Thrifty Inspiration

Check out the amazing thriftiness these ladies have been up to!

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Diana at Our Vintage Home stuck foam letters and numbers on old milk bottles and painted them.  They look wonderful!  Our Vintage Home is becoming one of my favorite blogs.  Diana does some amazing projects and takes beautiful pictures of her home. 

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Rinni at Rinnie's Playground gave an old triple dresser a beautiful blue paint job. 

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Jennifer at Blissfully Ever After painted letters onto the fabric liners of her industrial baskets for a Restoration Hardware look at a fraction of the price.

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Speaking of chores...Anne at Hello Newman's came up with this clever and cute solution for keeping up with weekly chores.  She used scrapbook paper and magnets.

All of these projects are fantastic and I'm definitely adding a couple of them to my to-do list!

Any thrifty projects up your sleeve this weekend?

Have a good one!

70x40 Mirror for $45

I completely forgot to post this last week, but here it is:  my finished mirror in our dining area!  (I use the term "area" loosely, because as you can see, it's tiny.  Our couch is practically in it.  It's more of a dining nook.)  It took me about a year of living in this house to realize that that big wall needed something flat on it like artwork or a mirror.  Since our first floor is so small and only has one window,  I thought that a mirror would help open the space up.  My only problem was finding a giant, affordable mirror.  I'd seen tutorials for how to frame a bathroom mirror all over the blog world, so I decided to try the same thing with a mirror that wasn't in a bathroom. 

It took no time to find someone trying to get rid of a frameless bathroom mirror on Craigslist.  I bought my 70 x 40 mirror for $30, and I had it hung within a couple days (I hung it with mirror clips just like you would hang a mirror in a bathroom).  I wish I could say that it took me the same amount of time to get it framed.  I'm so embarrassed to say that I had that mirror hanging for almost two years before I got around to getting it framed!  I don't know what took me so long!  It was just one of those things that kept getting pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

When I finally got around to getting it framed it was soooooo easy.  I bought $15 of molding and had my uncle cut it with his miter saw.  I painted the molding with white semi-gloss paint so that it would match the rest of my molding and I used these materials to attach the molding to my mirror.

 Double-sided duct tape, liquid nails, and spackle. 

I alternated beads of liquid nails and strips of duct tape on the backside of the molding.  The duct tape just held the molding in place while the liquid nails was drying.

After all the pieces of molding were on, I filled in the corners with spackle, smoothed them down, and painted over them.

You can't even tell that it's not one piece or that it didn't come ready-made from a store.

 Here's a before shot...before my chandy update, before the table runner, before the framed mirror:

This mirror was the last big project on our first floor.  All I really have left to do now is change out some accessories in our kitchen and I will be "done" with one whole floor of our house.  Yippee!

I'll be linking up to:

$4.50 Dresser Facelift

I'm in the middle of at a complete standstill with redecorating our guest bedroom.  

There's no before because I did this a while ago...just imagine it without the metal things in the corners of the drawers. ;)

I haven't been able to do much, but the one thing I have gotten done is this little change up on a dresser that moved into the guest room from our bedroom.  This dresser was my Memaw's, and my Mom and I painted it black and changed the hardware a few years ago.  When I moved it into the guest bedroom it became more of a focal point, so I wanted to do something to it to make it more interesting.

I originally saw this little project at Kara Passlay Designs.  She used duct tape on a dresser to give it a little more character.  Her dresser was for a movie set, and I'm betting that it didn't matter that she used duct tape because no one would ever see it up close.

I decided to find something other than duct tape to get the same affect on my dresser.  I originally wanted to use hardware.  I thought it would be easy to find.  I was wrong.  I'm going to keep looking, but for right now I'm pleased with what I found.

I found little 4"x4" squares of thin metal for $4.19 in the woodworking section of A.C. Moore to fashion my own "hardware".

I made the stencil for the shape I wanted out of painter's tape so it wouldn't slide around while I was cutting.

I used an xacto knife to cut out the shape.  I left room on the corners to fold over the edges of the dresser drawer.

 I sprayed the back of the metal with spray adhesive, aligned it with the corner, folded down the tabs and smoothed everything out.

 The dresser definitely has more character and my "hardware" adds some interest....now if I could just finish the rest of the room.

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