Project #1: Curtain closet doors / Cost: $$ to $$$ (depends on size of project)

Okay, so my boyfriend has been in this apartment for 3+ years. When he moved in he was missing the sliding closet doors that should have been on the hallway closets, but was promised they'd be installed shortly. As you can see below, the promised doors never arrived (despite my boyfriend placing MANY work orders for them since then with the ever-changing building management).

Clearly at some point we just gave up on the whole idea completely and let the closets just do their thing... which clearly was "be ugly."

We'd been meaning to start bugging the new building management about the issue again, but realized doors might cause a problem now that we had gotten accustomed to using the open closets for air drying laundry. Doors just wouldn't work anymore, but what we had looked cluttered and just plain ridiculous.

I had some fun green curtains from my last apartment (I love decorating with green... you should just get used to seeing it here a lot) that had never found a place in this home and were slowly deteriorating unloved in a drawer. I figured why not use them as makeshift doors?

First I tried putting it all together for "cheap as free" and used some hooks and picture hanging wire i had already to string the curtains across one of the closets. It was a bootleg solution at best; the wire sagged and one of the hooks got pulled out of the drywall when my boyfriend valiantly tried to force the wire to be more tight already. Clearly this was a project that needed a small amount of cash.

What ended up being a great solution was tension rods. They're usually used as a simple solution for putting up both window and shower curtains in spots where it would be hard/impossible to use more traditional rods with hook supports drilled into the wall. Tension rods have four great perks: they come in a variety of sizes, they're self-adjustible (so you only need a rough measurement of the area you need them to span to make them work), you can put them up and pull them down in under a minute with no damage to the walls, and (best of all for this blog) they're stupid cheap. I needed three tension rods (two for the 23" openings and another for the 54" one) and the grand total for all of them came to around $25.

The tension rods looked much more on purpose than the wire and I'm super happy about the punch of colour this project added to my hallway (as are, apparently, my cats).

Because I already had the curtains, my grand total for this project was the $25 for the tension rods. If I had to add in the curtains though, the project doesn't actually cost much more since I picked up the four curtain panels for $20 total on massive clearance at Linens and Things back in 2007 (they're half poly, half silk if you were wondering). If you keep your eyes out you can usually find curtains on sale at home or clearance stores like TJMaxx or HomeSense.  If you can't wait for a sale, do check out stores like Wal-Mart, Target, and Ikea for great low cost options. The nice thing about curtains is you can almost always find ones that look half decent in the cheap range, and since you don't need to block out out sun with these curtains you don't have to worry about finding ones with lining, which always adds to the price.

If you want to go one step further, you don't even need to pick up actual curtains. Get your hands on curtain rings with clips on them (like these Riktig rings from Ikea, which are a steal at $3.99 for 10) and then just clip up sheets or raw fabric that you like. If you use sheets you don't even need to sew hems; just adjust the sheet to the length you need, fold the excess over at the top of the sheet, and clip them at the fold.

Final project cost to me: $25

Time to complete project: Under 5 minutes (not including ironing the curtains, which bumps it up to about 20 minutes)