We asked design pros to recall the ways they gussied up their starter homes despite a lack of money. We knew their hacks would be brilliant.
LIKE THE stories our parents tell us of their youthful struggles, even our fondest recollections of our earliest flats are colored by compromise. The verses of the first-apartment blues may differ in their details (huffing up six flights of stairs, storing shoes in kitchen cabinets), but everyone sings the same chorus: We all did what we could to spiff up our digs.
Knowing that design pros probably did it better, WSJ asked hundreds of them to share the clever workarounds they devised as cash-strapped tyros. Many made décor lemonade out of real estate lemons. And it didn’t matter if someone else owned the place.