Leather furniture is one of the most comfortable, aesthetically pleasing types of living room furniture, but it’s also pretty expensive. The economy is sluggish right now, and many people, and many can’t afford to own their own homes, let alone invest thousands of dollars into high-end living room furniture.

Luckily, there are tons of cool things you can do to make some nifty, low-cost pieces of furniture of your own. Here are a few, neat, modern home furnishing ideas you can use to make your friends jealous of your living room.

Lego Furniture.

As a kid, you probably built some pretty cool stuff out of Legos — like spaceships and robots — but as an adult, you can use them to build yourself some interesting pieces of living room furniture. Though it’ll take hundreds of thousands of pieces, you can build some durable, neat looking end tables. Don’t bother trying to build a sofa or anything, since — let’s face it — that would just be uncomfortable.

Old Crate Cabinets.

If you want something more mature, why not build some storage cabinets out of old crates? Simply get two crates for drawers, measure out their width and length, trim a board to that size, attach a hinge to the board and to the crates, and there you have it! Some reclaimed, reused, and repurposed living room furniture.

Invisible Book Shelves.

Got too many books, and not enough storage space? Instead of buying an expensive bookcase and having to spend half a day putting it together, why not just make invisible book shelves at a fraction of the cost and half the time? Get some L-brackets, and carefully measure them to make sure they’re level. Then, anchor them well, and place some books on them, so it looks like you’re books are just hanging there in mid-air!

And you thought your living room furniture was going to cost you a fortune. If you have any questions about these projects, or know of any other super cool DIY projects you can use to make some nifty living room furniture, feel free to share in the comments.