Colourful Home Gym on a Budget: How I Did It
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I recently decided I’d stop paying my $25-a-week gym membership and instead work out at home, but if I’m going to exercise on a dingy concrete pad tucked under my house, I’m going to make it as fun as possible. Enter the colourful home gym on a budget.
In just a few days, I turned this garage sort of area (like a basement, but exposed which is common in a Queenslander) into a cute little workout area with a colourblocked wall mural, a TV to watch movies or workout videos, and a questionably affordable weight set that I’m not sure is enough but good enough to start!
Here’s how I made my colourful home gym on a budget:
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The Colour-Blocked Wall
I am admittedly a paint sample hoarder but this is one time it actually came in handy! Knowing I wanted a colourful home gym vibe, I grabbed out eight samples (including the green from our playroom and samples from our treehouse room makeover) in the same kind of muted but still vibrant tones and went to work.
I used my long level and a pencil to draw out squares, then grabbed some painters tape and taped off alternating squares, making sure to put the tape outside the line so I’d be painting the full square and not cutting into it.
I did two coats over each square and it took a couple of days because I had to wait for each set to dry before taping the next, but I feel like it was so worth it. My tape lines weren’t really that crisp so in the end I went over the lines by hand for a more organic look anyway and I love how it turned out. The perfect backdrop.
Budget Home Gym Equipment
This home gym area is so short, like just under 6 feet to the ceiling, so we’re a bit limited on what we can actually do in here.
So, I got a weight bench thinking anything we’d normally do overhead we could do on the bench instead, and we got the cheapest weight set I could find online (because we’re doing a colourful home gym on a budget, remember!).
To be honest, these weight plates being moveable between dumbbells and a barbell might annoy me in the longrun, but they’re fine to start with.
I added a big arched mirror from Bunnings because all gyms need a mirror, and because it does a good job of reflecting light and making the whole dingy space look a bit brighter.
Our kids have been into doing workouts with us lately, so we’ve also got a couple small dumbbells for them and then a few other bits like a yoga mat and resistance bands.
I’ve got a walking pad ordered, too, because I’m usually more of a weights and cardio outside kind of girl but figured it’s good to have if we want to just have a walk while we watch a show or something.
And speaking of a show, we added a cheap TV mounted on the colour-blocked wall so we could watch TV if we wanted, or do a YouTube or other streamed workout video. I made sure to order one with the apps etc. built-in, too!
The gallery wall
Once the TV was up, though, it stood out and looked a bit doctor’s office somehow, so I decided to add a few fun gym prints to make a gallery wall. The colourful home gym aesthetic really came together here and it gives me a chuckle every time.
All of the prints are from Etsy and I just had them printed at Kmart.
Other Bits
I put down some foam gym flooring tiles but they were so ugly and definitely not the look I was going for, so I added an outdoor rug over the top and it now looks cuter and is more comfortable. Plus, the concrete is quite uneven so it helps it feel a bit less like a little dungeon room.
You can also see in the photos that I put some acrylic sheets along the bottom of the wood slats on the outside wall. I had to clear out a lot of leaves when I first started working here and figured the acrylic would let me keep all the light but would keep the leaves out (and hopefully deter any critters a bit, too). TBD on if it actually works, but that’s the thought process.
Final Thoughts
As someone who needs a physical separate space to get in the mindset to focus on working out, I feel like this colourful home gym on a budget we made will definitely work! I spent only a couple hundred dollars on all of this stuff and it took about three days to put together, so it’s not a massive reno, but is a cute, functional space that I think the whole family is going to get some use out of.
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