Decorating on a Dime

I mentioned a while ago that I was crafting. It's not something that I regularly do, because lets be honest, the more fashionable it becomes to craft, the pricier it all becomes. Sure, if I had greater resources, I might accomplish more of my Pinterest dreams, but well, there are more important things most days. However, we recently moved into a super small duplex in Athens. It's not cute. It has zero charm and lots of flaws, so I decided to try to hide some of it's less desirable traits with some inexpensive craft projects. Obviously, I found all of these on Pinterest. If there is another way of finding crafts (I'm sure there is... but I can't remember. What did we do before Pinterest, again? The Martha Stewart show?) it is far too difficult. And I actually didn't even go looking for any of these. Almost all of these finds have been sitting on my board for years just waiting. So without further ado, I present to you the finished pieces.

Item 1: Shipping Pallett Wall Decor

I'm big on efficiency. It would not be efficient, but rather a giant waste of time for me to type up a how-to when I followed the instructions off of someone else's blog. I will however explain the interesting issues that I discovered in this process. First of all, my pallet looked nothing like this. It was FREE, so that was awesome, but aesthetically, it wasn't a great design. So I took it apart. Yes it took time. Yes it probably would have "worked" just fine had I left it, but my purpose wasn't just for it to "work" but rather to look cool while being functional. So I took out all of the nails, sanded the boards (no one wants splinters during the staining process), and stained them. We're on a strict budget, and as you'll see, we purchased stain for another project, so I decided to utilize the same stain. However, with the super cheap wood, the stain absorbs crazy fast, so we diluted it with mineral spirits. That seemed to work really well. However, just a word of advice, use the no/low odor stuff, otherwise your house will stink for DAYS! Once it had been stained and a coat of polyurethane had been added, we put it back together in a more attractive manor. I say we, I mean Sam. I want him to feel involved, you know?

So here it is:

Item 2: Shipping Pallet + Mason Jars= Bathroom Storage Solution

Again, I'm totally not typing up a how-to. You can read all about it. The only real difference here is that I did not have a perfectly sized pallet thing from IKEA, so my sweet husband cut a full size pallet down.. The rest is the same. It definitely solves our bathroom problems. Our bathroom has a sink with VERY little counter space and NO drawer space. So this little guy is great for things we use every day like toothbrushes, Q-tips, cottonballs, etc. It would be great to hold make-up brushes too, but I've been relegated to a different room to get ready in the morning as our bathroom is too small for us to both stand in at the same time. The only expenses were the mason jars, and the pipe fitting thingies. We used the same stain again, and as I mentioned before the pallet was FREE!

What do you think?

Item 3: Wall Art

This, I'll shamefully admit, is a copy of some girl's etsy product. I will say that I didn't realize it was a work of art someone was selling until after I'd already recreated it... oops! It was also a relatively inexpensive project (unlike her paintings). As  I was an art student once upon a time, I've got way too many blank canvases and tubes of paint lying around, so I put them to good use. I did run out of white paint, and my black was as dry as a rock, so there was minimal expense there. Bummer.

Take a look:

Item 4: Cage for the Demon Dog

A little back story: When we bought Sterling, I had some rose-colored glasses on for sure. We crate trained him, and he actually learned to sleep very peacefully in his crate after seveeral months. Sleep being the operative word. Leave him in it during waking hours, and he goes BONKERS!!! The wire crate had lost the fight by the time he was ten months old. For weeks I came home to him with wires pointed in at him all over the cage. It was basically a death trap. Needless to say, we bought him a new crate. But it's HUGE and really loud, so we didn't put it in our bedroom. We wondered, as he's SUCH a good sleeper, if he might sleep on his bed in the corner. That lasted for about a week. He went to sleep sweetly, but about 1AM he would come to MY side of the bed and nose me with his FREEZING cold nose asking, "mom, can we snuggle?". And thus began the "Sterling, on your bed." then "mom, can we snuggle?" war for the next five hours. So we hauled back out the old wire crate and he has slept in it ever since. But ughhhhh.... it's so UGLY!!! It has holes in it. It's rusty. You can see his ratty, shredded bed. I was not loving the idea of having that in our bedroom for the rest of his life. And then I found this lady, Ana White, via Pinterest. She makes the coolest things… but one was AWESOME. Her dog crate is stylish and functional. So after much begging, my husband set out to make one. Now obviously ours has to be a little larger all around… actually much taller, but we used the initial design. I think it turned out really well! It will look even better once it's painted!

Item 5: Cereal Box Monogram

Monograms are all the rage… is that a Southern thing? Do people out west or up north monogram kid's backpacks and lunch boxes? Do they slap monograms on their front door wreath or welcome mat? Anyway, I saw this and thought it was pretty cool. And it was FREE (except for the spray paint).  I learned that I am quite possible the worst at paper mache; even Sam was better at it than me! I made it significantly harder on myself than is necessary by choosing the lowercase "g"… all those curls and the weak midpoint joint made for a more frustrating project than I anticipated, but I'm semi-pleased with the final result.

Item 6: Shoebox Decor

This one was another budget friendly choice… the only cost was scrapbooking paper and I made sure I bought clearance and sale items. Again, super simple. No real explanation needed. I changed it up and used shoe boxes rather than wood as it is A-free and B- requires zero effort. The only hiccough I ran into was selecting extra large shoeboxes (I'm surrounded by big feet). It becomes a headache to piece the paper together to cover if the box is too big. If I had it do over, I'd purchase all of the paper at one time; paper seems to change with the seasons, and as I'm the slowest crafter ever, I spanned the seasons. It looks a little disjointed to me, I'd like some more cohesion, but ultimately it serves it's purpose by filling a horribly ugly wall.

Ta Da-

Item 7: Table & Chairs 

This I stole from my good friend Lesley Anne. We've wanted a table with matching chairs for a while… plus a set that was ours, not borrowed from several different sources. I figured if I didn't find something super cheap that I liked, we'd find something ugly and refinish it like the Fenton's. Well, believe it or not, the cheapest set we found was JUST like the Fenton's, so now we are breakfast table twins! I'll be honest and say that we did not use all of the products Lesley Anne and her husband Kyle did. We took several shortcuts, and our table and chairs certainly suffered for it, but they turned out fairly nice, just don't look too closely!

Item 8: Coffee Table

This is actually ALL Sam. I found two ideas for potential, cheap coffee tables, here and here, but he didn't love either. He found this design and completed it himself over the Labor Day weekend. Go Sam! The table cost us a whopping $65, and yes, we used the same stain. Glad we found a color we liked! I stained the table different colors by applying multiple coats to some boards and wiping the stain off super quickly to the others.

So there you have it, slowly but surely, we'll make this house half a house a home! And the good news is that I like everything enough to implement it in some way into our next place.

It took a major kick in the pants by way of the realization that I was about to have a house full of non-family members on a regular basis in my home to get motivated enough to finish these projects. Crafting always sounds WAY more fun than it is... 800 trips to Michaels later and we are all done!