First Digs: The Quasi-Adult's Guide to Decorating with Style---Without Blowing Your Budget

Great ideas for someone on a tight budget. I bought this and gave it to my cousin who is going to college. Perfect gift for the graduate... great ideas for dorms/first apartments! :)

I loved the book! There are lots of good tips and pointers, and for people like me who don't know how to do some home projects, the instructions were easy to follow and easy to use. I ended up buying 3 copies - one for me and two to give away to friends! Totally encourage you to check this out.

This is the book I wish I'd had when I was just starting out on my own, and the book I wish I'd thought to write after moving house about 10 times since I first started college! Yee-Fan does a great job of fitting all kinds of information into this book, and speaks in a voice that is easy to read but not patronizing to first-time renters. She's been there, done that, and wants to pass all that she's learned, good and bad, on to you! Everyone has lived in the white cardboard-box style apartment, and signed the lease that says "no painting, no restoration, no personality." This book has a TON of ways to get around all that and really make a rental your own. Once you read this book from cover to cover, you can satisfy your need for more by culling through countless articles on the website. I'll be buying a copy for every person I know that moves out on their own.

First, let me start by saying that I thought there would be more pictures in this book. I'm very visual and that's usually what drives me to buy decorating books. But that alone did not distract me, and since it's mentioned numerous times in the book that the author is also the editor of Digsmagazine.com, I can pop in there to augment all the great information in this book. Usually books about decorating, which is such a visual thing to begin with, have lots of pictures and very little text. If there is a lot of text in the book, it's usually pretty boring and hard to stay focused. Not so with this book. Yee-fan Sun's style of writing is very conversational and easy to read. The best part is that unlike other books on budget decorating or appealing to the newly free, she takes into consideration that many of us on a budget are renting and usually aren't allowed to make changes to our pads. Yee-fan provides plenty of easy, inexpensive, and temporary ways to inject personality into the cookie cutter apartments that we live in. Since she's lived all over the world on a starving student's budget, Yee-fan really knows what she's talking about. It's a lot of reading, but if you want to give your place a huge dose of personality without blowing the budget, this is the book for you!

Yee-fan really knows what she is talking about... too many style books offer great ideas, but their idea of a "budget" includes $200 pillows. Buy this book for amazing style on a realistic budget!