Decorate your home when seasons change using this inexpensive strategy

I love changing up the decor in our home for the seasons and at holidays, but I don't have a lot of time or storage space to hold a huge amount of seasonal decorations. So, for the last few years, I’ve been finding a way to meet both needs by using free printables that I find online in inexpensive frames that we’ve collected over the years.

The process takes about half an hour each time I made a change, and it's one of those home tasks that I actually look forward to doing (it's a little more fun than dishes, to be sure).

How often and when do you change them?
I typically change our frames for these times of year:

  • New Year

  • Spring

  • Summer

  • Fall/Gratitude/Halloween/Thanksgiving

  • Christmas/Winter Holidays

But there's nothing from stopping you adding in fun printables at St. Patrick's Day or Valentine's Day or whichever holiday you love.

What frames do you use?
I use inexpensive frames (here's a set of 8x10s I recently bought for less than $5 each), and just print the images from my regular home printer on regular printer paper. I'm sure you could get fancy with photo paper and an expensive printer, but our basic setup works fine for me. Of course, you can always use what you have already around the house.

Where do you get the artwork in the frames?
I have two types of images in our frames - most of them are just free printables I've found online by googling some version of "Fall Printables", "New Years Printables", etc. Click here to see what comes up in a "Summer Printables" search, for example. The others are pictures of my kids that are very seasonal. For example, I have a picture of my kids in Christmas outfits that goes up around that time of year.

I keep a folder of the prints all together so that I can use them again the following year.

What does it look like?
Here are the frames before we take them around the house to their respective hanging/sitting spots at a few points in the past year. We put them in the kitchen, living room, dining room, and bathroom to brighten up the house. I really enjoy how it changes the decor with so little time and money.

Applying the idea to throw pillows
Another way this concept gets put to use in our home is in pillow covers – we have inexpensive throw pillows and different covers that are great for various times of the year (ones with leaves in the fall, ones with snowflakes in the winter, some “regular” ones that contrast well with our furniture for most of the rest of the year). I have my eye on this one, and we already own all of these for  fall and  these  for  winter (each word is linked separately). 

Would love to hear your ideas for this type of decorating – what other things in a home could work like this? Do you have any printables you love that you could link for us below?

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