. If you want something large but relatively low effort, you should look into getting a tapestry. Or if you’re crafty, make one! A tie-dye tapestry is great because you get to customize the colors and the design.

All you have to do is go to your local craft/fabric store and select a large cut of a basic fabric, like cotton, and a few dyes that match your intended color scheme. Follow the directions on the dyes to produce the best colors. You can always look up many different tie-dye techniques online as well. You might be satisfied there, but if you’re not, try using a bleach pen to draw in some designs onto your tapestry. These could be things like dots or flowers, or even more complicated things like mandalas!

3. Holiday Crafts

The holidays are a great time to work on your DIY skills. Many Christmas decorations can be personalized and done for a low cost. Some things to try out at Christmastime are clear ornaments that you can fill with whatever you like or paint whatever you like. When you’re done, your tree won’t be basic and boring, but completely unique to you and your apartment! Some other holiday crafts might be building gingerbread houses or personalizing stockings, which can be easily done with some fabric, glue, and paints!

4. Pantry Jars

If you have a cooking and baking apartment like I do, you’re going to want something to put your main ingredients in. You can’t just leave all that flour sitting in the bag forever! You need some containers to separate your ingredients, as well as to make them easily accessible. However, some of these containers, especially the cheap ones, look rather boring and ugly. Try sprucing them up with a DIY.

Luckily, transferring fonts and words is really simple now and plenty of templates are free online. So find a font you like and label those containers to give them a bit of flair! You can find some help here.

5. Herb Garden

What’s better than something cute that will also improve your lifestyle? I can’t think of anything. If you agree, you should try out a DIY herb garden. If you visit your local home improvement store, you can find cheap packets of various plants and herbs, small pots, and a pint of chalkboard paint. That’s all you need! Get planting, paint some small rectangles of paint onto the pots, and then label those plants (in a cute font of course) and soon you’ll have your very own adorable herb garden.

Make sure you choose plants that are right for your apartment. Think about whether they’ll be inside or outside and how much sunlight they’ll be exposed to. After they’ve grown, you and your roommate(s) will reap the benefits of freshly grown herbs!

DIY projects are great because so much of the pride comes from not only the finished product but also from the creation. There’s not much a good project can’t fix. So now that the ideas are flowing, how do you plan to DIY?

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