The cheapest change is a coat of paint

In rough order of impact for the pound, people are consistent. Paint is first and by a distance — a room, a set of cabinets or a piece of furniture, transformed for the price of a pot and a weekend. New cabinet handles and drawer pulls are second: some people say swapping them, or even spray-painting the old ones a new colour, makes tired cabinetry look updated for very little, and metal switch and socket cover plates do the same to a wall. After that come the free and nearly-free moves that change how a room feels rather than looks: move the furniture around, which costs nothing; add a rug and softer lighting — a lamp or two and a warmer bulb change a room more than people expect; and add a plant or three, which people get for almost nothing from cuttings or a clearance rack. The order matters because it stops you spending on decoration before the bones look right: paint and handles fix what is dated, and the rug, light and plants make it feel like yours. What people warn against is buying decorative clutter to fix a room that is really just untidy — tidy first, then add.

Yes, and people say the preparation is the whole job. In an older home, check the paint for lead before you sand anything: see the lead line above. For cabinets: clean them thoroughly, sand lightly to give the paint something to grip, prime, then paint, and — the point worth keeping — seal painted cabinets with a clear, not yellow, protective coat, because a yellow one shifts the colour and an unsealed painted cabinet marks easily. It takes a few days but lasts. Whether your cabinets are worth painting or should be refinished depends on what they are made of: solid wood can be sanded back and stained or painted and will reward the effort, while laminate or particle board cannot be refinished — it can still be painted with careful prep, but it cannot be stripped back, so treat a damaged one as a candidate for replacement. Glazed tile can be painted too, but only if you sand the glaze off first, then prime — otherwise the paint will not hold. Some people warn about painted surfaces afterwards: clean them with soap and water only, because rubbing alcohol and similar solvents can damage the finish. Beyond that, the exact grits, coats and products are a proper how-to that a good video will teach better than a page can, and people name that detail as a gap rather than pretending to cover it.

For hard things, yes; for soft things, be careful, and the line is bed bugs. Some people build cheap, characterful rooms out of second-hand furniture and decor — thrift shops, estate and yard sales, charity reuse stores, buy-nothing groups, marketplace apps — repainted or reupholstered to match, and a trick people like is to buy mismatched pieces cheap and unify them with one colour of spray paint. Hard-surfaced items — a solid wood dresser, a metal lamp, glass, a chair frame — are low-risk and clean up easily. The risk is in soft goods: upholstered furniture, mattresses, bedding, anything with fabric and crevices can carry bed bugs, which are miserable to get rid of, so people are wary of used soft furniture and some avoid it entirely. If you do take a small used item and want to be safe, sealing it in a black bag in a hot car, or a spell in a hot dryer for fabric, kills them with heat. Two more checks: a thrift lampshade may be grubby enough that a new shade on an old base is the better buy, and if you ever pull a cabinet off a wall, look behind it for damp or water damage before you spend a penny making the front pretty.

Plenty, and the key is reversible. Peel-and-stick film — people call it adhesive film or sticky-back plastic — goes over a dated laminate counter or backsplash and lifts off later, giving a whole new surface with no tools; a grout pen re-colours tired grout; new cabinet handles screw into the existing holes and the old ones go back in a bag until you move out; and a rug, curtains, lamps, framed things on the walls where the lease allows — how to hang them without drilling is not covered here — and plants do most of the work of making a rented room feel yours without a drop of paint. One honest caveat on the peel-and-stick film, because people disagree about it: on a gentle-use surface it can last a couple of years, but on a busy kitchen counter it can bubble, lift at the seams and pockmark within weeks, and it will not take a hot pan, so treat it as a temporary refresh rather than a real worktop. And when you swap a fitting a landlord provided — a toilet seat, a shower head — keep the original to put back when you leave, so the upgrade is yours to take and the deposit stays yours.