To ask your (affordable) interior design loves?

I think leaning into the period your house is always works well; then add a modern twist to suit your own taste. Be sympathetic to any original features but have fun with colour and furniture to suit your own style.

Our big splurge is Farrow & Ball paint - I love it. Its colour and finish is unparalleled. Furniture I source second hand and shop for deals online. H&M Home is great for clean, scandi style at a good price.

I’m not a fan of clutter but bring the odd piece home from holidays - a painting, candle holder, oil burner, a pretty shell. You can build up a lovely collection quite cheaply doing this.

Plants in pretty pots! I love the cheap foliage you can buy in supermarkets etc. With good care, they flourish!

Stick to natural materials, wood, wool, cotton, glass, ceramic, etc. sourced second hand if necessary.
Avoid flat polyester foam filled cushions and plastic tat.
ikea is great and I’m fond of a good ikea haul but don’t over do it.

Art work should be correctly mounted and in good quality frames. Plastic frames and those ikea plastic ‘ glass’ are fine for maybe kids art work in the kitchen at a push.

I like modern design with a nod to the outdoors. Unfortunately the area where I live tends towards shabby chic/ fake French flea market/ faux mcm, all of which I dislike (even if real rather than fake). It means I have to get creative at times. I’m a big fan of texture and grain, especially in hard surfaces. I love colour and try to have one slightly unexpected colour in each room.

Whenever we go on holiday I try to buy something for our home. Post purchases have included artwork, posters, vases, candlesticks, cushion covers etc. Mostly not expensive (apart from one painting), but very meaningful to us.

I'd love to have a similar collection, @Ketzele - especially Bloomsbury inspired portraits. Or variations on a theme of Rembrandt...

PaminaMozart, mine are mostly from Ebay- I have a saved search which is roughly portraits-oil-modern. They send a daily selection and about once a mo nth or so something comes up. My budget is up to fifty quid.

My collection started with a few pieces My mum had been given by art student friends in the 60s, and I think most of what I buy is indeed art school stuff. In the 50s and 60s they all wanted to be Duncan Grant so that works well for my kind of Bloomsbury style!

I also have some odd bits from charity shops - a close up portrait of a baby, which says on the back 'my first grandchild, Hannah'. An old 30s painting of a woman breastfeeding. A big painting of an elderly Chinese man who has the kindest face. A rabbi.

Best of all is the two huge oil paintings of my great great grandparents, which were rolled up and hidden when my (Jewish, elderly) gg grandmother went into hiding in Berlin during the war. They sit kind of oddly in my little two bed home, but I love them so much.

Sorry to give such a long answer, but I have a lot of paintings and they give the most personality and the most uniqueness to my home. Visitors either love them or think it's a bit eccentric, but I honestly think cheap original art, beautiful paint and vintage furniture are the top three musts for a lovely home.

I love one red item in a room - it makes me smile. Lifts the whole room.

• If skirting and door frames are painted, paint them the same colour as the walls

• use multiple light sources, table lamps, floor lamps, wall lights - easy to pick up 2nd hand

• plants, put them in belly baskets, willow/wicker pots etc

• framed photos - silver coloured frames can be picked up very cheaply from Ikea

Where do you find very cheap portraits in oil, @Ketzele ?

Opportunity shop - don't know what they're called in Britain. Thrift shop? Charity shop?

Antiques and nice pictures (real art, which doesn’t need to be expensive). Definitely not large canvases of family photos.

I like homes that reflect the person who lives there, even if it isn't to my taste, if it suits them and there is somewhere comfortable to sit and relax, I think they are winning.

I like looking on FB and local auctions and charity shops for things that are a bit different, but happy with essentials from Ikea etc too.

Ooh I could talk about this for days - I am obsessed with interior design but also the queen of cheap. Key things in my home:

1. Default to second hand. It takes longer to find what you want but is so much cheaper. My velvet sofas were fifty quid and free, my kitchen table was six quid etc. I have searches saved on eBay but make most use of my community furniture scheme.

1. Do some basic upcycling - sand, stain or paint furniture, recover seats etc.

1. I love beautiful textiles, the posher the better. So I search for those on Ebay, and get big remnants which I turn into lampshades, cushion covers and curtains. I just framed a huge piece of velvet (Mulberry's Flying Mallards) which looks great on the wall. I also made a wall hanging out of a remnant of beautiful embroidered fabric that usually costs £260per metre - my length cost less than twenty quid.

1. Play with scale, have some outsize pieces. In my (very modest) front room I have an enormous six foot mirror with wooden pelmet, cost me 25 quid. It's so heavy I can never move it, but it looks amazing.

1. I love portraits in oil, especially mid century ones. My place is full of them, and they can be very cheap. They're very variable quality, but I love them all (even the Nazi brownshirt who I didn't realise was a Nazi brwnshirt till he arrived).

1. There are very few things I buy new but rugs is one. You can get brilliant cheap rugs - I've covered the nasty laminate floor in my living room with two jute -effect outdoor rugs from Dunelm. Thirty quid each and scrubbable.

1. Paint is the best and cheapest way to transform your home. Farrow and Ball has published three books (library should have them) which I think are amazingly good at walking you through the possibilities and providing inspiration. You don't have to then buy their paint (though I do - it's the only thing I spend more money on than strictly necessary).

1. Don't default to white paint or white trim. Which is not to say don't ever do it, but alternatives usually look more designed.

@HouseWoe I was a bit taken aback at how much they can sell for! not that I'm parting with it.

I've never actually heard of a donkey bookcase before. Stupidly, I thought it was just your term for a beloved bookcase !. You've lead me down the dangerous path of Google @ghostyslovesheets - I'll be on the lookout for one of these now. What a perfect place to stash paperbacks ( of which I also have far too many)

It's short for Opportunity Shop. It's the Oz/NZ term for a charity shop.

That donkey bookcase is adorable. It's the finishing touch to fill it with Penguin books.

I scour Facebook marketplace and it is brilliant for things at a cheap price. I’ve bought side tables, chairs, lamps all at a fraction. Antique furniture often goes for next to nothing.

Oh my, now that is special! It's just perfectly sized and cute. And with all the memories attached too, icing on the cake ... lovely piece

What is an op shop?

Ah ! Imagine swapping a beautiful clock for a 80’s bit of tat.

my donkey is this one - I always loved it and have such memories of it in my grandads study - his pipe and tobacco on the top.

I love antiques and vintage stuff. I own nothing of superb quality, but it's all still much better made and much cheaper than modern stuff. Even in modern homes I think a mix and match approach works well, I like to have at least one older piece in every room. FB marketplace and especially local auctions can have some fantastic bargains on beautiful, well made furniture

Oh, and panelling. Don't try and put traditional panelling in a modern house, if you want panelling make it age appropriate for the house, same with all fixtures and fittings, they should not be older than the house but can be more modern. Modern panelling in a modern house looks fab.

Nothing wrong with IKEA, they do some brilliant things. It's buying from nowhere but IKEA where the issue is but that's true for all shops. I like their fabrics (like a PP I bought cheap as chips fabric there then had pinch pleat, full length curtains made up with interlining for a bay window and they look great), their kitchenware is good as well, and their rugs. I have something from IKEA in every room of our house but don't go for the famous top of range stuff because it is ubiquitous.

You get more for your money shopping second hand. Ebay, gumtree, FBMP are all good for this plus charity shops and auction houses. Or beg, borrow or steal hand-me-downs from family and friends. Whenever I need something for the house I always look for it second hand first. As the great Patsy Stone said 'One should never be the oldest thing in ones house'. It doesn't need to be a valuable antique, as long as you love it.

You can do a lot with paint. Think about colour drenching, or colour blocking or painting the ceiling and woodwork any colour but white. Personally I prefer a whole small room wallpapered to a feature wall in a bigger room but do what you like.

Art work should be meaningful to you, not something generic from IKEA. I have framed artwork by family members (including my kids), photos I've taken, meaningful postcards, studio glass and pottery bought second hand, a massive poster DH took home from a scientific conference, lots of things from the places DH and I grew up or things we've bought on holiday. Plus plants in nice pots (another thing IKEA is good at and supermarket house plants are pretty good as well, you don't need to spend a fortune at the likes of Patch Plants). But think about how it's all positioned, have a gallery wall for small pictures or maybe have a special one next to your bed or a quiet reading chair so you can look at it each day or have a single large picture somewhere it becomes a main feature. Don't scatter pictures about willy nilly, half the battle is in the styling.

I think it's fine to get high street or high end stuff as well as part of the mix, particularly as you get older and can afford more. But, e.g. my expensive new bookshelves are grounded by my reupholstered inherited chaise longue and the battered old trunk we use as a coffee table that DH bought as a student 30 years ago.

And finally, declutter and have enough storage for what you need and love. And take your time finding things you love and always donate or sell on things if you don't need them anymore. So much cheap furniture ends up in landfill, if you buy and sell second hand you are preventing that happening.

I just painted this mural on my bedroom wall. Total cost £12. Probably could have done it cheaper if I mixed the shades myself. I have painted over the grid lines now.

2 strong colours and an accent in an approx a 2:2:1 e.g. White ceiling and walls, pink sofa/ lampshades and a yellow cushion.

Bright white paint and gloss. Just anything fresh.

Things throughout the house to tie stuff together e.g. all black picture frames in each room or all silver accessories.

Cosy side lighting and purposeful spaces, like a reading nook demarked by paint, a chair and a little table with books and a proper, useful light.

Built in storage.

No clutter. Knick knacks, fine, you do you, but not piles of laundry

Mcm furniture is just gorgeous and I'm aware, I've had some very lucky finds! I'm intrigued as to what your donkey bookcase look like?!

Funny but true story - when I went to pick up the starburst clock, the man who opened the door asked me which clock I was coming to get as he had lots and lots of clocks he was selling. He tried to talk me into changing my choice for a nice (ugly red plastic 80s) digital clock as he thought it would suit my tastes much more and was far more " modern ". I politely declined and scarpered - I wasn't letting that beauty go! Some people haven't got a scooby how desirable MCM pieces are.

Like you, I do love a mix and match style - I've got some cracking Georgian chests of drawers too.