How to RECHARGE Your Small Apartment Decor & Lifestyle
Feeling bored with your small apartment decor? Want to elevate your apartment life and make it so simply existing in your space feels inspiring and beautiful? Maybe you need an apartment refresh!
In this video, I'm giving you 6 tips for how to ⚡️recharge⚡️ your apartment and make it feel like your own personal oasis. No more feeling "blah" and uninspired in your environment - let's get you to a place where you can fall in love with your apartment and simply enjoy living in it every day.
Whether you want to create a cozy apartment aesthetic, need some studio apartment decorating ideas, or you're looking for decor inspiration to enhance your daily apartment lifestyle, let's talk about how to recharge your small apartment so you can feel blissful in your space every day!
Video Transcript ↓
The new year is upon us! And that means it's time to feel recharged, refreshed, rejuvenated... all the "re's"...
And your lovely little apartment can absolutely play a role in achieving that fresh, minty, new-year-new-me vibe we're all after on some level.
In this video, I'm gonna give you some specific ways to breathe new life into your small apartment so that you can start the new year feeling refreshed and ready to thrive in your small space!
And even if it isn't the new year when you're watching this video (hello you from the future), I think this really applies to any time of the year. Because we all go through a phase sometimes where we're feeling uninspired, kind of bored, maybe low-key claustrophobic living in a small apartment... Let's talk about how to remedy that!
And if you’re new to my channel, my name is Steffi and I’m the creator of the interior style blog Moda Misfit as well as the online course Small Apartment Styling School.
And you’re watching Living Pretty, the place for apartment styling tips! So if you want to get inspired with me every week, be sure to subscribe!
And before we dive in, I wanted to let you know that you can now watch my free workshop, "Decorate Your Dream Apartment Without Spending Money on the Wrong Decor For You" whenever you want!
In this FREE, 1-hour workshop, I’ll teach you how to…
Discover your personal style so you can decorate a space that feels like YOU
Create mood boards to help you visualize what your apartment could look like before buying things
Shop for decor in a way that will save you money and allow you to buy things that actually fit your space and your personality
If all that sounds like exactly what you need to create the dreamy apartment you’ve been yearning for, click here to watch the workshop!
So now let's dive into what you can do to recharge your apartment decor and your overall daily life!
1. Make a list of what you want to improve in your apartment
Think about what's been bothering you in your space.
When you're sitting on your couch and you're looking around, what are the little things that just don't really work for you?
Do you have the wrong coffee table sitting in front of you?
Do you have ugly beige switch plates that totally throw off the look of your apartment? By the way, my ugly beige switch plates that came with my studio apartment have always bothered me but I never did anything about it… 🤷🏻♀️
Could you use a few more decorative pillows on your bed? Chances are you probably could, because there's no such thing as too many decorative pillows in my book.
Watch this video for my bed styling tips! ↓
Do a personal style check-in with yourself.
Is your current apartment styling resonating with you? Are you actually expressing your personal style in your space?
And if you don't really know what your personal style is, well, that is where I come in. That's what my videos are all about.
And figuring out your personal style is something my free, one-hour workshop I mentioned earlier can definitely help you with. Click here to access it and start decorating your dream apartment!
Basically just do a personal style check-in and assess what isn't working, what is working, and list out the ways that you can actually improve your space.
What are the actions that you can take?
What are some pieces of decor that you can buy to enhance your space?
What are some pieces of decor that you can remove?
A huge part of interior styling is actually removing things. Editing. If you just move one piece of decor, that can unlock so much style in your space!
This video quiz I created can help you figure out your personal interior style! ↓
2. Do a deep clean
Now this one is pretty obvious. I bet there are probably a hundred YouTube videos that have gone up in the last week since New Years, all about doing a deep clean in your apartment.
I'm just gonna tell you right now, I'm not gonna be doing one of those videos because I don't like cleaning, frankly. And I don't like documenting it. 🙃
So I will let other YouTubers create their awesome deep cleaning videos!
But despite my hatred of cleaning and organizing, I’m actually going to do just that. I am going to do a really good deep cleaning session; vacuuming, organizing cabinets, dusting...
Basically, if you want to recharge your small apartment, getting rid of clutter and making things look and feel clean is going to refresh your space and therefore refresh your mind.
And if you really hate cleaning as much as I do, here's a little mindset trick that I play on myself:
Basically I choose a podcast or an audio book, or maybe one of my favorite albums, and I tell myself that I am going to listen to, say, this podcast… and I might as well just clean while I'm doing that.
So it's just a small mindset shift in which you make it about the desirable fun thing. “I'm going to listen to a really good, true crime podcast. I'm also just gonna be cleaning at the same time.”
Oh, the tricks we must play...
3. Move things around & experiment
My next tip for recharging your space is a very simple one. And it's very much in line with what I was talking about earlier with editing and removing things from your apartment, only it's to simply move things around.
So maybe it's not about adding things. Maybe it's not about removing things completely. Sometimes it's just about relocating something.
This is where my good friend experimentation comes into the equation!
Experiment. Experiment! Move things around. If something doesn't look good when you move it, move it again.
I think we put way too much pressure on ourselves to get things right the first time, and that just doesn't happen.
You have no idea how, how many things I had try in my studio apartment before my styling actually felt right.
This is where a lot of people convince themselves that they're not good at decorating because they don't get things right on the first try.
You're gonna get things wrong on the first try more times than not! It doesn't mean that you're bad at decorating. It just means that you need to move things. You need to experiment.
Interior styling is all about evolution, change, fluidity, and just experimenting until it all clicks together. So to recharge your apartment, just try moving things and see how it feels. And then keep moving things until it feels right.
4. Set the mood
So much of what makes an apartment experience feel good all comes down to mood and ambiance.
And mood doesn't happen by accident! You have to actually do things to set a mood; light a candle, figure out the lighting in your apartment.
Are you using your overhead light still? I know I've talked about this a lot in my videos, but I'm gonna keep hounding you until you stop flipping that light switch to use your overhead lights!
Because overhead lights will kill the mood in your apartment.
Even a beautifully decorated space can be destroyed by bad lighting. So please invest in a good floor lamp that imparts a nice soft glow. That in itself will increase your style points by like 10 to 15 style points… Good lighting is like drinking a style elixir that increases your style points by 15%. 🤓
So think about mood. Think about ambiance. Think about lighting. Think about home fragrance.
I've done a couple videos about my favorite candles and reed diffusers if you want my recommendations! ↓
I'm telling you, home fragrance is a huge part of what enhances the mood of a space. Mood comes down to appeasing all of the senses. It's about experience, not just visuals.
And speaking of experience, that leads me to my next tip, which is to…
5. Think about how you spend time in your apartment
How do you interact with your space? Do you feel like you're old friends with your apartment or does it feel like you're strangers? How can you befriend your apartment?
The last thing we want to feel in our space is a lack of belonging. We don't wanna feel like a stranger in our own space.
Your apartment should feel like your home world, not an alien planet!
So how do you enhance the experience in your apartment? How do you make it feel like your space? Like you belong there?
This all goes back to being intentional. You have to take action to create an environment that feels like your own. Create memories, have experiences (even simple ones).
Delight in the simple pleasures. Relish the feeling of making your coffee in the morning, for example.
How can you make the simple act of making your coffee in the morning a pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing experience?
Does something like that come down to just having a beautiful mug that makes you happy to look at? Does it come down to making your kitchen nice and tidy and stylish so that when you walk into your kitchen in the morning to make that morning coffee and start your day, you feel like it's simply a pleasurable experience?
How can you take these small - even mundane - experiences that you have every day in your apartment and heighten them?
For me, this is where interior styling comes in. The fact that I have created a stylish apartment that resonates with me as a person makes it so that these small little mundane tasks feel incredible.
Interior styling is a gateway to enhancing your life and your daily small experiences in a beautiful, meaningful way. At least that's what it does for me. So I want you to think about how you can take these small experiences and enhance them!
6. Get out
And my final tip for recharging your apartment is to get out of your apartment.
There's really not much to this one. Sometimes the best way to fall back in love with something is to give it space!
And this tip definitely applies especially to my fellow work-from-home people, which I know there are a lot of us now in this day and age.
And if you're anything like me, you're a hermit who actually just loves being at home and can actually last inside an apartment for a freakish amount of time, living the life of a little mole in a hole who… doesn't leave. That's my vibe.
But the unfortunate side of being such a homebody is that being in my little hole for days and days and days without leaving is not great for any human brain.
We all need to leave sometimes.
So how I've done this is I've started taking long walks in the morning. And I have never a been the girl who takes walks (I'm kind of allergic to any physical activity of any kind), but I've been loving it! And if I can love it, anybody can love it.
I've also discovered the benefits of going down to the community lounge area in my apartment building, which I have ignored for most of the five years that I've been living here.
The simple act of changing your environment can give you such a renewed sense of focus and drive.
Get out to a coffee shop. You can go to the library. (COVID permitting, of course.) There are all kinds of places that you can go to just get out of that apartment and change your work environment for a bit.
Then you can come back to your apartment and fall in love with it all over again, because absence makes the hard grow fonder. Your apartment probably needs a break from you too. So get out!
All right, those were my tips on how you can recharge your apartment decor and overall apartment lifestyle.
Sometimes it's those tiny little actions and mindset shifts that make a world of difference!
Let me know in the comments below, how do you feel refreshed in your apartment? What are some of the things that you do to sort of recharge your experience in your space?
And if you’re still not sure how to create your dream apartment and you're wondering things like:
“How do I discover my personal style so that I can make these good choices for my decorating?”
“How do I become more confident in my interior styling choices?”
“How do I mix styles?”
“How do I actually arrange things in my apartment?”
Then I got you covered…
If you're wanting to dive deeper into learning about how to style your apartment step by step, that's where my online course Small Apartment Styling School comes in!
Small Apartment Styling School basically holds your hand through your styling process and tells you exactly what to do step-by-step, so by the end of the course you feel like you know your style, you know what to buy, and you know how to place it in your apartment with confidence.
Imagine living in an apartment that actually boosts your mood everyday and makes you feel welcome, and makes you feel a sense of belonging and being at home.
Just because you rent your space doesn't mean you can't own your style, and Small Apartment Styling School helps you do that!
My current students have been a raving about how helpful the course was for decorating their apartments and I am so proud of what they've achieved after enrolling in the course!
Small Apartment Styling School will help you decorate your apartment step by step, including:
Figuring out your personal style
Choosing a color palette
Mixing different interior styles
Learning about the different interior styles that are out there and which ones might be a good fit for you
Arranging and accessorizing your apartment room by room - living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom.
All of this and more is in Small Apartment Styling School, so if you want to learn more and join the waitlist for the next time it opens for enrollment, click here!
For daily glimpses into my studio apartment life, you can follow me on Instagram @moda.misfit.
And for regular doses of apartment styling tips and small space decor inspiration, subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when a new video goes up every week.