Decorating on a $0 Budget

I live in a 2 bed/ 2 bath apartment with my husband and 2 kids. We don't have a backyard and we don't have a lot of space. We can't paint our walls and we don't really have extra money to spend on decorating. I have recently been working on making our children's bedroom feel more like a bedroom and less like a storage room and so I decided to go room by room and show you how I have decorated and what I still have on my to do list for each room. Obviously I did spend some money, but I try to be as thrifty as possible and only spend money on things that we really need. I am constantly keeping an eye out on craigslist (the free, furniture and baby sections) and freecycle and when I'm driving if something on the side of the road catches my eye I'll slow down or stop and take a look. When ever I go shopping I always check out sales sections first, scour the thrift stores and I find lots of things for decorating at the dollar store.

I'm gonna start off with a corner of our living room. I know that my bookshelves are very messy but if I went to clean them up then I wouldn't have time to blog about it.

My parents bought us the bookshelves as a Chanukkah gift the first year we were married (they are from Ikea). The baskets on the bottom shelves I bought on sale at Target ($5 each down from $25) about 2 1/2 yrs ago and until recently they were they only toy storage that we had. The accent chair and the little side table are from a local organization (people in our community can give their old furniture to them and other people in the community who need furniture can take it). The lamp is Ikea (the base was thrifted) and the stack of kiddie chairs is from a local thrift store $1 a chair.


Lastly the wall decal I made myself. I looked around on Etsy for some inspiration and I bought the solid black contact paper on Ebay then I just drew on the contact paper and cut it out. I paid about $10 for 2 rolls of contact paper shipped and I only ended up using one roll for the tree (later I will show you what I did with the other roll) which makes it about $5 for the tree vs paying about $75 and up to buy it.
Do you have a zero dollar decorating budget? Do you have any decorating ideas for next to nothing? Let me know in the comments bellow.