How-To: Conventional Item - Creative Use

Through my adventures in home decor I always love finding a creative use for a conventional item and also reusing what I have in a new way. Here are two examples of fun ways to use seemingly simple items.

Item 1: Wall Decor in a new way.
I was looking for something fun and graphic to go on the wall in our bedroom as a centerpiece above the bed. I wandered into Pier One Import and found a wire leaf basket that is normally used to hold fruit or other items. Background info: while in Architecture school, our professors would always take our finished models and turn them upside down or on its side and then proceed to hand it back to us and say "there, that is how it should look", namely, the lesson in that is: always challenge your ability to look at things differently. So, I took the wire leaf basket and turned it on its side as if it were to be hung on the wall and AMAZING! I grabbed the last two baskets and had Scott nail them onto the wall centered on the headboard. I love the way that they look on the wall, they add height to room by drawing your eye up to the ceiling, they emit a leaf shadow onto the wall from the sunlight, and by pairing two baskets it repeats the element and reinforces the design creating a graphic effect.

The original item used to hold everyday items.

The new use for the wire leaf basket over the headboard.

Item 2: Recycle, Reduce, Reuse!
In our first house we had a kitchen that was noted as the "Contractor's Special", being that this kitchen was installed with low-end generic cabinets from a big box retail store. My husband and I decided to paint the majority of the cabinets in a beautiful vanilla white and add hardware (that is a whole other project!). The cabinet that was over the refrigerator was ill-proportioned and took up too much dead space. We took out that upper cabinet and added open shelving, which really expanded the use of the space (and another whole project). As the upper cabinet was sitting on the floor of our outdoor screened in porch I thought, that would make an exceptional BOOT BENCH! We really needed a boot bench on our porch - what a great opportunity! So I went to work with these steps...
1. Sand and Paint the cabinet
2. Cut and mount wood footings to each corner
3. At the craft store, buy a thick foam rectangle and cut it to fit in the inlay of the top of the cabinet
4. Buy some duck cloth from the craft store and sew it to fit around the foam cushion
5. Enjoy!
What a great use out of an item (this cabinet retails for $68.00) that we normally would have donated or thrown away.

The original item sold as an upper cabinet.

The new use for the item: a functional boot bench.

The boot bench placed in our new home is functional and stylish.