Refresh your home for less: A few cheap items can brighten your life

How to refresh your home for less: What to spend £500, £1,000 or £5,000 on for maximum impact inside your property

  • Some households are better off financially thanks to lockdown
  • With more time spent at home, many could be looking to spruce it up
  • We take a look on how to improve your property with £500, £1,000 or £5,000 

Thanks to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s bounty, aspiring homeowners could save as much as £15,000 on stamp duty on a £500,000 property.

Meanwhile, although many households have suffered in lockdown, others are now better off having not had to pay for travel or socialising. 

So what to do with this extra cash? These are the smart ways you can pep up your home.

New look: A bedroom with shutters by Shutterly Fabulous where prices start at £299 per square metre

A £500 spruce-up: Sofas and artwork

A new sofa is cost-effective if your home lacks comfort. 

At Marks & Spencer, the two-seater Foxbury can be had for £499, down from £999, while at SofaSofa, the three-seater Montana is available in seven colours at £479, down from £649. 

Dunelm offers the two-seater, 1960s-style Sheldon in ink blue or green velvet for £495.

Artwork adds visual interest and Habitat can kit you out with your own Tate, whether it’s Damien Hirst-type dots from Colourplay6 for £55 or Kandinsky-like abstracts for £50, down from £100 at Habitiat. 

Or John Lewis has an in-vogue nine-piece map of Europe for £195.

The £1,000 refurb: Blinds, shutters and rugs

Plantation blinds are here to stay. They are elegant and could easily pay for themselves.

Some estate agents use the proportion of houses in a street that have such shutters as a guide to its gentrification.

The cost varies depending on window size and who installs them. 

Prices at Shutterly Fabulous start at £299 per square metre. 

For a sitting room window in a typical terrace house, the bill would be about £860.

Lockdown has exposed a drawback of open-plan living: how to escape the din of family life. 

Wil Law, interior consultant at John Lewis, says a large rug can in fact create an effective visual barrier.

The John Lewis Distressed Waterfall rug for £1,000 would blend with a neutral Scandi interior.

£5,000 makeover: Replacing kitchen units

Before lockdown, cafes and takeaways accounted for 40 per cent of Britain’s food expenditure.

This has dropped to about 15 per cent and, even with the VAT cut for restaurants, we are still likely to eat mostly at home.

So it may be time to replace tired-looking kitchen units and take advantage of the sale at Wren.

Or you can mix and match with open shelving. Finnish-designed String shelving is based on side ladders onto which shelves are slotted. 

A wall-to-floor unit to display cool crockery goes for £810.

You could also invest in a new kitchen table and chairs. The Bossy pantry table from Loaf is practical but handsome at £1,245. 

Cheerful mismatched chair choices include Habitat’s Oregan (£80, down from £160) and Sophie (£76.50, down from £85).

A Miele dishwasher, £1,099 from AO, should last for 20 years. Spend £5,000 wisely and the weekly cost over a 20-year period will be £4.80 — equivalent to just two takeaway coffees.