10 Simple DIY Home Decor Ideas for Your Fixer-Upper – Pt 1

Buying a home to DIY can be a delight if rolling up your sleeves to wield paintbrush and hammer sounds like a dream weekend for you. Getting into DIY home decor, there are a lot of major projects you can do. You can practically renovate your home DIY if you get too deep into a project. But wait, you don’t actually have to rip out your old backsplash or even hammer together reclaimed wood to make some amazing, useful, and beautiful upgrades to your new home.

DIY doesn’t have to be tough or expensive, there are tons of easy and fast projects you can do to improve your home decor without buckets of effort or breaking the bank. In fact, we’ve put together ten of our favorite easy DIY home decor ideas that you can try to spruce up a light fixer-upper home purchase.  

1) Stencil Your Own Moroccan Walls

If you love the look of elegant Moroccan walls with the detailed stenciling and subtle contrast of color, you don’t need expensive wallpaper to bring that beauty into your home. Using nothing but a small paintbrush and a piece of shaped cardboard, you can easily stencil a gorgeous Moroccan-style design onto your wall as if you had detailed wallpaper. The subtle elegance of the change will have your guests looking around trying to discover just why your room seems more refined than it did before.

2) Organize with Pegboard Shelves & Hooks

Love the feel of DIY in your decorating style? Are you passionate about versatile and creative storage options? Try pegboards. Pegboards are large panels of wood with a grid of evenly spaced holes throughout. Polished, they make a lovely backdrop to hang on your wall but they are also the perfect mounting point for shelves, pegs, hooks, and other neat pegboard doodads you may find along the way. 

Mount floating shelves, useful hanging spots, and use these boards as a backdrop.

3) Hang New Stylish No-Sew Curtains

Want new curtains? You don’t have to pay a mint in hand-sewn fabric. If you want a solid color or filmy curtains, use a new set of bedsheets. Otherwise, swing by the fabric store and get a few yards of a pattern you love.

Then use sewing tape to make a pocket. Simply line one edge with sewing tape and fold over until the top pocket is large enough for a decorative curtain rod. Press firmly or iron to secure your no-sew tape. While no-sew is hit-or-miss for clothes, it’s strong enough to hold up curtains, and shouldn’t need to hold up much else.

4) Set the Table with Stamp Patterned Napkins

If you love decorative table settings or hosting fun dinner parties with friends, then custom napkins are a fun project that will reward you again and again. Use a stamp to create patterned napkins that would fit into any wedding decor. You can also use stamps and a light touch of permanent fabric paint to add a beautiful or fun central design to your napkins or elegantly emboss just one corner.

5) Contact Paper Resurfacing

If your home or furniture needs a new surface but you aren’t a whiz at refinishing, grab some decorative contact paper. Contact paper is a sticky vinyl sheet on one side and an elegant or festive design on the other. Contact paper ranges from matte black to neon frogs and everything in between. You can resurface your appliances for a fun new look, cover damaged shelves that can’t be removed to repaint, and reinvent scratched-up table tops. 

Try contact paper that can be used as a whiteboard, or contact paper with a useful magnetic lining. There’s grid contact paper faux wood contact paper, clean gloss, and frost or patterned film for glass.

Contact paper goes well on wood, metal, painted surfaces, and glass. With the right contact paper, you can even refinish a rental home and leave the place almost the same when you go.