This list focuses on interior design improvements you can make without too much effort, and which use items that are very easy to pack up into boxes when moving.1 Obviously the payoff to creating a pleasant environment is higher when you’re settled in a house semi-permanently, but I think these basics are worth doing pretty much anywhere you spend more than two months a year.
There are time-money tradeoffs here: if you don’t want to search for good deals, you can just buy things from Amazon and have them arrive the next day – but in general, shops like IKEA and Argos will be cheaper, sometimes by a factor of 2-3x.
Lighting
One of the first things I do in a new room is take out the old bulbs and replace them with better ones. We’re lucky to have LEDs – lights that are cheap to buy and virtually free to run – so there’s no reason not to use them!
Adjusting the lighting intensity and temperature is one of the easiest ways to change a room’s ambience, which is why having multiple light sources is always useful. The most common complaint I have about the original lights in a room is that they had the wrong (brightness, warmth) combination for their use – for example, a dim & dingy CFL as the main overhead bulb, or a harsh blue bedside lamp.
In my medium-sized bedroom, I have:
- A bright overhead light (1500lm, 3000K) with a basic lampshade
- A bedside light (400lm, 2200K)
- Some “globe-y” fairy lights (80lm, ~2000K)
- A desk lamp (800lm, 2700K)
- A table lamp (ditto)
LED strip lights are also astonishingly cheap (e.g. a 30m roll for £10 at time of writing). Personally I wouldn’t want them in my bedroom, but they work well for a living room.
(As an aside, it’s pretty cool that while direct sunlight is about 1,000x brighter than a typical room, logarithmic perception means that the difference seems far smaller.)
Plants
Not new advice, but they really do make a space happier. If you’ve got a dark room, IKEA has some very nice fake plants for under £10. Otherwise, some hardy and attractive-looking options are:
Ideally you’d get colourful ceramic pots, e.g. at B&Q or Homebase, but as a cheaper alternative plastic plant saucers also work to stop them dripping.
Posters and pictures
Fairly self-explanatory, both ways to put some personality into a room.
- Big (20x30") posters are great for filling blank wall space. Making AI art
and having it printed someplace like Snapfish is of course one option, but there are also lots of lovely high-resolution public domain images
online, e.g. on Wikimedia, or here.
- To avoid damaging paint with sticky tack, I would use magnetic hangers along with command hooks. Also much easier to pack than frames!
- You can get 4x6" photo prints extremely cheaply – and since the cost of an additional
print is very low, you might as well buy lots and simply decide which you like best once they arrive.
- Depending on the vibe you’re going for, you can hang them on a big corkboard
or using pegs and string plus more command hooks.
- The latter is considerably fiddlier to assemble for the first time but more compact to pack up, and also avoids making pinholes in your prints.
- Depending on the vibe you’re going for, you can hang them on a big corkboard
or using pegs and string plus more command hooks.
Rugs
Rented rooms often have very ugly and tired carpets, but even a small rug can take the attention away from them and add a splash of character. IKEA has a very cheerful £5 mat which looks nice at the foot of a bed or by the sink.
Addendum: bedding
Given that you spend about a third of your time in bed, it’s worth paying £10-15 extra for 100% cotton bedsheets. At first I thought I’d economise and get polyester or polycotton ones, but they just feel scratchy and aren’t at all breathable. I’m not sure what the returns to more expensive bedding (e.g. Egyptian cotton) are, but plausibly worth it.
And a potentially controversial opinion to finish: I like having two duvet sets to choose from, each with different colours. Although this means the rest of the furnishings will likely be less well colour-coordinated with the bed on average, the big advantage is that you can change the feel of your room just by switching the bedding.
See also: fun interiors as described by Nina Panickssery, rationalist house style, and a very early LW post with some dissenting advice.
21 Dec: I also like this on the underratedness of good lighting.
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After ferrrying my things between Oxford and London every few months for two years, I think I’ve racked up enough experience to pass judgement here. As the apocryphal etymology says, these breaks are called “vacations” rather than “holidays” because although you don’t necessarily get a rest from work, you definitely do have to vacate your college-owned room… ↩︎