We’re updating our home on a budget.
When we looked at buying our first home together, my husband and I wanted a home that needed some cosmetic love. We didn’t want to be restoring the foundation or tearing down walls, but we wanted to flip it as we live in it and eventually sell it for more than we bought it for.
I know there are a lot of people who struggle with being able to afford updating their home whether it’s through home projects or just buying home decor.
So, I wanted to share all the things we have learned through our process so far, the things that have helped us, our struggles, and exactly how we stay on track and reach our goals financially and for the home.
How We’re Updating Our Home on a Budget
Since we’re updating our home on a budget, we only buy things we can pay for with cash. So that means no loans and no credit cards.
If you want to know exactly how we work with our budget to fit in all our home projects, I wrote a post on three of our biggest budget tips that help us stay on track. These tips are perfect for beginners to create a foundation or people who already have a budget in place and want to work for specific goals.
CLICK HERE to read that post.
Getting in the right mindset
Before I met David, I bought my first home by myself when I was 23. I had absolutely nothing for the house. The first few weeks of living there, I remember eating meals on a paper plate next to a small lamp while sitting on the floor of this gorgeous little house.
Wanting to furnish the house (obviously, because who willingly wants to eat their meals that way), I mentioned to my parents that I was thinking of getting a credit card just to furnish the house.
I wasn’t planning on going out and buying the most expensive furniture, but I wanted to at least have a table or a couch. Reasonable, right?!
My Dad said something to me that helped me establish a healthier financial mindset and it has helped me throughout the years to stay on track. He said, “If you can’t buy it with cash, you don’t deserve to have it.”
Yikes. That one hurts a bit, right? I deserve to buy a kitchen table, right? Nope. Not if I couldn’t afford to. Sounds harsh, but I think this world is almost a little too privileged in what we think we deserve.
We work for what we want and if there is something expensive and nice that we want, we work harder. That’s life.
Staying in budget while trying to update our home can be a challenging thing, but we’re finding there are a few things that work best for us to stay on track and still get what we want for our home.
Here are our biggest tips and suggestions from what we’ve learned or worked on while we’re updating our home on a budget.
First Things First
For starters, if you’re married then you’re going to want to make sure you and your spouse are on the same page as far as goals and budgeting. If one of you is tight pocketed and the other one is a little too free willing, then you’re going to run into some tough roadblocks pretty quickly.
Make sure you’re prioritizing your budget correctly. Work on paying bills, paying off debt and taking care of necessities FIRST.
David is a little more tight pocketed than I am, but we’re both on the same page with our goals. We’ve worked to find a balance that reflects our goals that also keeps both of us happy.
We both definitely struggle at different times with wanting certain things immediately and not wanting to wait for the budget to comply. But usually the other one is there to give some rational reasoning.
I’m not going to lie. Being on a budget is really challenging at times. We definitely feel like we’re the odd balls from our friends. Most of the people we know that are our age have multiple credit cards, brand new cars and a whole list of things we’ve had our eyes on.
However, we try to remind ourselves that everyone is on a different path with different goals. That’s perfectly fine!
Try not to compare or think the grass is necessarily greener at the neighbor’s house. That’s just a road to self pity and failure.
I read a quote from Lysa Terkeurst that said, “The grass isn’t greener on the other side. It’s greener where you water and fertilize it.”
Focus on your goals and don’t worry about the people around you. Some of the richer people in the world actually live a poorer lifestyle. Things can make you look rich, but that doesn’t mean you are.
If you want true financial freedom, you have to learn to make sacrifices and have patience.
Patience
If I had a nickel for every life lesson in which God has tried to teach me patience, we wouldn’t be on a budget!
When I come up with a plan for a room, I am READY to start. I’ll drive to the store immediately and start working on it this afternoon if I can!
When I decided I wanted to switch up my kitchen decor to a lemon farmhouse theme, it took me all of an hour before I was at TJ Maxx browsing the home decor. I did do it very inexpensively, but I didn’t practice patience.
You can check out my lemon kitchen HERE.
Patience, home projects and I are not a bundle deal! Home projects and I work really well together, but patience and I don’t always get along.
However, patience is critical to updating our home on a budget. Budgeting takes time. Money can sometimes come in slowly. Especially when the car breaks down and you now have to dish out a couple unexpected hundreds to your mechanic.
We’ve been there. We know that struggle.
Our world is such a “want this, need this NOW” world and patience is not as much a valued thing.
If something is functional and you can get by without replacing it until you have the cash, then wait.
Make sure you’re not just buying things because you want them. Wait until you can buy them.
Remember in the beginning of this post I said I wanted to get a credit card for the home furnishing I couldn’t afford? Well, patience totally paid off for me in the end.
Somehow everyone seemed to know exactly what I needed for furniture. I was so incredibly blessed.
Here are a few photos of my first home.
Everything was GIVEN to me except for the couches that I had purchased for $400 and the lamps for $30. So, for $430, I furnished my entire home!
Was it perfect? No, but I was 23 and had nothing. My patience had totally paid off and I was so completely blessed.
Four years later, I still have all this furniture, but I’m finding different ways to use it in the home that David and I share. I recently transformed the TV stand into an entryway bench!
Check out that easy DIY HERE.
Years later and my patience during that time is still blessing me.
While patience and I may not always get along, I know it’s a good friend. It really has my best interest at heart, and it will help me reap benefits in the end.
Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize
I’ve already mentioned that I have the type of personality that when I come up with an idea, I want to get started NOW. Not an ideal thing when working with budgets, but I find that if I can stay focused on our main goals then I can slow myself down.
It’s important to have goals and steps on how to reach those goals.
For example, we would love to have a garage. If we got impatient and decided to build a garage right now with the money we currently have, it would be a smaller garage than what we want. I know David wants a two-car garage with attic space and enough room for him to work on projects and have his own space.
Let me remind you, we only pay for things in cash and we only buy things we have earned.
If we dumped all of our money into one big project, then we would reach our financial goals much slower and possibly put ourselves in a financially tough position.
So instead of buying or building the cheaper thing that we want right now, we try to keep our eyes on the ideal thing we want. And with extra hard work and a little more patience, we will get to our end goal and it will be so much better than if we had settled for a “temporary affordable fix for now” solution.
We don’t buy cheap things that we’ll have to replace in a few years unless we absolutely have to. Honestly, I think that kind of spending is reckless. It’s smarter to buy the more expensive thing that will last, but just make sure you DESERVE to buy it and NEED it when you do.
I know it can be challenging to not be able to get what you want right now. I watch my poor husband wish for a garage and it can get discouraging. But we try to find ways that will keep us content until we can get what we ideally want.
I do this by making lists.
Make a List
If you’re like me, you struggle with seeing the end goal sometimes because you constantly see the need for a solution now.
For example, I would LOVE to completely gut out our outdated kitchen and start fresh TODAY. We could technically dish out the money to do that, but we won’t because we have certain financial goals that we want to meet. Plus, we have a ton of other projects around the house that need our attention.
So, as a compromise, I find ways to slowly update our kitchen (or any of our rooms) that still work for our budget by doing small projects that update our home in a financially safe position.
I write down a list of everything we want to get done around our house- big and small.
Then, I look at the smaller things and figure out what we can do NOW.
We do small projects a little at a time to update our home so that we’re constantly updating things. But we make sure that even these small projects work with our budget.
Right now, I am currently picking out paint to paint the walls and repaint the cabinets in the kitchen. We just purchased new hardware and hinges for the cabinets. These little updates don’t ruin our financial goals and will get us in the right step toward having an updated kitchen.
I really believe that these little steps will definitely improve the look of the kitchen. Will it be perfect? Nope, but it will be enough until we are ready and have the money put aside to do the bigger stuff. Plus, these are things we will eventually need so we’re not wasting any money. We’re just spending it a little at a time.
Having a list and being able to physically check things off has helped me with feeling like we’re accomplishing our goals to update the house.
I like to be working on things constantly so having little projects that I can do and check off keeps me motivated towards our end goal and keeps me from feeling like we have a huge project or issue with our home that needs to be fixed.
Find little ways to improve the look of your home that work for your budget.
If you need ideas, I have written quite a few posts on how to inexpensively update your home.
In Home Decor Refresh on a Budget, I share tips on how to use products already in your home as decor items. I also share my 20 Budget Friendly Home Decor Ideas and Tips to Save Money on Home Decor.
I use tips like these in my own home to help make our home look better with budget friendly ideas that coincide with our goals. Taking little steps to get to our large goals really helps us stay motivated.
Strategize How We Buy
I like quality things and my home decor taste is fairly expensive.
Since we’re updating our home on a budget, I’ve had to find creative ways to get our home decor.
I’ve learned my mistake of buying things too quickly because it was a cheaper option too many times. Over the years I have come up with strategies on how to shop for home decor that has saved us a ton of money and allowed us to have cute pieces in our home that work for us and my style.
You can check out my top tips on my post Tips to Save Money on Home Decor.
Since I do a lot of shopping around, I’ve also learned the best places to buy affordable home decor and I share where I buy my decor and my favorite places to get specific items on this post.
I like quality items, but my pocket is pretty tight so if you have a small budget, these tips will definitely work for you.
DIY What We Can
One of the big things we do when updating our home on a budget is DIYs. I know not everyone is big on DIYing and I know a lot of people who would rather buy. But like I said, I have expensive taste and a tight pocket so in order to work with that financially, it’s smarter for us to figure out how to DIY things than hire someone to do them or buy really expensive decor.
We try to do as much stuff as we can by ourselves. If we don’t know how to do something, we look it up. I can guarantee you, whatever it is you want to do, someone has written or videoed a tutorial.
I’ve shared quite a few of my DIYs, but my personal favorites are the Dollar Tree Decor Planter and the HOME Sign.
Find ways to use your resources and be a resourceful homemaker. (See what I did there?)
Learn to Appreciate What You Have
Learn to be happy and content no matter what you have or don’t have. If you are constantly chasing things, you will just constantly want more. Until you learn to be content with what you have you’ll never be happy.
You can read this whole post and follow all our actions and be in a financially stable point, but you’ll never be happy constantly chasing things.
We all have to learn to be content in each stage knowing that we’re only moving forward because we’ve earned it and worked for it not because the next step will somehow make us happy.
I see updated homes and definitely dream about a modern kitchen someday, but I am learning to be content with the stage that my kitchen is in now because my happiness should not depend on what nice thing I have.
I’m not perfect at it, but I have for the most part learned to be content with what I have. I focus on our goals and the financial freedom we’ll have in the future and I’m content and happy.
I’m so blessed with a hard-working husband and a home that gives us what we need.
Focus on what you do have instead of what you don’t have and things seem to fall into place a lot easier. Just try to make the most of what you have.
Conclusion
Updating our home on a budget can be stressful. We’ve learned hard lessons along the way and there are times when we’d rather give into things we want now rather than wait for things to match with our budget.
It’s challenging when we see that we could technically afford to do certain things but have to remember to focus on our end goal rather than our current wants.
I hope you can use our strategies to help you create budget friendly beautiful spaces in your home and financial freedom in your own life.
Each one of these strategies has played a crucial role in our process of updating our home and each one has been beneficial at different times.
Which one do you think will be the most beneficial in your own journey?
