Inspiration Tuesday: Thrifty Makeovers

In anticipation of the Under $25 Makeover launch next week, I'm sharing some thrifty makeovers. I hope these inspire you to start thinking about inexpensive makeovers!

First up is this thrifty chair makeover featured on Country Living.

Here's the before:

And here's the after:


Love it!!!

I found this great repurposing of a vintage door over at Today's Fabulous Finds.

Before:


After:
Fabulous!

Or what about this great space that was freshened up for under $50 at Better Homes and Gardens:

* See several other spaces BHG made over for less than $50 here.

And finally, I'll share my own microwave stand makeover.

Before:


After:

I'm a huge fan of decorating for less, trash to treasure, roadkill rescue or whatever you want to call it. I hope these projects inspire you to think about it before you pass up that freebie on the curb or throw something out you already, have think about the possibilities!

Happy Crafting!

*Shared at Whatever Goes Wednesday.

Making a Rental a Home

So, due to the whole credit business and the deal on the house falling through, Hubby and I are going to be stuck in the rental for the foreseeable future. (Check out the back story here.) At first, this was really upsetting to me. The house we are in now is small and only has two bedrooms. The walls are all off white (or as I like to call them dirty white). I spent an hour scrubbing our small bathroom walls one day and went through a huge amount of supplies. The walls still look dirty.

The second bedroom seemed ridiculously small. It housed our office with a desk, large bookcase, display cabinet, futon, and a jewelry armoire and it seemed jam packed. All I could think was where are we going to put a crib? Hubby told me everything would be fine and that we'd just move furniture out of the room. All I could think was where in the hell are we going to move it to?

We have two enclosed porches, one on the front of the house and one on the back. The front one is my "craft" (or chaos) room. I had a lot of stuff jam packed in there as well. Hubby thought we could move the futon and the computer desk in with the craft stuff. I was not buying it, but Hubby, it turns out, has better vision than I.

Not only did the futon fit, but it made a nice place for me to sit down and work on small things like jewelry in front of the t.v. The computer desk fit nicely on the other end of the porch. All of my crafting supplies and surfaces fit around everything else.

As for the bedroom (soon to be the nursery), the crib fits in there perfectly as well as an armchair (which I'll eventually replace with a rocker). The tall bookcase stayed and another small bookcase came in for baby storage. There is even room for a dresser/changing table.
I've started decorating a little bit. I'm trying not to go overboard, since we still don't know if it's a boy or girl. (See discussion on color schemes here and here.) I've been mostly sticking with the black and grays, since that will go with either color scheme.

Now, I know these descriptions are better with pictures. I'll show you the current status of the nursery, but it looks bare and undecorated right now, so be wary of that. As for the craft porch/office, you'll have to wait until I can finish reorganizing because it's a total disaster right now! ;) All right, enough disclaimers, on with the pictures:

Corner with the crib:Opposite corner with armchair (also note some of Hubby's "office" decor is still on the walls. This will get relocated if we have a girl!) :


Tall bookcase that stayed:

The final corner with display cabinet and room for dresser/changing table:

Since all this, I've been reading on various blogs ways to make even a rental feel like your home. Nobody does this better than The Nester over at The Nesting Place (see what I mean here and here) She even has a post about being brave and painting the walls in your rental here. Her attitude is don't ask if the landlord never said not to and if you have to paint it back when you leave so be it. (Now granted, The Nester is talking about painting the walls a neutral color). Now, if only I could convince my Hubby this is a good philosophy....

I'll keep you all up to date on rearranging our house (with more pics I promise!) as I can. (Read: if I have the baby tomorrow, you're SOL for awhile!) ;)

Do you live in a rental? Have you? What did you do to make it a home?

Happy Crafting!

Storage and Organizing Tips

To get a start on my (and many others) New Year's Resolutions to organize, today I thought I'd share a few storage and organizing solutions both from the internet and my own home.

The first one comes from Real Simple Magazine. They used an empty tissue box to store plastic bags.

I love this idea! I've always been meaning to make one of those hanging sleeves out of scrap fabric and elastic, but this would take up way less space and recycle twice as much!

How about using a chunk of old ladder as a pot rack as shown on Better Homes and Gardens?

Then there's this great mail sorter I found on Bright and Blithe.

And bonus? She made a tutorial so you can make one too!

Here's one from my own house. I don't have anywhere decent to hang pot holders in my kitchen. So, I used a magnetic curtain rod (for steel doors) and stuck it on my fridge. Then I used curtain hangers with clips on them to clip the pot holders up.

I love the idea of using an old shutter as a message board from Better Homes and Gardens.

I have a couple of smaller shutters that I have plans to do something similar to this with.

My mom has been making old windows into cabinets for years now. Here's the one in my house (currently housing Hubby's sport memorabilia and my hinged box collection).

I hope some of these ideas inspired you to organize. This week, I have a list and one room a night to clean and organize. I'll let you know how that goes! ;) Do you have any great organizational ideas to share?

Happy Crafting!

Old Microwave Stand Redo

So I was a busy beaver last weekend. Not that I actually got any cleaning or baking done like I planned, but I got lots of other stuff done. ;) The project that took me most of the weekend was a rehab of an old microwave stand. I am trying to actually clean and organize my craft room (porch) so that all the jewelry stuff is together, all the paint, etc. This stand sits in my craft room and is great for doing projects on since it has a drop leaf on it. (My mom gave me this for free. Woot!)

Here's the before:

And one with the leaf up:

Pretty ugly, eh? I was originally going to paint it an off-white, distress it and antique it, but at Junk Bonanza (see posts here and here), I saw several pieces that had been painted turquoise and distressed and antiqued, so I decided to go for it.

First I removed the hardware from the drawers. Then I sanded the whole piece with a palm sander. Then I painted the whole thing with cheap but effective paint from Walmart (Color Place: I believe the color was just called turquoise, I'll check and get back to you).

Here's what it looked like with a coat of paint:

Whew, that's bright! But don't worry, I'm not done yet! I took a piece of sandpaper and hand-sanded all the edges so they looked like this:

Then I took a foam brush and brushed on a dark walnut stain we had leftover in the garage. I put on the stain in small sections and then wiped it in circular motions with a rag. I did this over the whole piece and then let it dry. I didn't like the way it looked (still too bright), so I decided to brush on another coat with a bristle brush and just work it into the wood with the brush alone. This worked much better! To show you the difference, I took a pic of two drawer fronts. The bottom one is the one done with a rag wipe, the top one is after I used a bristle brush. Huge difference!

You can also see I spray painted the hardware with a hammered bronze spray paint (Rustoleum brand). When I put on the second coat of stain, I did it right over the hardware too. I think it helped it look much more aged.


Here's the finished product:

(Ignore the still messy craft porch. That's the cleaning I didn't get to this weekend.)

I love the result! That walnut stain definitely darkened up the turquoise paint a lot!!! What do you guys think? The whole project cost around $4. The only thing I bought was the half gallon of paint and I only used about half the can. I'm thinking now I might have to paint my tall freestanding cupboard in the craft room the same color!

* I plan on posting this tomorrow over at Shabby Chic Cottage for Transformation Thursday.

*Also linking up over at Infarrantly Creative's Roadkill Rescue Party!

Happy Crafting!

Inspiration Tuesay: A day late but with awesome junk!

I didn't end up posting my junky finds yesterday while trying to get the sun to peek out for better photos. No sun today either, so you'll have to settle for sub-part ones ( I know, but I'll try to make the sun come out tomorrow and retake them!) Anywho, I found lots of great stuff, all on the trinket sized side this time around.

I bought these adorable tin film canisters.


I plan on using vintage ephemera to alter a few of these. At least one of them I plan on turning into a pin cushion.

I found various bit of vintage silverware, all just begging to be made into jewelry.

I especially can't wait to turn the tea spoon into a locket pendant with stuff inside!

Vintage dominoes and mahjong tiles I plan on making jewelry out of also.

I'm not entirely certain, but those mahjong tiles may actually be made out of carved bone mounted onto bamboo.

Tiny cute perfume bottles I plan on altering with ephemera, jewels, and ribbons.

And finally, probably my favorite find was this antique silver hand mirror with my initial on it.

It's kinda hard to see, but there's a beautiful script E in the middle. Plus, the mirror itself is in great shape:

I had a blast at Junk Bonanza and would recommend it to anyone. There are several other flea/antique style markets coming up in the Twin Cities area to watch out for as well. I'll update this post with the info when I can find it in my mess! Also, I promise some finished crafts are coming soon! I am reorganizing my entire craft area right now, so it's hard to get at things.

Happy Crafting!

Junk Bonanza in Review

Junk Bonanza was awesome! There were three huge buildings of booths. Mom and I got there around 10:00 am and left at 5:00 pm. We were really rushing to see everything in the last building at the end of the show too! I do have some pics. They are not great ones because I forgot to bring my actual camera, so these are all from my cell phone. Today I'm going to highlight some of the cool booths and neat items I saw. I'll show you what I actually bought tomorrow.

Great display of camp items:

Awesome giant sign letters:

A pretty display of primitive white and silver items:

I love this vintage tin trunk that's been printed with names of streets and other landmarks from around the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

Hall tree made out of an old door:

A random crowd shot also showing some cute pumpkins made out of chenille:

There was so much cute stuff that I'm kicking myself for not getting pics of. There were peace signs made out of vintage ceiling tin, vintage roller skates used as wine bottle displays, and lots of fabulous junky furniture. I'm already dreaming of next year!

Don't forget, tomorrow for Inspiration Tuesday I'm going to post the stuff I got and unveil all my fabulous plans for it!

Happy Crafting!

One man's trash...

My 7 yr. old niece asked me several weeks ago to "please sew my net back together." The net in question is a cute green butterfly net that lives at their lake cabin. The same lake cabin where she catches frogs, moths, worms, fish, and every other imaginable creature she can and then tries to keep them. Of course, being the good auntie that I am, I said I would fix it and bring it back to her next week. This was four weeks ago. She asked me again last week if I had fixed it yet. I had forgotten all about it. I forgot about it as soon as I got home again, too. I thought of it today only because hubby and I are going up to see our nieces and nephew tonight. I realized I better get cracking if I am to get this "sewn back together." So I pulled out my needle and thanked the lucky stars even though I don't embroider and I haven't cross stictched in years, I have embroidery floss. I pick green to match the net. (Although one of my other nieces (8 yr. old) would tell me that it doesn't match because it's not exactly the same shade of green.) So, I managed to get the net all sewn up over lunch break.

During these last few weeks, I thought about telling my niece I couldn't fix the net, and then buy her a new one. But I realized two things. First, that it wouldn't be the same to her. Second, that maybe it's good to teach kids that not everything needs to be thrown away the second it gets broken. That maybe things can be fixed or reused in a different purpose. It's never too early to teach "reduce, recycle, reuse." Especially if you're teaching it in a practical way that's easily understood by all ages.

Happy Crafting!