Five Dollar Decor: Maps

I have a longstanding love affair with maps. I particularly like the pretty antique ones, but the ones pulled from the atlas are just as good, if you ask me. I like to look at them. I like to think about them. I just like having them around. They are cool. I am a map enthusiast.

I would do this

And you know who else was obsessed with maps? Winston Churchill. So you can wipe that condescending look off your face, smartypants. Maps are awesome.

I haven't done all of the projects in this week's Five Dollar Decor post, but I think I can honestly say that is only because I don't have the time to do all the projects I want to do. Someday, though. Someday.

Five Dollar Decor: Upcycling

This post was supposed to go up on Friday, but automated posting failed me, so here it is now!

"Upcycling" is a word I love. It has a nice ring to it, and is my favorite example of modern word invention. We aren't merely recycling something. Oh no. We are taking it and elevating it. We are upcycling.

One man's trash is another man's awesome oil lamp.

But, when you get down to brass tacks, upcycling just means "taking something and making it somehow awesomer," doesn't it? Exactly. And nothing could be more appropriate for the theme of "Five Dollar Decor" than taking things you already own and turning them into new things.

Five Dollar Decor: Wreaths

Fall, for some reason, always feels to me like the beginning of wreath season. Perhaps because when I was growing up, hanging a wreath was part of the late-fall preparation for Advent and Christmas. Perhaps because trick-or-treating meant seeing a lot of doors and a lot of wreaths. Whatever the reason, I think about wreaths most when the days start to get shorter and the weather starts to get colder.

Coffee filter wreath by Craftberry Bush

It's hard for me sometimes to find wreaths that I like. Too much clutter or kitsch and I'm instantly turned off. But a lot of people are out there finding ways to make beautiful wreaths with not a lot of clutter for not a lot of money.

Five Dollar Decor: Decorative Letters

It's back! After a nice, long, break, and by popular request, Five Dollar Decor has returned. I'd like to thank Pinterest for making it possible for me to once again return this feature to the blog. Without it, I'd still be stuck in the doldrums, with no inspiration for what to write about next.

And then... inspiration struck!

Everybody seems to be really into decorating with letters lately, and I am totally ok with that. You could go to Anthropologie or Urban Outfitters and pay beaucoup bucks for them, or you could go to your local craft store, spend an hour with some mod podge or paint, and whip up your own on the cheap.

I, predictably, favor the latter. Want to know how to do it? Here are five different styles for you to try.

Five Dollar Decor - Child's Room

I've been remiss lately with the Five Dollar Decor posts, I admit. You'd be surprised how tough it can be to come up with ideas when there's nothing that I find immediately inspiring.

I still wasn't terribly inspired when I chose this theme, but I got more and more excited as I went, and now I'm really sad that it hasn't got any applicability for Mr. Scrimp and I at this time.

We don't have kids of our own yet, but I started working in childcare around the same time I started high school and have been doing it ever since. Babysitting, nannying, teaching preschool--you name it, I've done it. If I ever teach preschool again, I'll use these ideas in my classroom. If not, I'll use them when Mr. Scrimp and I manage to successfully make a Tiny Scrimp. Scrimpette? Mini-Scrimp? Well, the point is, someday we'll have one, and I will be ready.

Five Dollar Decor: Framed Art

One of the things that I find makes a home feel most finished is hanging framed artwork on the walls. I don't even care what's in the frames, really--there's just something about one or two or twenty(!) frames, neatly hung, that says a place is lived in by someone who cares about their surroundings.

Thing is, framed artwork--if you just buy it--is really expensive, especially when you get into bigger pieces.

So, what you should do instead is make it!

Five Dollar Decor - Arts & Crafts Style

So, Mr. Scrimp and I were trying to figure out a good five dollar decor topic. We couldn't come up with one for the longest time, and then it hit me! Instead of talking about five variations on one thing--wall coverings, or whatever--what if I looked at five things you can add to or change about a room to make it feel more like a certain style of decor?

So this week, I dug up five things that you can do to make a room feel more Arts & Crafts. Now, when I say Arts & Crafts, I'm not talking about the thing you do with fingerpaint and popsicle sticks in kindergarten. No, I'm referring to the design movement pioneered by William Morris and John Ruskin at the turn of the century.

Think early Tiffany lamps, Stickley furniture, Frank Lloyd Wright, exposed wood beams, simple fabrics, geometric patterns, and leaded glass. The key here is simplicity. You should be able to replicate all of the following things for five dollars each.

Five Dollar Decor - Cardboard

Today, I'd like to talk about cardboard.

Mr. Scrimp and I have an entire closet that is filled from top to bottom with cardboard boxes from moving. We can't bring ourselves to throw them away (I have packrat tendencies). After all, the cardboard is perfectly good, and if we don't use it for a project, we'll need it again eventually anyway.

Well, I think it's time to break into the closet, because I've put together a list of some really great ways to use cardboard in your home.

Most of these involve a fair amount of DIY effort from you, but if you're like me, cardboard is going to cost you nothing because you have already accumulated so darn much of it. So it's a fair trade-off, I think.

Five Dollar Decor - Tape

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating proje

Geeks, mechanics, theater people, and college students the world around know the value of a good piece of tape. I use tape way more than I should, probably, but I can't help it. It has everything going for it--it's sticky, it's decorative (if used properly), it's versatile, it's cheap.

Today, I'd like to feature five decorative uses of regular old tape. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Five Dollar Decor - Paint

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project?  

When I first started writing these posts, Mr. Scrimp suggested I write something about paint. I was hesitant, because it's nearly impossible to find sufficient quantities of good paint for $5 or less, but while the title of these blogs is "five dollar decor," the idea is that you can redecorate one room for about $25, and you can definitely change the entire look and feel of a room with nothing but paint.

For people who live in apartments where you can't paint--well, this isn't for you. We aren't allowed to paint, but I still daydream about it. But if you live in a rental where painting is ok, or are fortunate enough to own your home, painting is a perfect and low-cost way to totally revamp a space.

So, here are five suggestions for ways to transform a room with paint. Some of them are pretty straightforward. Some of them, though, maybe you haven't thought of yet.

Five Dollar Decor - Bathroom

My most recent project, which I've been doing in little bits and pieces, has been redecorating our bathroom. Every time I go to the store, I keep an eye on clearance or thrifted items that might make our bathroom look a little more finished, and when I find one, I snap it up and put it in there.

I'd take pictures of the changes I've made, but I can't seem to find my camera anywhere, so for now we're just going to have to make do without.

A bathroom is really easy to transform with a few simple purchases. Start out, though, by clearing all the clutter and getting things really clean. Dirt is the easiest way to make a room look unfinished. Cleanliness is the easiest way to make it look new.

1. New Shower Curtain

When we moved in, there was a shower curtain already in the shower/tub. It was pretty hideous--torn, white plastic with blackened spots of mold and grime all over it. I picked up a new curtain at CVS (or maybe it was Walgreens) for $5 and had Mr. Scrimp put it up, because I'm pathetically short. I count it as one of the best five dollars I've ever spent on home decor.

Even if you buy a plain vinyl curtain, it can be decorated with paint or acrylic markers.

If your vinyl curtain is clean but the outer curtain needs to change (ours was actually pretty nice), you can also find those quite cheap at thrift stores. Alternatively, you can make one--find a clearance fabric you like, measure the distance from your curtain rod to the spot you'd like them to hit when they hang straight. Add three inches to the top and bottom for hemming, and that's the height of your curtains. Measure from one end of your shower to another and add an additional four to six inches for some fullness. Hem, and hang.


If you're willing to spend some extra money, you can find all sorts of really beautiful or interesting shower curtains online with a price range of anywhere from $10 to $50. The one pictured here, from Target, is $9.99.


2. New Bath Mat

I lucked out on this one. In the home goods clearance section at TJ Maxx, I found a woven cotton mat that matched our bathroom colors perfectly and had been marked down to $3. If you're willing to wait on sales or clearance, I think you can probably score a similar deal and keep this item under $5.

How you choose a bath mat or bathroom rug can totally define the look of your bathroom. If you get something that coordinates with the walls and floor, you'll keep a neutral, one-color sort of look going. Or, you can get something that contrasts and adds a really beautiful splash of color to an otherwise drab room. Find something that you'll be happy to see when you stumble into the bathroom in the morning.

I found the one pictured here at Amazon for $9.99 in about 30 seconds of looking. They're definitely out there, and cheap.

You could also consider repurposing a small rug that you currently have somewhere else.

3. Line Insides of Cabinets


 A few years ago, Martha Stewart had a bit on this. I can't find it now, of course, but other people have since taken up the torch.

This is one bathroom project still on my list that I haven't yet accomplished, but it's definitely happening. Find a pretty wallpaper, wrapping paper, or scrapbook paper and use it to line the inside of your medicine cabinet and other bathroom cabinets. Hopefully you don't have the kind of nosy guests who snoop around in your cabinets, but just in case you do, give them something pretty to look at--and if they don't, give yourself something pretty to look at.. especially if you live with someone who chronically leaves cabinets standing open.

There are a couple of ways to do this--sallyTV does it with foam core and rubber cement. Design*Sponge, whose final result is what you see pictured here, used spray adhesive and wallpaper.

If you have concerns about being able to remove your work, you could also try fabric with spray starch, or contact paper.

4. Storage

The best way to keep a bathroom clean and happy is to make sure that everything in there has a place to be. You can buy plastic adhesive hooks at major pharmacy chains for just a couple of dollars. I mentioned last Friday how easy and cheap it is to find clear plastic boxes (with lids) that are perfect for tucking into small spaces like the area under your bathroom sink, and hold all sorts of things.

Every time I'm out shopping clearance sales or thrift stores, I also keep my eyes open for small containers, tumblers, soap dishes, or what-have-you that will fit inside of our medicine cabinet so that all the things in there can stay nicely organized. I recently picked up a great ceramic tumbler to keep our toothbrushes in for a mere $1.50 (it had a chip in it, that we never even notice because I turned it towards the back).

5. Decorate

Obviously, this whole post has been about decoration to some degree. I mean something a little less practical here, though. Find something to put in your bathroom that is there simply because you like to look at it. This could be wall art, a small sculpture, a piece of ceramic, a potted plant--anything that is beautiful and that you just, well, like. After all, you spend a lot of time in your bathroom. Shouldn't you be looking at something pleasant while you're in there?

This doesn't have to cost you any money at all. You probably have plenty of things in your house that don't quite work where they are, or could stand to be moved around. Look around and see what you've got.

I picked up a medium-sized ceramic sculpture of a bird the other day for $2. I couldn't figure out where to put it, until I hit on putting it in our bathroom on the small table under our window. It serves absolutely no purpose, but it's there, being pretty, and making me smile whenever I see it. I call that a $2 well spent, and a bathroom well-decorated.

Five Dollar Decor - Organizing

Organizing is simultaneously my favorite and least favorite thing. I love to sit down and organize things. I hate and am terrible at keeping them that way.

I'm often struck by the huge change that can be made in a space by doing very little. This week, I'm going to continue with the getting ready for the new year theme by talking about some quick and inexpensive ways to make dramatic changes in cluttered spaces around the house.

1. Use a Hanging Shoe Organizer

...and I don't mean for shoes. We have a shoe rack in our front closet that my mother-in-law gave us. Because we tend not to buy shoes unless we have a repeating need which none of our current pairs can fill, all the shoes we wear can fit on that one rack with a couple of spots left over.

We also have a hanging shoe organizer in our bedroom closet. After months of being frustrated by overstuffed dresser drawers, socks on the floor, and sweaters taking up most of the hanger space we had, I hung an organizer in our closet. Ours has several sizes of compartment, some larger and some smaller. In half the smaller compartments, I tuck all of Mr. Scrimp's clean, matched socks, and in the other half I put all of his folded undershirts. The larger compartments are big enough to hold sweaters, either rolled or folded.

Organizers run the gamut in both price and quality. Ours was from Bed Bath & Beyond and cost about $15 (I already had it on hand, it was a gift), but I've used the cheap ones in the past in the same way and had no problems. You could try using this one from Organize2Fit.com, which is only $4.99.

2. Sort Your Mail

Mr. Scrimp and I throw our mail into a basket on a small table,and it inevitably ends up in a pile that needs to be sorted through before bills can be paid or letters can be read and replied to. Apartment Therapy suggests buying a small plate rack/organizer and sticking it on your desk or front table to hold letters. Because it's designed to hold plates, it will hold larger, sturdier envelopes just as well as small ones.

The photo at Apartment Therapy uses a $10 rack from the Container Store, but you can get a similar one from Ace Hardware for $4.58.

3. Bottle Things Up

I spent four hours today deep-cleaning our house. I scrubbed floors, sorted papers, reorganized things, and wound up, like I always do, with little piles of things that don't really have a specific place to go--pins, thumbtacks, twist-ties, spare buttons, and the like.

I also have, in my medicine cabinet, a fairly large assortment of accumulated pill bottles, most of which have one pill left over from treatments finished or forgotten, painkillers unneeded, or cough medicine gone bad. I'm heading to the craft store tomorrow or Monday to pick up a couple of sheets of scrapbook paper and put into practice this fabulous idea over on Curbly, which involves covering prescription bottles with scrapbook paper and nice labels, and using them to hold all those little odds and ends that don't have any other home.

Even if they just end up back in a junk drawer or stowed on a shelf, I'll know where to find those things the next time I need them, and where to put them the next time I go on a cleaning jag that turns up half a pound of doodads that I have no home for but can't throw away.

And, as an added bonus, all those prescription bottles that I never throw away will also get sorted and dealt with!

4. Boxes in Kitchen Cupboards

I will admit, there is one exception that I allow when it comes to our rule about never storing food in plastic. We have a very small closet/pantry space for our dry goods, and for quite some time it was a horrific mess. Things were sorted more or less by category of food (baking, canned goods, spices, etc.) but the shelves, while narrow, are deep, and every time we cooked we ended up making a mess of things that, more often than not, never got cleaned up. After a while we were just tossing things on top of other things and it was a disaster.

Then I remembered that I had a couple of plastic shoebox-sized totes from my dorm room days that were sitting unused in our guest room. I recruited them for kitchen duty, spent 45 minutes reorganizing, and ended up with a closet that was unrecognizably different from its former self.

This is a great way to bring an immediate visual change to a small pantry space while also organizing it for easy access to whatever it is you need at the moment. With all your spice jars in one box, all your teas in another, a third holding bags of flour and sugar, and so on and so forth, you'll not only be able to locate all your food, but you'll be able to fit even more inside.

My boxes are Rubbermaid that I think I picked up at CVS a few years ago. I also recommend these ones from The Container Store, at $1.29 apiece.

5. Creative Shelving

Our lack of shelf space isn't just a problem in the pantry. With the exception of our kitchen, which has far more shelving than it ought to have given its tiny size, Mr. Scrimp and I can never seem to find enough shelves to hold all of our books and knicknacks. The next time I find a guitar case at a thrift store, I'd really like to have Mr. Scrimp bolt it to the wall in our guest room so that I can turn it into a bookshelf like the one pictured here, which was a project featured on RecyclArt. Seriously, how completely cool is that? (Come to think of it, I might have mentioned this on the blog before. I just continue to think it's an incredible idea.)

If nothing else, I feel like this should inspire you to look at objects around your home as having new potential to become an organizational aid, and you'll end up with a house that is clean, decluttered, organized, and ready for a new year to begin.

Five Dollar Decor - Winterize

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project? 

Christmas is in a week. If you haven't got your decorating done, well, I can't look too much askance at you, because we haven't even put ornaments on our tree yet (I know, I know.)

But I do feel like at this point, even if you haven't actually put them up, you know what your holiday decorations are going to be. So, I'm not going to write about Christmas decor.

Instead, I'm going to write about that awful time after the holidays. You know what I'm talking about. Christmas decorations come down, the New Year is over, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, it's still winter. And if you live in the North, like Mr. Scrimp and I do, it will still be winter for up to five more months. It's time to settle in for more cold, some breathtakingly beautiful weather, and a lot of dreariness.

So, once Christmas is over, why not get ready for January by freshening up your home with these touches? My favorite thing to do in January is to celebrate the new year by doing all I can to create a clean and fresh feeling at home. It's a good time to clean and organize things, and if you're going to be redecorating, I suggest using a lot of white, light blue, or yellow accents. Those colors just scream "clean and new" to me, and bring a little bit of winter inside without any of the grayness or chill.


1. Forced Paperwhites

These are a January-February staple for me. Delicate, sweet-smelling, and ridiculously easy to grow, you can find bulbs for cheap at most grocery, hardware, and Wal-Mart type stores, and plant them in any spare bowl, planter, or dish that you have lying around. This article at About.com has step-by-step instructions for how to do it.

(Photo from Holland Acres)

2. Window Covers

Rather than keeping blinds and heavy curtains up that block out the scant sunlight, why not take them down and instead cover your window glass with clear contact paper or light fabric applied with starch? These will allow light to come through while still preserving your privacy.

Clear contact paper can be purchased at most drug stores, Wal-Mart, and places of that ilk. It is removable without much hassle, and you can decorate it at will. Design*Sponge suggests drawing on it with a white paint pen, as in this photo.

If you live near an Ikea, you can also get frosted paper specifically designed to be applied to windows without adhesive, for $4.99.

3. Candles

The dollar store sells bags of small votive candles. While they generally come in nondescript tin holders, they pop right out and can go in any assortment into whatever clear glass holders you have if you don't like the tin. Group as many as you can fit onto a thrifted or on-hand silver tray or gilt-framed mirror and light them all at once.

This is great on a dining table, kitchen table, coffee table, bureau, desk, mantel, or, well, pretty much anywhere with enough room to safely display candles. The clean white and silver are lovely during the short days, and the extra, soft light will make the long nights a little more pleasant.

(Photo from Better Homes and Gardens)

4. Reconsider Christmas

Look at your Christmas decorations. Have you got any that could be tweaked and de-Christmasized a bit to hang around and be plain winter decorations? A green garland, a string of white lights, or an arrangement of silver glass balls in a clear jar or bowl don't necessarily need to be strictly for Christmas. When you take down your Christmas things, reserve one or two of the least explicitly Christmassy ones and try putting them in a new spot or adding a new element or two to increase their longevity. Best part? It's free!

5. Outerwear as Decor

You're wearing scarves, gloves, boots, and hats anyway. Rather than tossing them in a closet, why not make them into a design element? Install a row of Command hooks (or nails, or pegs, or anything that you can hang something on) in a hallway. Hang an assortment of brightly colored scarves (or bags, or hats, or mittens on strings) on the hooks.

You can change the items on the hooks out once a week for a fresh look, rearrange the colors, hang a mix of knit and cotton scarves to play with texture--the possibilities are pretty much endless and make use of things that you already own to bring some colors into your hallway or entrance room.

(Photo from Howstuffworks.com)

Five Dollar Decor - Christmas Ornament Extravaganza!

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project?

I'm going to be doing something a little different this week. Rather than featuring whole-room decor, I'd like to focus on Christmas ornaments. Also, I'll be doing multiple posts over the weekend, highlighting a different style of Christmas decoration in each.

Mr. Scrimp works near a very high-end, expensive mall, and I will occasionally wander around it to get ideas. I noticed that the emphasis at the big pricey home goods stores this year seems to be on things that look homemade--lots of felt, lots of yarn, lots of natural materials. Well, why pay $5 an ornament for faux-homemade when you can get the real thing for less?

For a very traditional, old-American Christmas look, stick with reds and whites and avoid glitter. Shades of red and cream with a lot of greenery and hints of silver will make a sophisticated statement without giving up any of the jump-out-at-you color that makes Christmas so distinctive.

These aren't the grade-school-craft felt ornaments of your childhood. These are beautiful, stylish, and charmingly old-fashioned. They have a type of Depression-era chic to them that I can't help but love.



1. Fabric Balls

These, of course, come from the perpetually perfect Martha. She made hers with taffeta, satin, and velvet, and all sorts of fancy-schmancy trims. I think they're very pretty that way (who am I to quibble when Martha says something must be so?) but I saw something similar over at Crate & Barrel that were covered with felt and yarn and looked much simpler, and I honestly liked them better.


2. Peppermint Garland

This project from Good Housekeeping is so simple they don't even have a tutorial. Just buy a couple of bags of individually wrapped peppermint lozenges and glue them together end-to-end with a hot glue gun. I love the look of striped peppermints but can never finish eating one, so this is a great way to keep them around withoutbeing tempted to actually pop one in my mouth.


3. Popsicle Stick Sled

The year I was born, a family friend gave my parents one handmade popsicle stick sled ornament for each of us, painted Radio Flyer red and embellished with our names and the year in silver paint. Well, that was 25 years ago, and now mine is the only one that is still intact.

In keeping with the retro Christmas theme of this post, I'm including this craft, and not just because of my sudden wave of 80's nostalgia, but because that bright, cheery wooden sled is a classic emblem of American Christmas Past. This tutorial from Family Fun suggests using pre-colored popsicle sticks from the craft store to save painting time. (I'm horrified that they made it yellow. Everyone knows the best sleds are red, especially at Christmas.)


4. Add Some Silver

Well listen, I didn't say this was going to be a post made up exclusively of handmade ornaments. A Christmas tree isn't really decorated till it's got a little sparkle going. For a modern-vintage look, stick with thinner tinsel garlands, tinsel icicles (used sparingly, or silver glass ball ornaments, and go for silver, because originally, tinsel was actually made out of metal. Check Goodwill and the Salvation Army, too--a lot of times around this season you can find boxes of antique tinsel. You can also almost always find boxes of antique ornaments.

I'm planning to swing by the dollar store this weekend and pick up a pack of silver ornaments and experiment with antiquing them with glaze as in this post at Dollar Store Crafts. I'm hoping it will make those lackluster, cheap ornaments look somewhat similar to mercury glass. If it works out, I'll let you know and post a tutorial!

5. Ice Skate Ornaments

Like most little girls, I had fond dreams at one point of becoming a figure skater. My mom duly enrolled me in figure skating lessons and dropped me off at the rink, trusting my older brothers to see me safely to figure skating before they went to their hockey practice.

She should have known better. As soon as she was gone, my brothers cornered me and impressed on me the solemn knowledge that hockey is way cooler than figure skating, and that if I wanted to be cool, I could only do it by playing hockey. I worked my six-year-old wiles on the hockey coach and got him to let me on the pee-wee team in lieu of figure skating lessons.

And so my dreams of being a figure skater were squashed under the weight of fifty million pounds of hockey gear. But they came back to me when I saw these.

Modeled after vintage handmade ornaments, these ice skates from Not Quite Vintage  might be the most adorable homemade ornament I've seen on the Internets to date. I am definitely going to be making at least one set of these, and possibly more. Look at the pom-poms! And the sequins! Look!

I'm going to run away from home and be a figure skater.

Five Dollar Decor - Kitchen

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project?

After spending a solid fifteen and a half thousand hours in my kitchen yesterday preparing Thanksgiving dinner, I thought that today would be a perfect day to highlight some quick, cheap, and easy ways to make over a kitchen.

1. Kitchen Rugs

Replacing kitchen floors is costly, difficult, and generally not allowed for renters. A much easier way to deal with an unsightly or tired kitchen floor is to cover it with a sturdy and durable rug.

I personally am a huge fan of Ikea's Signe flatwoven rug, which can be purchased for a mere $2.99. Unfortunately, it's not available online, so if you want that specific one you'll have to make a pilgrimage for it (our nearest Ikea is in Pittsburgh, 2 hours away).

2. Painted Furniture

Even if you can't paint your walls or floor, it's quick, easy, and cheap to paint furniture. This is a great trick for getting a completely mismatched collection of chairs to look intentionally matched, as in this photo from Apartment Therapy. Of course, a kitchen table could be painted to match or coordinate.

If your kitchen, like ours, is too small for that much furniture, you could still add a fresh splash of color by painting a stepladder, stool, or narrow shelf and finding a home for it in a corner.

3. Kitchen Tools as Art

The painted bundt pans used as decor in this photo from PointClickHome actually almost made the cut to be in last week's Five Dollar Decor post, but I think they fit better here, in a kichen-specific post. 

Other things that would make an excellent decorative display include antique utensils (potato mashers, spatulas, etc.), wooden spoons, thrifted mugs, trivets, and potholders. For a more modern look, choose items all of the same color, or paint items a single color so that all match. For a more eclectic or antique style, mix and match as much as you like.

4. Tea Towels

Tea towels and dish towels are available in abundance everywhere from the Dollar Tree to Bed, Bath & Beyond. For $5 at the dollar store you can locate five dish towels or tea towels in a variety of surprisingly stylish designs and colors.

Hang them off the stove, on the wall as decoration, or over the windows as makeshift curtains, as in this photo from Xochi Santa Fe. Cover a cabinet or the panels on a door with them. If your kitchen, like mine, is bland-looking and colorless, this can make a huge difference.

5. Chalkboards

Whether unfinished and rustic, mounted inside of a modern and stylish frame, or painted directly onto the wall, a chalkboard in a kitchen is a happy thing. Shopping lists, notes, phone messages, recipes, reminders, and doodles--whatever it is that ends up there, it will reflect your home and family, which is what a good kitchen ought to do.

For those of us living in apartments where painting isn't an option, cheap chalkboards are available for a few dollars at craft stores and can be removed from their frames and mounted any way you like. For a custom size or shape, find a piece of plywood that takes your fancy and paint it with chalkboard paint. Or, take it into another room and paint the side of a bookshelf, the top of a table, or a flat mirror frame.

If you own or are allowed to paint, consider covering a door panel, a cupboard, or even an entire wall with chalkboard paint. I love this photo from Design*Sponge for inspiration.

If you don't like black or chalkboard green, RowHouse blog has a recipe for homemade chalkboar paint in the color of your choosing using nothing but a cup of latex paint and some dry unsanded tile grout mix.


Tune in next week for another exciting episode of Five Dollar Decor!

Five Dollar Decor - Unexpected Wall Coverings

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project?

If you live in an apartment or other rental property, there's a fair chance that you're going to be limited in your decorating options. Wallpaper, for instance, is right out. Occasionally you might get a landlord who will let you paint, but those tend to be few and far between. In general, if you rent an apartment, your walls are probably white or beige and, while you might be allowed to put nail holes in them, you can't paint.

So, what can you do to cover up the expanse of blank wall that you're inevitably stuck with? You can hang artwork, sure, but although posters and prints aren't always pricey, frames are.

In the spirit of recycling and innovation, I have collected five ideas for room-changing wall treatments that are rental-friendly, inexpensive, and unique. The best advice I can offer you for how to use them is to create BIG pieces. I lived in an apartment once where we didn't plan out our artwork well and ended up with a bunch of too-small frames and shelves scattered around the walls, and all they did was emphasize the negative space instead of filling it.

1. Hanging Carpet

This is the most common and therefore the least unexpected of these suggestions, but it is still probably not your go-to idea for when you are trying to come up with a way to hide the vast blank beigeness of your living room. Carpets go on the floor, after all--or DO they? If you're lucky, you might own a small carpet or rug that is pretty enough to go up on your wall, which will make this a free project. If not, a little dedication and time will probably lead you to a cheap one at a thrift store or yard sale. Surprisingly, I wasn't able to find a picture of this, and I have no carpets hanging in my home at this time (mainly for lack of carpets to hang), so you'll have to use your imagination.

2. Coffee Filter Art
 
Yes, that's right, I said coffee filter.  Try painting or coffee-staining these, cutting them into various sizes, and thumbtacking them to your wall in a large, swirling design. If you plan it out a little bit before you start tacking things up, you can end up with something that looks like a gigantic swirl of dandelion seeds flying across your wall , and you can cover a huge amount of space with a single packet of filters. (Photo and concept from the haystack needle via Daily Danny)

3. Scrapbook Paper

A sheet of 12x12" scrapbook paper runs between 25 and 50 cents at Joann's and Michaels, depending on  sales. The DIY Maven over at Curbly.com mounted hers on 12x12" squares of styrofoam and covered the edges with ribbon, which she said should run about $50 for all materials.

$50? Really? I'm planning to do this, and the way I plan to do it is to mount my scrapbook paper on foam display board, which should run me about $2 at the Dollar Tree, or $4 if I want to double up my squares of foam display board to get a similar thickness as the styrofoam.

Make at least four of these and hang them in a tightly clustered group. Remember, the goal this week is to cover as much space as possible for as little money as possible.

4. Tin Cans

Now we're getting into the crazy and fun stuff. I hate throwing away cans because I always imagine that someday I will come up with a use for them. Well, now I have.  Peel off the labels, wash everything up, and then group them on your wall for a piece of functional modern decor.

Obviously this isn't going to work with every decorating style--sadly, I don't think it would look right in my house at all--but this would look fabulous with utra-modern, industrial, or 50's and 60's retro decor. If you painted the cans instead of leaving them silver, that would probably also make a fair amount of difference and would make this a more versatile look. (Photo and instructions from GreenUpgrader)

5. Mystery Object

Ok, this isn't really a mystery, but I think it's so clever and has such a huge visual impact, that I'm going to show you the picture first and let you figure it out.

Are you ready? Here's the picture:

Can you tell what it is that's looking so cool up there on that wall?

Ok, ok, I'll tell you--it's leftover styrofoam trays from grocery store-purchased fruits, meats, and vegetables, stuck to the wall with silver pushpins.

I can't even find words to express how cool I think this is, taking useless garbage and turning it, with a minimum of work, into a fantastic piece of decor. I'm going to have to start saving styrofoam.

(New York Times, via  Curbly)

I passed up a bunch of really fun and unique ideas for this post, including wall art made of cutlery, hanging collections of painted bundt pans or colorful colanders, and ConTact paper stripes and polka dots. Try thinking outside the box--anything can become art if you hang it on the wall and arrange it thoughtfully.

If you rent your home: Always be sure of the rules before you start decorating. Our landlord is ok with nail holes, but not all of them are. Be sure you know what you're doing before you begin.

Five Dollar Decor - Celebrating Nature

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project?

Well, another week is gone, and it's time for the weekend. If you're like me and someone who loves you gave you a subscription to Martha Stewart Living at some point, you have seen the ridiculous amounts of greenery that litter her home(s). Well, I have plants in my house, but I can't afford two dozen houseplants to put in my Indoor Garden Corner Nook Thing, or whatever she calls it.

That being said, I am a huge nature lover, and I would love to theme a room around the things I find most beautiful in the natural world.

1. Framed Faux Foliage

Ok, I'll cop to getting a little carried away with the alliteration there. This idea comes from The Red Chair Blog via Dollar Store Crafts. Once again, you may need to dig around to find a frame that keeps this project under $5 for you--but then again, you may not. It depends on the scale you're going for.
 
I recommend tea-staining the paper you mount the foliage on in order to get the antiqued look that is so popular over at Design*Sponge. Or, you could borrow a page from their book and try more creative backgrounds--why not brown paper, from the back of a grocery bag, or leftover scrapbook paper, or wallpaper? The sky's the limit. If you live in an area where location and weather aren't conspiring against you, you can of course make the project even cheaper (but less instantly gratifying) by using real foliage.

Alternatively, you could splurge on some paint and antique the silk flowers, or paint them some color other than green, or use them as stencils. When you're done, hang them in groups, as in this photo from TheNest.com.

2. Laboratory Garden

Your $5 here is going to be spent at the dollar store or the thrift store, where a little digging will pretty easily find you five glass vases--narrow and cylindrical, or, if you can find them, the stranger and more bulbous shapes that are reminiscent of a steampunk mad scientist's lab.

Head outside--even if you live in the city, you should be able to pull this off. Right now it's November, and I live in the land of the Lake Effect, so greenery is getting sparse, but it would be just as lovely to fill these with tall, stripped branches or boughs of berries. In the winter, you could change it up and stick some evergreens in there or something. In the spring, early flowers and greenery could take over, and in the summer you could do anything that grows, of course.

Cluster the vases on a side table, or spread them out along a larger table or mantel.


3. Branch Hooks

I'm going to be getting together with my husband and seeing about putting together a photo tutorial for this, because we want some for our house. You can purchase these for about $40 a pop from Live Wire Farm, or you can make your own with some carefully chosen branches, a power drill, and a couple of screws. (via Haute Nature)

4. Stones

This article in Country Living, of all places, suggests filling two large glass jars--one with stones, and one with blown eggs. I'm not sure I would do the eggs, because country living isn't exactly the aesthetic I go for when it comes to decorating, but you can go pretty crazy with stones. Fill a jar with small rocks from your front yard. Take a day trip out to the country and dig up a giant flat stone to put on your coffee table. Make a centerpiece of river rocks (which you can buy by the bag at some dollar stores). It's quick, it's simple, and it's beautiful.

A google image search revealed some beautiful photos by people who have done something along these lines. I'm sharing my favorite, which came from EcoSalon.


5. Leaf Mobile

By and large, I associate mobiles with babies. You know, they hang over a crib. That's where they go.

Well, yeah, if they're made of felt and have clowns on them, they do.

I'm using the term "mobile" here loosely. I'm not suggesting you sit down and spend your weekend going crazy making something that spins around in the wind or anything like that. My aunt once made a much simpler version (and I wish I had a photo) by stringing fall leaves on fishing line and attaching each line individually to the ceiling with a thumbtack. The leaves were staggered so that as you walk into the room it looks as though, hovering above the table, someone had frozen autumn leaves in time as they were in the process of falling.

You could do it that way, over a dining room or coffee table. You could string them up against a wall as an art piece. You could get crazy and cover an entire wall with strings of leaves.



I know that a lot of these ideas might not be up your alley. It's really, really, really easy to overdo decor in this theme and end up with some sort of messy, cluttered, "rustic" look, and I hate that. So while I might not implement all five of these ideas in one room, I would happily scatter all five throughout my home.

Five Dollar Decor - Books

Every Friday, I'll be posting Five Dollar Decor--five ideas for interior decorating that can be achieved by spending only five dollars. For five dollars, you can add one new element to your in-home design. For twenty-five, you can revamp an entire room around a new theme. Hmm... a trip to Starbucks, or a weekend redecorating project?

 
My husband and I both majored in English, and have a soft spot in our hearts for books. Generally we're both pretty opposed to any sort of decorating that involves destroying a book, but these are so gorgeous that I decided to link to them anyway. Depending on the project, you could use a cheap copy of your favorite book (I've been able to find most of mine for less than $1.50 at Half.com), a dollar store romance novel, a comic book, or something else you have just lying around.

1. Wall Covering

We live in an apartment and can't paint or paper our walls, but you could cover an accent wall with individual pages of a book for a beautiful and unique look using nothing but sticky-tack.(Photo and inspiration from Frolic)

There are several ways to mix this idea up. Instead of covering an entire wall, you could just put up blocks of pages instead of framed artwork. If you have some ink and rubber stamps, you could stamp a page here and there. Or you could do a light watercolor or acrylic wash over some of the pages to scatter in some pops of color.

2. Floating Shelf

This one appeals to me, because as many books as I might use up for decorating, I will still have more left over and we never have enough shelf space. This creates a shelf out of a book, creating an illusion of floating books on your wall.

Design from Instructables 

3. Flying Book Art

The photo here comes from an in-store display at Anthropologie, and was taken by Casasugar. Here, covers were removed from old books, they were glued together, individual pages were folded down in a repeating design, and the books were hung by the ceiling by the holes in the centers.

You could do this, or, if you didn't want to remove the cover, you could simply fit the opened book over a length of rope or ribbon and fold or roll the pages to keep it open as it hangs. Great for an office, reading nook, or kid's bedroom.


4. Framed Books

Want some nice artwork for your walls, but too broke to purchase any and unwilling to actually destroy a whole book to make your own? Why not borrow an idea from Good Housekeeping and put your book in a shadow box? Craft stores regularly run huge sales on frames, and you can also check thrift stores for nice frames that you can salvage (usually the art is appalling; try to visualize the frame without that awful oil painting of the Easter Bunny). 

If you can't find a shadow box and book together within the $5 budget, and don't want to bump your spending up by a few dollars, you could imitate the aesthetic this project by simply attaching the book to the wall (although this will involve damaging it a little) and hanging an open frame around it.

5. Book Wreath

The fifth and last Five Dollar Decor idea for this week  is actually a wreath made of book pages, with photos and instructions by Living With Lindsay. I'm not actually a big wreath person myself, but if you are, I think you'll dig this one.

This could be made in multiple sizes, and even multiple shapes. If you already have a room decorated in a books-and-paper theme, this could be a great finishing touch.



And that's all for this week's Five Dollar Decor. Happy weekend!