Fake a Foyer

A foyer, or entry hall, is a great way to enter your home. But if your front door opens right into your living room, just fake it!

Have a small table for mail, keys and sunglasses. If there's room, add a small bench. Put up a peg rack on the wall for hats and coats, or maybe a decorative coat rack. Add an umbrella stand. You probably have room for at least some of these items.

You can also give the illusion of a foyer by painting the wall immediately inside the front door a different color from the rest of your living room. If your living room is large enough, you can even consider putting some sort of room divider, such as a screen or another piece of furniture.

Family Antiques

What do you do with family antiques that just don't fit your style anymore? Or maybe they never fit your style, but guilt has forced you to use them in your home.

I have a walnut love seat from the Victorian period. It belonged to my great-grandmother, and it is truly beautiful. Carved lion's heads and all that. I just don't like Victorian furniture. Every living sole in my family would have a fit if I said I was getting rid of it. Yet, none of them will take it.

It's been in my living room forever. Now it lives in my attic. Just not in my decorating future.

What should I do?

More Art

Let’s stay on the cheap artwork theme.

For another look, take a trip to the dollar store and buy black picture frames. Slip in your favorites pics, and then lay all the frames down next to each other face side down. If you have nine frames, do three across and three down. Then take duct tape and tape them together. Turn them back over, and wow! You have a large, unique piece of art.

If you like a rustic or country look, find discarded pieces of wood and stencil any words you want on them. Rig up the back for hanging.

Antique architectural pieces are nice, but they’re almost always expensive. Go to the hardware store and buy new, unpainted architectural pieces such as heavy, detailed molding. Paint or stain, and then distress. Instant antiques!

And speaking of instant – if you don’t have old family pictures to display, just go to your nearest flea market. Chances are you can find somebody else’s ancestors to frame and claim as your own.

Inexpensive Art

Need some inexpensive art for your walls? You don’t have to spend big bucks to get a cool look. There are lots of budget options out there, and many are easy enough for the non-crafty person to pull off.

Go to Michael’s or Hobby Lobby and buy some stretched artist canvas. You can get a couple of 9x12 canvases for less than $10. For a little more money, you can get a really big canvas. Then purchase some fabric you live and simply pull it around the canvas and staple. You’re done in no time.

Take a little more time and you can have a personalized work of art. Buy another stretched canvas. Dip the bottom of a gallon paint container in paint, and press it to the canvas. Find other shapes you like, and paint away.

Don't Get Stuck

With our twins off to college, we find we starting to live differently in our home. This weekend, we've been talking about how the various rooms in our house function and how our lifestyle is changing. It's certainly different, and actually, it's okay!

We're thinking about moving the huge sectional sofa that's in the playroom upstairs down to our family room. That big flat screen television in the playroom might need to move downstairs, too. We're even talking about the possibility of moving the big TV into our kitchen. We have a large kitchen, with an enormous farmhouse style kitchen table, so we spend a lot of time in there. And my husband and I love to cook together, and we love watching the food channel.

It's so easy to get stuck with the way your house lives. Furniture can move, and the world won't end! When our children were tiny, we turned our sun room into a small playroom for them. When they got older, it went back to being a sun room. And when I started working out of my home, it became a beautiful office for me.

Don't get stuck. Try some new options!

HGTV Vent!

I really love to watch HGTV, but I still have to vent. When they do those shows like "Designed to Sell" and "Decorating On A Dime," they talk about doing all this decorating on a budget. Only $2,000 to get this house to the point where it sells for 20 percent over the asking price! Only $1,000 to totally recreate the look of this room.

Well, what they fail to say is that the labor is free. They have expert decorators, expert carpenters, an expert seamstress . . .sure, if I could do all that stuff, my home would like like that, and on a budget, too!

I'm not really knocking the shows. They're fun to watch, and you can still get fabulous decorating ideas. But I wish that every now and then they would mention how expensive labor is. Some of their ideas are not very realistic if you're trying to do it on the cheap.

Superstore Decorating Magic

When was the last time you checked the superstores, such as Target and Wal-Mart, for decorating finds? Wow! They have certainly upped their image. Especially at Target, you can find some beautiful things that look a lot more expensive than they are. I recently bought my daughter a great $20 hot pink ottoman at Target for her bedroom at college. And the top comes off so you can use it for storage.

I also recently found an 86 inch decorative drapery rod and brackets on clearance for $9 at Wal-Mart. Sure, it's plastic and just painted to look like a heavy, expensive rod. But way up high on a window? Who's going to know?

Browse the expensive stores, study their catalogs and then go to your nearest superstore, and see how closely you can match the item at a fraction on the classy store's price.