Give a Room a New Look when your Broke.
Sometimes you just have to do something even when your broke. A can of paint can cost you 25 dollars. Even cheap paint. When you are as poor as I have been 25 dollars can be a lot of money. I was doing a lot of baking back then and had a lot of flour on hand. I was also really big into making things from scratch because when your that poor you kind of have to anyway. I was working a paper route and had tons f left over newspaper. I also had an office with awful ugly walls I’d been wanting to cover for a while.
I found a recipe for wallpaper paste ans tore the newspaper into manageable sizes and covered the walls of my office with it. I then got some brown paper grocery sacks for free from a grocery store and used the same wallpaper paste recipe to cover the walls in my bathroom with brown grocery paper (if you can get it flat enough it looks kind of like leather). I had a dark utility room and pantry with walls I needed to cover and a big roll of tinfoil. I tore it into workable pieces and glued it to the walls (shiny side down).
Another cheap way to give a room a new and expensive new look is to buy a huge bucket of joint compound and a trowel and do a venetian plaster effect. There are lots of sites online with instructions on how to do it.
