I'm moving soon to my own apartment, and seeking for inspiration of ideas of creative, or not decoration. Feel free to post pictures, etc.
Stick to the basics and don't fill your first place up with useless stuff. Spend the coin and get a good bed and mattress, a good sheet set or two and warm comfy blankets. Sleep is important. go to yard sales for wall art on the cheap, and look for used solid wood tables etc. keep it simple at first, save cash and build a emergency fund.
Thrift stores and yard sales are the best way to find cheap, funky art and kitchen items.
Lesson learned: Live with a roommate if you can. Currently living by myself in a relatively cheap 1 bedroom, but would not mind living with one other person at all. Would have saved a good chunk of money. Oh well, only a 9ish month mistake.
Unfortunately for me, i do not live well with others. but yea get a roommate when you can, and save as much as you can get away with. SAVE early and get in that habit. having 6-12 months take-home pay in a savings account is freedom. have to move NOW to take that dream job? you got cash for that (break old lease, get new place, moving fees etc). car breaks down? cash will fix that right up. Need to go to a 'fancy' dinner for a job interview or to meet an idol/job prospect, date you want to really impress? yea cash to the rescue again. after a while if you auto deduct savings from your pay you do not miss it. but it is there in the back of your head when you need it. next step is to fight the need-vs-want battles. those are fun.
Reduce your exposure to Advertising. Netflix your shows, use adblocking etc. Advertising exists to blur that line and convince you that you are a terrible person who smells bad and everyone hates you... but if you buy our regurgitated bean lard for three low payments of 49.95 then you will be a rockstar! Once I stopped watching TV my expenses dropped by about 1/4.That's one I'm still working on. It's hard as hell. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.
Same happened to me once I cut my internet use down to half, especially avoiding speciality blogs that focus on comics and movies and cutting my Reddit use down significantly. The wife and I also changed our shopping habits a bit too, where we no longer go out to stores just because we're "bored and looking for something to do." In my opinion, we still have a ways to go, but we've made some good strides.Once I stopped watching TV my expenses dropped by about 1/4.
Every home that I go into that I think is well decorated, it's not about matching furniture or anything of the sort. It's about people decorating their house to reflect their interests and their hobbies. My friends who are huge readers have their bookshelves as the most prominent part of their layout. One of my friends is super huge into video games, so he has two entertainment centers with about 10 consoles divided between them. My wife and I personally are huge fans of cars and antiques. When we finally get our own place and can get all of our stuff out of a storage room and actually put on display, we hope to incorporate them into our decorating. Truth be told, we don't have a lot of matching furniture, but I think it'll actually blend in well with the mish-mash of stuff that we have.
This is sort of what I'm doing, but due to a pretty low interest in decorating, I haven't made much progress. I have a huge stack of posters I'd like to hang. Mostly ones from concerts. I have a few of the more meaningful ones framed, and some time I need to sit down and figure out which ones coordinate well and start filling up walls. I'd also like to have some prints done with some of my hiking pictures. I've had one canvas print made, and I think it looks great. These will probably go in the more public rooms, and the music ones will go in my bedroom and the bathrooms. Like you said, they're based on my hobbies. They're pictures I took or they're bands I like/concerts I attended.
I've spent decades collecting memories from all over the world, so I want them visible, and surrounding me in my life. To emphasize the items and not the shelving, I got wire racks from Storables: http://www.storables.com/shelving/industrial-post-steel-wire-shelving.html These are great platforms to present things on. Also, they have pads - both clear, and rubberized - that cover the shelves for the "small things" that would otherwise fall between the wires of the shelf. The cool part is that I have a big collection of hats, and there are little hooks that snap onto the vertical posts of this shelving. So I got a bunch of these hooks, and hang my hats on the vertical posts! It covers up the metal and makes a more interesting display. I also used Ikea LED lighting strips underneath the edge of the shelves to provide subtle illumination on each shelf. http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50192073/ And finally, I found a way to mount my guitar hangers on the ends of the rack, so my guitars can hang up, out of the way, but easy to reach when I wanna make some noise. Now I am embarking on getting 20 years of collected art into frames, and onto the walls...
When we moved into our current place we decided to get rid of all the random furnature our parents gave us for our first place and make our space our own. LIttle things that we did to that effect was a small board game shelf above my makeshift standing desk As well as lots of cat shelves so our cat could go up on our cabinet (yay catification).
My living room is indicative of the rest of my home. Lots of windows, minimal amount of "stuff," colors of Blues and greens that pull the outside in. Natural light etc. mid century modern furniture. Also, my dog Harrison and some kids toys. I like to frame concert posters too. That's a Wilco poster on the left.
This is the first piece of art I purchased for my apartment in 7 months of living here. It's a mixed medium (Pastel and watercolor? ) picture of a bear. It sits on the small wall panel between my bedroom window and an adjacent wall, and I see it when I get up in the morning. My apartment is white and off-white in base colors and I've decorated with earth colors and blues mostly, being pretty sparse with furniture.
When I was forced to rejoin the Ikea Kult (needed to furnish an apartment in addition to a house), I decided my theme would be "things that hang from the ceiling." I slept in a hammock for a year, and if there was an option for a piece of furniture to hang rather than sit on the carpet I took it. Worked out well for the Roomba.
Every time we need new furniture or anything big for the home the conversation goes like this. GF: What color should we get? Me: I like the black one. GF: ...we could get the black one. Me: We don't have to get the black one. GF: I know you only like black and white things. Me: But we could get a different color... GF: let's get the black one. The original idea was mostly black and white with a few accent colors, but that hasn't really happened so much. So everything is black or white, then we've spend the last four years slowly decorating the corners of our living room and office with piles of unused and useless items that we can't seem to throw away...