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Designing on a Dime

I can’t sing.  I can’t dance.  I can’t play any musical instruments (despite the fact that I took piano lessons for 6 years, but that’s besides the point).  One talent that I do have is taking things that are not great – sometimes even meant for trash- and turning them into things that make our house a home.

My husband and I are committed to living on a pretty tight budget so that doesn’t always leave money for decorating so I’ve had to become pretty creative and resourceful.  One of my bigger feats was lugging four dining room chairs that were set out for bulk trash pick up across a big play ground to my car and home.  You can read more about that here.

Once I got them home I asked Hubs to refinish them for me.  We have a very common butcher block dining room table that we bought at a garage sale when we first got married (which we’re planning on refinishing too).  I didn’t like 2 of the chairs that came with the table so we chunked them and built our own benches- on casters. Trouble is one of the benches is really really hard to move.  It’s been like that for years.  When I saw those chairs I knew that they were the answer to my problem.  I could replace the 2 chairs that we currently had and take out the bench and use all four of the chairs that I recovered.

Here’s the before and after:

I’m not going to lie.  If I had unlimited resources that’s not the chair I would pick out in a furniture store, but if it looks 100% better than what we currently have so it works for me.

Next up we have our master bedroom.  We had a huge white dresser that I had had since high school.  The thing was probably 15 years old.  When we moved into our house I painted it white (it was a murky brown color) and swapped out the hardware so it looked decent, but it was just too big for our room.  I saw this picture in a magazine and wanted to see if I could copy it with furniture we already had.

I feel like I came pretty close.  I still need to buy some glass knobs for the smaller dresser, but I’m happy with how it turned out.  I also decided to do my nightstand while I was at it:

And yes the ugly lamp is on my to-do list.  I saw one at Target that I really like, but it’s $50 so I’m waiting for it to go on clearance.

The last project that I want to share if for those of you out there who think that you can’t do this sort of thing.  Start small.  Really small.  I found these frames (there were two) at a garage sale and knew that they’d be perfect for my kid’s rooms.

I spray painted them with left over paint from previous projects, put the mats back in with pictures of my kids with their friends and now they’re hanging up in their rooms.

Garage sales, second-hand stores, flea markets, Craigslist are great places to start looking for those little treasures that can really turn your house into a home.  If you need help find some frugal decorating blogs (they’re a lot of very talented women out there) to help hone your eye and expand your mind as to what’s possible.

When Candace isn’t dumpster diving she blogs at Mama Mia.