If you work from home even part of the time, you’ve likely discovered the importance of having a workable space that keeps distractions at bay. When you first started working from home, you probably chose the best place for your desk and set up camp there. But over time, it’s important to make the space your own.

Unfortunately, for many people budget restrictions don’t allow for a major redecorating project. But even on a small budget, you can make changes to your office that will make it not only more visually pleasing but more functional, as well.

DIY Office Supplies

You don’t have to spend a fortune in office supplies. Empty out and clean old jelly jars to hold all of your pens and pencils. You can also repurpose an old coffee mug or drink glass for the same purpose. If you want to refresh the look, you could cover your makeshift cup holder in a colorful fabric that matches your taste.

Creative Furniture

Do you need a desk but you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend? You can make a desk out of a variety of furniture types, which you can often find at yard sales or thrift shops. This article demonstrates different do-it-yourself desk projects that you can easily do with the inexpensive used furniture you find.

Add Shelves

You can free up storage without spending a fortune by adding shelves on one wall of your office. Here you can store photos, boxes and binders with work files, and reference books related to your profession. You can even add a few decorative items to show off your own flair for fashion, making your office more visually appealing.

Use a Room Divider

If you don’t have an extra room in your house to devote solely to your office, you’ll probably have to share space with another room. Whether it’s an office/guest bedroom combination or you’re setting up in a corner of one of your more highly-trafficked rooms, you can use a room divider to mark off your office space. Even though this option isn’t soundproof, you’ll still have a small amount of privacy while you work.

Add a Pegboard

Bulletin boards are great for tacking reminders and photos within your view, but they limit you. A pegboard, usually reserved for tools in workshops, can be used to organize items like scissors, tape, and items you need on hand throughout the day. Best of all, you can often find pegboards in a wide range of colors and sizes, making them perfect if you need to match them to the existing colors in your office.

If you work from home, you likely want to make your office as enjoyable and comfortable as possible. Feel free to occasionally improve the design with little changes. By using creativity and repurposing furniture and household items, you can create an office that rivals what you’d find in a business complex. All you’ll need is a way to keep distractions at bay so you can get work done.

Art lovers no longer have to leave home to appreciate fine art. Thanks to a growing trend, they can create the same experience on one of their own walls. Art gallery walls have become a great way to create a point of interest in your home while also showing off your great taste in art.

But putting together an art gallery wall is an art in itself. You can browse examples of other art gallery walls to get ideas and inspiration but in the end, you’ll want to make it your own. Here are some tips to help you create an art gallery wall in your own living space.

Go for Diversity

To make it clear your wall is designed to showcase a variety of artwork types, you should try to make your selections as diverse and eclectic as possible. This could be a combination of paintings you have in your collection already and items you source specifically for the wall. Do an inventory of the pieces you already have and begin a search for the perfect items to add to it. If you’re on a budget, there are choices you can make that won’t break the bank. Scour the Internet, as well as antique shops, flea markets, and thrift stores. You’ll be surprised at the great finds you’ll discover at these bargain-shopping opportunities. This budget-conscious decorator used pictures from a book for her gallery wall and was thrilled with the results.

Match Framing

Your art selections may be eclectic, but you can bring it all together by using consistent framing. Choose frames and mattes in identical colors and styles and match the surrounding décor. If your gallery wall is in a dedicated area of the house, this might not be as much of a challenge than if it lines a stairwell or hangs above your sofa. This will free you up to pick paintings in a wide variety of colors without worrying about adding to the noise with multiple frame colors and types.

Diagram It Out

One of the toughest parts of a gallery wall is laying it out so that it looks neat and orderly without appearing too uniform. As you add items to your collection, diagram out your plan for the wall. This will help you determine whether you need more landscape or portrait paintings, as well as whether you need artwork in a certain size. Once you have all of your artwork ready to go, set it all on the floor and move items around until you have the perfect placement. Measure the group and make sure it fits before you hammer in the first nail. This careful planning will save you the extra work of having to redo an entire section of paintings because you ran out of room.

With an art gallery wall, you no longer have to limit yourself to just a few pieces of artwork per room. You can display your personal taste while also creating a great talking point for your next party. Additionally, you’ll have the fun of shopping for the perfect item to complement your collection.

Try and think of an area of your life where technology hasn’t taken over. Pretty tough, right? Everywhere you turn, people are buried in their tablets and smartphones. Work places are filled with the latest in software and computer programs. Even classrooms are filled with technological devices to help educators teach students more effectively.

Technology really has affected just about every aspect of our lives, including how you apply and get approved for a mortgage.

From beginning to the end, innovative technologies are revamping every step of the mortgage lending process for you, your lender, the real estate agent, and anyone else involved in the process. There are plenty of benefits that technology offers within the mortgage realm.

Streamlining the Mortgage Process

Many home buyer hopefuls dread the mortgage application process. The application itself tends to be lengthy and cumbersome. You’ve got to gather up all sorts of financial documents, and fill out and sign pages and pages of documents.

Then waiting around to find out whether or not you’re approved can have you biting your nails. When you finally get the stamp of approval, there’s the closing to deal with and wait for.

This doesn’t sound like the most enjoyable task in the world. In fact, it isn’t. It can be a real labor-intensive hassle. But thanks to advances in technology, the process is much simpler and more streamlined. In fact, you can even apply for a mortgage online without ever even having to leave the comfort of your home.

Benefits That Technology Has Brought to the Face of Mortgage Lending

With the right tools at your fingertips, you can significantly cut the application and approval times by more than half. It’s not unheard of to be approved for a mortgage within a few short days. Digital tools also help you stay in closer contact with your lender to ensure that all necessary information is properly and accurately communicated.

Aside from the online application process, one of the biggest ways that technology has positively affected the mortgage loan process is though the advent of electronic signatures – or ‘e-signatures.’ Thanks to the arrival of e-signatures, it’s no longer necessary to have to hand-deliver documents in person.

Simply signing your name on a document electronically and emailing it to the necessary parties has shaved a serious amount of time off the process, and made things so much more convenient for everyone involved. This is especially helpful when there’s a lot of back-and-forth document exchanges that tends to be pretty common.

As long as you’ve got a computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone, you can check the status of your loan application at any time, and from anywhere. There are even smartphone apps that serve as an entire loan processing management system. These apps connect all parties involved in the mortgage process so everyone can stay in constant communication. Just installing the app on your smartphone can instantly offer total transparency to you, the lender, the underwriter, and your agent, in the loan process from start to finish. Anyone involved can check the status of a loan application at any time.

Has the underwriter received your application? Is approval conditional? Has an appraisal been ordered? Has title been ordered and received? These are just some of the questions that can be answered thanks to the inclusion of technology in the mortgage lending process. Everything is updated in real time, giving you up-to-the-minute information as needed.

Rather than a paper-based system, processes can be automated and dealt with electronically to speed up any steps that were once done manually. Digital workflow processes can be used for signatures, accessing information on file, approvals, and more. For instance, during the mortgage process, all of the borrower’s data can be gathered electronically and automatically pushed through to the underwriter. If the underwriter feels that more information is needed, it can be sent back to the loan processor with this request.

The costs associated with the mortgage process can also be significantly reduced. Rather than shuffling through paper copies between the loan officer, loan processor and underwriter, everyone involved in the lending process can access such information remotely and fire it off to the necessary parties quickly and easily. Not only does this cut costs, it also minimizes the odds of documents getting misplaced or lost.

New advancements in technology come up all the time, and as such, lenders and borrowers can expect the lending process to be a lot easier and more cost-effective. While you can use technology yourself, make sure that the mortgage broker you work with keeps up with such technology too, and uses it to help save a ton of time and avoid a lot of potential frustration.

Inside Out, the latest film from Pixar Animation Studios and Disney, is a masterpiece of a film. It’s perhaps the most adult-oriented film in the studio’s catalogue, which is made up entirely of family-friendly works like Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and the Toy Story series. For our money, it’s one of the best films they’ve ever done; a touching, extremely perceptive and especially poignant film about the emotions that a little girl feels as she moves away from her home town.

What can we learn from the 11 year-old Riley, and her inner manifestations of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear about the real estate market? Quite a lot, actually. Beyond the (fantastic) San Francisco and Minnesota jokes, Inside Out deals with many of the problems that new homeowners face as they trek across the country, families or no. Let’s take a look and see what this film can teach us about the moving process.

Massive spoilers ensue — and watching Inside Out is obviously recommended before reading.

Where’s Our Stuff?

Even though Inside Out delves into a fantastical reimagining of the human psyche, certain plot devices ground it in reality. Few situations in the film are as real and unfortunate as the moving van fiasco: the family arrives at their disappointing San Francisco townhouse, only to discover that their rented moving van will be almost a week late.

They’re not alone. The Department of Transportation cites nearly 4,000 move-related scam reports a year. According to a study from MoveRescue, shady movers use a number of different techniques to get more money, but the most common is illegally holding their loads “hostage” from their clients. Your goods might not be returned until you pay more than you intended. In order to make sure your stuff doesn’t go the way of Bing Bong (R.I.P.), MoveRescue recommends heavy research into your prospective company. That means using the web, looking at places that have been in existence longer than ten years, and checking to see if they’re AMSA-certified (America Moving and Storage Association). Don’t be swayed by a seemingly too-good-to-be-true cheap offer. Your service will definitely suffer, and you’ll have your own Sadness grabbing your happy memory globes far more quickly than otherwise.

Getting to Know Your Local School Districts and Hot Spots

Even if you’re not raising a family, getting to know the local school districts is a great way to gauge where your new community holds everything from block parties to Fourth of July fireworks shows, and more. It’s also worth noting that if you’re near a school itself, you’ll get a firsthand traffic report almost every single school day.

But if you are moving to support a growing family, take a page out of Riley & Co.’s approach to school. It’s within a quick walk of her home, and close enough to hot spots like pizza places — disgusting broccoli toppings aside. Regardless of your transportation capabilities, you’re going to at least want to establish your quickest route to the community center, so you can get involved in something called…

Community Efforts

That’s right, other people are there too!

One of Riley’s “personality islands” is Hockey Island, created via happy memories of her hometown hockey team in Minnesota. Riley’s mother, in a show of amazing parenting for the ages, somehow finds a suitable hockey league in roughly .005 seconds of moving into their new California home.

Even if you’re not the kind of mother that Riley has (and let’s face it, no one is), there’s plenty you can do to ease the anxiety after the move is over. A huge part of the post-move lifestyle change is that “regaining” process. Work hours aside, your leisure-time obligations are hard to organize. Those weekly meetings for everything from book clubs to bowling nights are impossible to replicate, too. That’s something that Inside Out knows all too well. As Anger says, sometimes you want to go back to the place that gave you so many memories, no matter the cost.

But a quick survey of available community groups might be the thing that gets you back on your feet. Check your local bookstores and coffee shops for meet ups. Ask around during big holidays or weekends. Chances are, your community has a big event like a farmer’s market or cookout at least once a month. The internet and other publications can be a great place to check in as well — most cities in America have a local subreddit on Reddit.com, or at least have a local newspaper to get you information about things to do, and people to meet!

The goal here isn’t to make sure you’re exhausted each and every day, but to stay busy after the move and help you transition into your new community the best. If all goes well, you’ll fit right in sooner than you thought.

Greener Grass (And Final Thoughts)

The last point about real estate that Inside Out can teach us is a bit more basic than the others. Bear with us.

Real estate transactions are complicated, and long and stressful moves are part of life, but they’re the result of that innate desire within people to find a home. Sure, we need Realtors to help us choose where we want to stay, what kinds of costs to anticipate, and how to make the process function with our jobs, families, and lifestyles. But we’re doing it to find a new place to live — to grow, learn and keep our lives going.

Moving uproots those memories, good or bad, happy or sad, that make us who we are. But just like those memories will always be there, there’s always going to be new people to meet, new schools to go to, new pizza places to try, and new families to be created. It’s an adventure, just like going back to school.

It happens all the time. A 20-something character in a fictional New York, is allegedly broke but still manages to afford a two-bedroom basement apartment in Manhattan with close proximity to the subway. A gang of teenagers head up to their parent’s rented mountain ranch only to get murdered by a crazy guy who mistakenly thought the property was worth millions.

Too often, there’s a discrepancy in what the properties we see on TV and in movies look like, and how they would actually look in their given location, price, etc. We’re going to investigate this phenomena and narrow it down to four major categories: New York, Beachfront, the Midwest, and the Mountains.

Category 1: The New York Apartment

Sorry to burst your bubble, twenty-somethings. Despite what Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt tells you, even the shabbiest basement apartments in Manhattan carry a rent check that will make your student loans look like the penny in the mall fountain.

A typical Brooklyn rent along the L might set you and your roommates back $1000+ a month not including utilities in 2015, and that might be a bargain depending on your location. We recommend turning to neighborhoods like Queens and The Bronx, which offer plenty of styles to choose from, including townhouses that are doable with the right roommates. But good luck trying to find even a space like that in Midtown on the salary of Robert de Niro in Taxi. The key to renting or purchasing is to know what you can and can’t afford. Take Jim Gordon’s “Gotham” family pad  in The Dark Knight. Sure, he’s a police captain, but is it enough for the multiple-story, two-bedroom property that Batman visits occasionally? Probably not. In real life, that’d set the Gordons back around a cool million on initial cost alone. He’d be in a better place if he and his family looked to a longer commute, maybe a Queens townhouse. Heck, if they’re willing to commute, pick up a space in Beacon, NY, an extremely pretty small town with transportation to the city and ample opportunities for hiking. Don’t let Hollywood fool you even more than it already has.

Category 2: The Beachfront Property

If your youth was spent in any way like those teenagers from beach-town classic TV shows like The O.C. or 90210, then bless you. But could those teenagers and their families have actually afforded them through gossip, murder, or cliffhangers?  No, Dylan, don’t shoot! You might hit the Mona Lisa behind you, and you have no idea how it got there.

Similarly to a New York startup, affordable beach bungalows are still extremely hard to come by. Even if we give the criminals of NCIS: LA a pass and say that their hideouts are actually rentals, the fact is that the average income of a Newport Beach resident is $106,333 in 2015. Around 40 percent of Newport’s 95,000 people lived in rental units last year, so it’s not that big of a stretch to guess that that’s mostly what’s going on here. If you’re looking for a teenage beach soap opera or movie with some sense, find the one that acknowledges the summer rental culture and take its advice.

That’s right, we’re talking about Point Break. A refresher: Keanu Reeves and Gary Busey are two FBI agents pursuing a gang of bank robbers who surf on the side. (Still with us?) However, in order to catch the gang, they have to act before the surf season ends, and the gang’s summer rental property changes again for the next season to an unknown property along the beach. This is about the only thing from Point Break that you can call accurate and sensible. Even with their ridiculous bank robbing stunts, the gang (known as the Ex-Presidents) doesn’t have the sort of stable income that creditors will appreciate. But they can probably satisfy the landlord looking for $750 — $850 rental for their two-story (estimated), five-bedroom hideout with that bank money. The summer beach season sees many of the same customers, who may want to renew their same agreement or experiment with a new property. Point is, there is flexibility if you keep in mind that — unlike the Ex-Presidents — you’re looking to come back alive again next year.

Category 3: The Midwestern Home

From the suburbs of New Mexico in Breaking Bad to the high school kingdom of Friday Night Lights, Middle America seems to have almost the opposite problem as fictional New York or Malibu. In markets like Oklahoma City, the financial shift from New York feels like letting a dumbbell off your shoulders. For the price of that same Brooklyn apartment, you could start making payments on a one-story house, and be done before your student loans are even formed (that might be an exaggeration, but so is everything in Smallville, so we’ll leave it at that). However, this vast difference in property cost almost never reaches the mass media, and we’re left with an entire generation ignorant of the affordable, great properties in the Midwest. As such, we’d like to congratulate HBO’s Girls for making light of this situation in season four’s “Triggering.” Main character Hannah’s shock at renting a full house for $800 a month was a brief reprieve from the insistence that everything is too expensive for prospective homeowners.

Category 4: Any Mountain Residence, Ever

You know what the most unrealistic part of the horror-movie classic “Friday the 13th” is? No, it’s not that a masked murderer has survived for god-only-knows-how-many number of years at the same lake just to murder every teenager in his path (nor is it that he can apparently breathe underwater and will live forever). It’s that a camp with such little business can hold such enviable property for that long without any other potential suitors. The out-of-the-way mountain sanctuary is the most misunderstood property in film and television, bar none. To be sure, there’s plenty of variety. We can get vistas as incredible and scenic as Friday the 13th‘s Camp Crystal Lake, or we can get the claustrophobic cabins of the incredibly underrated Wrong Turn series, and everything in between. Simple, 3-bedroom properties along the Rockies in Fort Collins, CO can be as low as $250,000, but drive a short hour and a half outside of Denver and that figure can skyrocket to $2 million. The mountains are where vacation cabins at $50 a night freely coexist with open-air mansions.

The main real estate angle that filmmakers forget in their ever-present search for that perfect cabin: rentals. Sure, we have films like Joss Whedon’s horror-satire Cabin in the Woods that touch on this, but the rental market for faraway cabins is thriving, even if it’s seasonal. Many cabins and other rental properties surrounding a U.S. National Park can have the benefit of unbeatable natural beauty, consistent opportunities for adventure, and the chance to meet new and exciting people. But if you’re not near there, consider a tip from Citizen Kane and become a newspaper tycoon. Maybe you can build your own Xanadu someday without fear of paying rent checks every month.