15 Living Room Projects You Can Complete In A Weekend

Modern life is busy, and finding time to decorate or refresh your home can seem overwhelming. Our living rooms should be a sanctuary in the home, providing us with a cozy space to curl up in for the evening. But over time, features, paints, furniture, and the design of the room can become tired, making the space seem less appealing.

So why not breathe new life into your living room with these simple projects that you really can complete in just a weekend? From fresh paint jobs to simply curating shelves and display cabinets, there are lots of smaller jobs that will instantly update your living room without months of effort. And something as simple as cleaning and decluttering a space can also increase the value of your home, should you decide it's time to sell up at any point. But more importantly, making small changes to your space can have a surprisingly positive effect on how you feel in your home, and, as the living room is often the heart of the home, it makes perfect sense to spend our limited time implementing these changes.  

Perhaps the easiest way to refresh your living room is by painting the walls a different color. Choosing an inspiring living room paint color will instantly refresh your space and give your living room a completely different feel. Although it's perfectly plausible to paint an entire room in a weekend, you could also consider just painting a statement wall by choosing a vibrant or bold color that still matches your existing furniture. This will still change the feel of a room, but isn't as time-consuming or daunting.  

Creating the perfect gallery wall can really change the feel of your living room, with a simple rearrangement of your existing artwork to draw the focus to one particular area of the space. To make sure you create the perfect arrangement, try mapping out your gallery on the floor first and use command strips to adhere the pictures to the wall. Because they're easy to remove, using command strips means you can rearrange regularly without marking the wall, keeping your display fresh and interesting.  

Adding plants is the easy living room upgrade that instantly elevates your home decor, bringing a sense of tranquility and calm to your home. A plant corner brings in the outside world, with the verdant leaves and lush greens adding color to neutral paint schemes, and contrasting accents to darker colors. Plus, plants have the added benefit of improving air quality, making your living room a healthier space. If you're new to keeping house plants, start with low-maintenance varieties such as snake plants, aspidistras, and prayer plants.

Cat owners in particular should invest in one of the best fabric shavers to spend the weekend removing pilled parts and loose threads from sofas or armchairs. Usually employed on sweaters and coats, these handy little tools are also brilliant at tidying up sofa arms, which could be particularly useful if you've got a feline friend who likes to add their own artistic impressions to your furniture. With a little patience and dedication, you'll be able to remove the loose threads and have your furniture looking like new again. 

Embrace curated clutter and immediately make your home look more expensive by tidying and arranging all your mismatched bits and bobs onto shelving units and display cabinets. You're looking to create a considered look here — items may not match, but they are placed together to tell a story and draw the viewer's eye around the shelves in a certain way. This is an easy way to add your own personal stamp to your living room, and remember that you can collect items from rooms around the house.  

Installing tile on your fireplace can add flair and a touch of individuality to your living room, and it's a simple project that's perfectly possible to complete in a weekend. You can go for brightly colored statement tiles to fit in with your living room's existing color scheme, or choose something a little more classic and muted for a period property. Do make sure that you use grout that's heat-resistant, or all your hard work could be undone the minute you light a fire. 

Living rooms tend to be home to televisions and sound systems, and with these products come lots of cables. If your living room currently looks like an obstacle course with plugs and extension leads, it's time to put aside the weekend to organise your cables. Invest in some of the essential gadgets for neat and tidy cords, such as cable management boxes and floor or wall covers, and you'll soon have your living room looking sleek and, most importantly, less of a trip hazard.

If you've got some basic sewing skills, why not have a go at making your own cushion covers to instantly update the look of your living room? To keep things easy to start with, try making an envelope-style cushion cover, which can be sewn by hand without the need for a sewing machine. Lighter-weight fabrics are easier to start off with, but once you're confident, you can try heavier materials and silk. Choosing rich colors and sumptuous fabrics can really add to your living room without extortionate costs. 

How often do we think about our door frames? Very rarely, if we're being honest. But a boring door frame is something that can easily be livened up and made into a feature over a weekend. Why not transform a boring wall frame into a standout element of your living room by painting it with a vibrant or contrasting color to that of the walls around it? Not only will this make the frame pop, it will also frame your living room and draw the eye in.  

Don't want to undertake any actual DIY but still fancy a change? Why not rearrange your existing furniture and create a whole new living room layout? Think about how you use your living room and rearrange the furniture to best suit your needs. If you're not sure where to start, try following established layout ideas, such as L-shaped or U-shaped arrangements. Something as simple as just moving the position of your sofa can give a living room an entirely new feel.

Making a bespoke lampshade is a surprisingly simple task that can easily be undertaken in a weekend. You'll find tons of DIY kits available online or at craft stores, which will contain everything you need apart from the fabric or wallpaper you want to use. Alternatively, you could look at updating an existing lampshade — try making a beautiful pleated lampshade with a simple hot glue DIY as a great starting point. 

Adding wallpaper to one wall in your living room can instantly transform the look and feel of the space, as well as give the space a focal point to draw the eye into. And the biggest advantage of wallpaper is that there are plenty of reasonably priced options out there, meaning you don't have to break the bank to afford an interesting print. 

If you have a small living room, you can use mirrors to make the space look bigger and more spacious. This is because mirrors reflect light from either the sun outside or from other light sources in your room, and a brighter space always appears larger when we're looking at it. This can be particularly helpful if you live somewhere that's prone to a lot of gloomy days — you could even consider adding in multiple mirrors of different shapes and sizes to create a feature wall.

Most of us have pieces of furniture in our living rooms that are either old and a bit battered or were cheap finds to fill a space. For a quick update and a simple way to refresh your living room space, try painting your old furniture. Choosing a new color can make furniture look new again, and it's a project that's easily undertaken in the space of a weekend. 

Interior designers are increasingly thinking of the ceiling as the fifth wall, so why not jump on this trend and paint your ceiling with color? Step away from a bland white ceiling and choose a color to match your walls. It's one of the best creative ways to add character to your ceiling and is one of the quickest ways to add a different feel and vibe to your room, without spending excessive amounts.