The Kmart Bedroom Makeover Under 0">bedroom is the room you spend the most time in and, counterintuitively, often the one that gets the least decorating attention. Most people focus their effort and budget on the Small Living Room (Without Spending Much)">living room — the space guests see — and leave the bedroom as a functional afterthought. The result is that millions of Australians are sleeping in rooms that feel dull, impersonal, and uninspiring, when a relatively modest investment of time and money could transform them into genuine retreats.
A hundred dollars sounds like a tight budget for a room makeover, and it is. But Kmart's pricing makes it genuinely achievable if you are strategic about what you buy and what impact each purchase has. The key is prioritising the elements that make the most visual difference — bedding, cushions, lighting — over decorative details that look good in isolation but do not transform the overall feel of the room.
This guide walks you through exactly how to spend a hundred dollars at Kmart for maximum bedroom impact. The room you wake up in matters more than most people realise. Let this be the year you take it seriously.
Start with an Edit, Not a Purchase
Before you spend a single dollar, spend an hour editing what is already in your bedroom. Remove everything that is not actively useful or beautiful. Clear your bedside tables completely. Take anything off the floor that is not furniture. Clear the top of any dresser or chest of drawers.
You will be amazed at how much better a room looks after this simple step, and it costs nothing. Many people buy more things to fix a room that is actually suffering from too many things. Starting with a clear, clean space gives you an honest assessment of what the room actually needs.
The bedroom you are working with after the edit is the bedroom you are decorating. Everything you purchase should earn its place in that edited space.
The $100 Kmart Bedroom Shopping List
Here is exactly how to allocate a hundred dollars for maximum impact:
Cushion covers — $24 (3 x $8) Buy three cushion covers in coordinating tones. The most effective combination is two covers in the same colour and one in a complementary tone or texture. For a warm, inviting bedroom, try two oatmeal linen-look covers and one in a warm rust or sage green. Use cushion inserts you already own, or pick up one new insert at around eight dollars if needed. Throw blanket — $18 Kmart's waffle-knit or chunky-weave throws in neutral tones are genuinely excellent for the price. Draped across the foot of the bed or folded over the corner of the bed, a throw adds texture, colour, and that layered, hotel-bed aesthetic that makes a bedroom feel expensive. Choose a tone that complements your cushions. Bedside lamp — $22 Kmart stocks a range of small bedside lamps at very accessible prices. The simple column-style lamps in white or black ceramic are particularly good — they look like something from a boutique homeware store and cost a fraction of the price. Good bedside lighting is transformative in a bedroom. Warm-toned bulbs (2700K) create a soft, intimate atmosphere that overhead lighting simply cannot replicate. Candle — $8 A single scented candle on a bedside table adds warmth, fragrance, and a deliberately styled quality to the space. Choose a scent that promotes relaxation — lavender, sandalwood, or a simple clean cotton scent. The visual presence of a candle in a glass vessel on a bedside table signals that this is a cared-for space. Small plant or vase — $12 A small ceramic pot with an easy-care plant — a succulent, a small pothos, or a cactus — brings life and organic warmth to a bedroom. If you prefer, a simple ceramic vase with a single dried stem or eucalyptus branch achieves a similar effect. Either option signals care and intention. Picture frame — $10 A single framed print above the bed, on a bedside table, or leaning against a wall adds a personal, curated touch. Print something meaningful — a photograph, a botanical illustration, a simple quote in a nice font — and place it in a Kmart frame. Keep it simple: one well-chosen image always beats a cluttered gallery in a small or medium bedroom. Total: approximately $94Making the Bed: The Single Most Impactful Skill
No amount of decorating can compensate for a poorly made bed. The bed is the visual centrepiece of any bedroom and its appearance dominates everything else in the room. Learning to make a bed properly — and it is a skill that takes practice — will make your bedroom look dramatically better every single morning.
Start with fresh, clean sheets. This is non-negotiable. Even inexpensive sheets look good when they are clean and well-laundered. Fitted sheet first, pulled tight at each corner. Flat sheet or duvet next, pulled straight and smooth. The duvet should overhang evenly on both sides of the bed.
For the hotel-bed look, fold the top of the duvet back about thirty centimetres, exposing the top sheet beneath. This creates a layered effect and gives the bed a deliberately styled quality. Arrange your cushions at the head of the bed — two sleeping pillows upright at the back, two styled cushion covers in front of them, one accent cushion in front of those if the bed is wide enough. Drape the throw across the foot of the bed in a loose, slightly rumpled fold.
Stand back and look. Resist the urge to over-straighten. A slightly casual, lived-in perfection looks more beautiful and more expensive than military-precision neatness.
Lighting: The Room Within the Room
The single biggest difference between a bedroom that feels like a hotel suite and one that feels like a rental property is lighting. Harsh overhead lights make every room feel clinical and flat. Layered warm lighting at multiple heights creates intimacy, warmth, and depth.
With your Kmart bedside lamp in place, consider also adding a string of warm fairy lights. Draped along a shelf, arranged behind a headboard, or wound around a plant, they add a gentle ambient glow that transforms the atmosphere of a room in the evenings. A set of warm LED fairy lights from Kmart costs around eight to twelve dollars and can be powered by USB, meaning no complicated installation.
Turn off the overhead light in your bedroom by 8pm every night. Use only your bedside lamp and any additional warm light sources. You will be genuinely surprised at how different — and how much better — your bedroom feels.
The Headboard Hack
If your bed has no headboard, or a headboard that is not to your taste, there are several budget-friendly solutions that make an enormous visual difference.
The simplest is a large piece of fabric or a curtain panel hung on the wall behind the bed. A piece of linen fabric in a warm neutral, hemmed with iron-on tape and hung from a simple dowel rod, creates a soft, organic headboard effect that looks genuinely intentional and designed. Total cost: around twenty to thirty dollars.
Alternatively, three to four large Kmart cushions arranged upright against the wall create a casual, layered headboard effect. This is particularly effective in bohemian or eclectic bedroom styles.
A gallery wall of three to five framed prints positioned above the bed functions as a visual headboard and adds personality and character to the room.
Scent: The Invisible Decorator
A bedroom that smells wonderful feels more luxurious and more personal than one that does not. Scent is the most underrated element in home decorating, partly because it is invisible and partly because its effect is immediate and powerful in a way that is difficult to attribute to any specific design decision.
Your Kmart candle is the starting point. Beyond that, consider a linen spray for your pillows — a few spritzes of lavender or clean linen spray on fresh pillowcases makes getting into bed feel genuinely indulgent. A small reed diffuser on a shelf adds continuous ambient fragrance without requiring any action.
Keep the bedroom scent consistent and relatively simple. One dominant scent — lavender, sandalwood, or something clean and fresh — creates a signature for the room that becomes associated with rest and relaxation.
The Finishing Touches
With the major elements in place — fresh bedding, styled cushions and throw, good lighting, a plant or vase, a candle, and one piece of wall art — the room should already look dramatically different from where it started.
Now look at the bedside tables. Each one should have a maximum of four objects: the lamp, a book or two stacked horizontally, the candle, and one small decorative item (the plant, a small ceramic, a crystal). Nothing else. Keep phone chargers hidden as much as possible and charge phones outside the bedroom if you can.
Look at the floor. It should be clear except for furniture and perhaps one bedside rug if you have one. Clear floors make a bedroom feel significantly larger.
Look at the wardrobe. Even if the inside is chaotic, keeping the doors closed and the exterior clean makes a large difference to the overall feel of the room.
What a $100 Kmart Makeover Cannot Do
It is worth being honest about the limits of a hundred dollar budget. It cannot replace furniture that is fundamentally the wrong size or shape for the room. It cannot fix a room with structural problems like inadequate storage or awkward dimensions. And it cannot make a bed with genuinely worn, thin, or uncomfortable mattress feel luxurious, no matter how beautiful the bedding looks.
But it can make almost any bedroom look significantly more considered, more personal, and more beautiful. It can transform a room from one you sleep in to one you genuinely enjoy spending time in. And at a hundred dollars, it is one of the most impactful investments you can make in your own daily wellbeing.
The bedroom you wake up in sets the tone for the entire day. Make it somewhere worth waking up to.
The Psychology of a Beautiful Bedroom
The bedroom is more than a place to sleep. Research consistently shows that the environment we sleep in directly affects sleep quality, mood upon waking, and overall wellbeing. A cluttered, aesthetically unpleasant bedroom activates low-level stress that affects sleep architecture even when you are not consciously aware of it. A beautiful, calm, considered bedroom does the opposite.
This is not vanity. The investment in making your bedroom genuinely pleasant — even on a hundred dollar budget — is an investment in your mental health, your sleep quality, and consequently your energy and mood throughout every day. That return on investment is extraordinary when you think about it in those terms.
Making It Personal
The difference between a styled bedroom and a beautiful bedroom is personality. Styled means it looks like the photos in a catalogue. Beautiful means it looks like you live there and love it. The personal elements are what create that distinction: a photograph of someone you love, a book that changed your life on the bedside table, a plant you propagated yourself from a cutting.
These personal touches cost nothing, cannot be bought at any price, and are what transform an attractive room into a genuine home. Do not omit them in pursuit of a perfect aesthetic. The imperfect, personal detail is always more interesting than the flawless but generic one.
Maintaining the Makeover
The hundred dollar bedroom makeover is most valuable when it prompts a permanent shift in how you treat your bedroom. Make the bed every morning. Keep surfaces clear. Replace or wash bedding and cushion covers regularly. Address clutter as it accumulates rather than letting it build to the point where a major effort is required.
A bedroom that is consistently maintained at the level achieved by this makeover is a bedroom that genuinely supports your daily life. That is worth far more than the hundred dollars it cost to create it.
Finally, enjoy the process. Decorating your bedroom should be pleasant — a creative exercise that results in a space that is genuinely yours. Do not rush it, do not stress about perfection, and do not compare your bedroom to the impossibly staged photographs in home decor magazines. Your bedroom, made with care on a hundred dollar budget, can be genuinely beautiful. And genuinely beautiful, for the place you wake up every morning, is entirely worth the effort.
The bedroom makeover is complete when you walk in and feel a small lift — a quiet satisfaction at being in a space that reflects care and intention. That feeling is available at any budget. It is waiting for you.
Your Bedroom Reflects You
The bedroom is one of the few spaces in a home that is entirely private. Unlike the living room, which performs for guests, or the kitchen, which serves a practical function that others observe, the bedroom exists entirely for you. This makes it both the most personal space in any home and, paradoxically, often the one we neglect most.
A hundred dollars and the strategies in this guide give you the opportunity to change that. To create a bedroom that is not just functional but genuinely restorative — a space that supports sleep, promotes calm, and makes you feel, every time you walk into it, that you are somewhere that has been made with care.
The money is secondary. What matters is the intention behind it. When you buy a cushion cover because it brings a colour you love into a space that was feeling dull, or when you position a small plant where the morning light will catch it, you are making a series of small, deliberate choices about how you want to live. That intentionality is what separates a styled room from a beautiful one. And it is available at any budget, to anyone willing to pay attention.Every good habit begins with a single decision, and every beautiful home is built one small choice at a time. Whether you are buying your first IKEA mirror, making your bed for the hundredth time, or trying a slow cooker recipe