...Or just make your own furniture!

We moved things around in our living room, and ended up with a wall that needed some covering. Brian got the idea in his head to make a little coffee table-type-thing, and made this. I was a little skeptical at first, but I love it now.

There is a store in our town called ReUse. It is a thrift store of sorts, full of building materials. The people who own it go around and tear down old homes and barns and sell all of the usable materials. It's pretty cool. Brian got this barn wood for 25 cents a linear foot at ReUse. He sanded it down until it was nice a smooth, and put it together. The wood is super beat up (which we like), and the old nail holes add additional charm. There's a piece of plywood below these top boards, which are covered on the sides by additional barn wood (shown below). You can't even tell it's there, although it's what's holding the table together. It's a beautiful piece of furniture. We'll be moving from this area someday fairly soon, so I'm planning to go around and tear down those barns myself if it means that we'll be able to make beautiful pieces like this!

Refinish Old Furniture

I so wish that I had a before picture of this chest of drawers. My family had this thing growing up, and it eventually ended up in my Mom's barn gathering dust. It was just hideous. It was a horrible yellow, and you would never have guessed it could turn out so beautiful. Brian saw it one day and had a hankering to refinish it, so we took it. He had no idea what he was getting himself into. Underneath that unsightly mustardy-yellow were several layers of both paint and lacquer. He spent day after day putting toxic substances on layer after layer, and after several hours of hard work, he got the dresser down to the original wood. He then simply touched it up with some polyurethane, and voila! A beautiful, country dresser. It's quite old, turns out, and the nails used to put it together were square, which we love. It is now the most prominent piece of furniture in our house, and we just love it.

Prints & Mats

Unbeknownst to most people who know him, Brian has a secret love for art. Every time we go to a decent-sized city, he inevitably seeks out the free museums, and we spend more time there than I thought possible. Whenever we visit the Met, for example, my feet ache so much by the end that I am just dying to sit down. I don't dislike art, don't get me wrong, not at all. I love art, but just not with the fervor that Brian does. His favorite form of art: prints. They're pretty amazing. These fantastic artists carve pictures into wood, then put ink on the wood and 'print' them onto paper. They are incredibly detailed, and the most amazing part is that the artist has to carve a negative of the picture they want to turn out on the paper. It is fascinating, really.
Anyway, we especially like prints that depict farm life, but we can't afford to get a nice copy of the print. So, Brian gets an electronic copy of the print and just prints it out on beige paper. It looks pretty good... so much so that you can't really tell a difference between the purchased print and the homemade ones in the picture above.

Mats and frames are expensive. We buy our frames at dollar stores or thrift stores and polish them up with black spray paint. Seriously a hideous frame can become beautiful with a little paint!
To solve the mat problem, we just use poster board to mat our pictures. In the case of the prints, we make a nice, torn edge on the picture, and place it over some plain black poster board. It looks great! I don't notice that the picture is on top of the mat, and it gives it the same effect. You could do this with other colors of poster board, but we stick with black. Other examples of pictures matted in this way:

Collages

This is the collage we made for my office. I had my office painted green (far less "clinical" than other offices, as one of my students pointed out). The color did make a huge difference, but my office still wasn't the haven that I wanted it to be. I realized that some things were unavoidable...such as the desk, computer, and filing cabinet, but the rest I could mess with. I have a nice, comfy chair in there that I take a nap in during lunch almost daily, which helps a lot. I decided I wanted to decorate my office like my home. In the past, I've decorated it with cast-offs, but I spend a lot of time at my office (WAY more than I would ever choose to), so it should feel comfortable. I hung up some prints (more coming about these in a later post!), but I had a huge wall that needed something to cover up its blankness. So, we made this collage. It's covered with pictures, words, and ideas all associated with a 'quaint' lifestyle, embodying the joy of all 4 seasons. I just love it. It hangs proudly on my wall, and I find myself staring at it dreamily when I should probably be engaged in my work.

I don't have any pictures of additional collages readily available at the moment, but this is actually a pretty prominent form of decoration in our home. We got a whole bunch of old magazines (either free or for 10 cents a piece), including Country Living and Martha Stewart Living. We are slowly working our way through the plethora of magazines, building up a huge catalog of pictures for collages. We sometimes cut edges, or my favorite thing to do is to tear them (licking the edges first makes for a great edge). Put the pictures together on the board/paper, then finish it with little pictures (to cover up holes), and words or phrases, and you're all set! I love collages. They are a feast for the eyes every time you see them.

Great Find!

 

This is our living room, or half of it. We enjoy a country style in our home (no surprise there), and even though it's a basement apartment, we have made it into a nice, cozy home. We love it there. It's only half-basement, because only one corner of the apartment is under ground. The rest is exposed. This is awesome, because we enjoy the comfort of a basement in that it never goes below 50 in the winter and stays nice and cool in the summer, but we also have a full back door and plenty of light. It's great. Brian is the mastermind behind our apartment's decoration and design. I can tell what goes together, but I can't position things in a room like he can. We're cheap (or "Thrifty", since cheap apparently denotes something negative), so we do most of the work ourselves. 

Brian and I are "Freegans"... I don't really know exactly what that means, but our friends consistently label us that way. Apparently there's a movement going on where people won't pay for any of their food. They dumpster dive, eat un-eaten food at restaurants, forage, and get food in any way besides pay for it. Brian was curious about it, so he found a "freegan test" online and took it, and ... drum roll please ... yep! We are officially freegans. Now, although I think free food is of course a great idea, I'm not willing to go as far as some people do. But we do get as much free food as we can, and our "freeganness" extends past food. 

We are always on the lookout for free anything. I think the biggest secret to finding good stuff free is to be willing to wait for it. Take our couch, for example. We had a little loveseat that we found at a thrift store that suited our situation sufficiently, but I hated it. It wasn't comfortable (Brian would definitely NOT agree with that statement), and it was ugly (Brian would agree with that statement). It was a terrible blue corduroy with other colors dispersed all over it. I tried to improve it by sewing a brown sheet over it, but that almost made it worse. We stuck with the sheet, however, because the blue didn't match a thing in the room. I could have gone to a lot of work to make a decent cover for it, but I didn't have any intention of keeping the thing very long, so I saw no reason to go to so much work. 

So we had that thing for a long while, until one beautiful day when we found the couch in the picture. I had just gotten off the bus at home, and Brian and I ran back to something I had seen only a few houses down the road. I had seen a fake leather couch with a huge, cozy chair to match. There was a sign on it, which I supposed would list a price, but to my amazement, the sign said "FREE"... music to my ears.  The chair was in perfect condition. We loaded it on top of our Subaru and Brian drove it home while I sat on the couch to keep our claim on it.

While I was waiting, I inspected the couch. It was great from the front, but the back was all torn out and ripped up. I ended up patching that up easily by tearing off some pieces from the back, patching the parts visible from the front and sides, and then I sewed a brown sheet (Yep, the same one that was on the loveseat) over the back so that it wasn't exposed. I wish I had some before and after photos. It looks great! We have it up against the wall, so you really can't tell anything was ever wrong with it. We love it!