When in Doubt: Freshen Up with a New Knob

Repurposing furniture is one of my favorite pastimes and finding a deal is even better! Sometimes it only takes a coat of paint or a new knob to freshen up a piece of furniture. I found the side tables, dresser, and vanity pieces off of Craiglist for my guest room. The entire room was put together for less than $100. I gave some of them a new coat of paint and wanted to replace the old knobs with new ones that would match the style of my guest room. The guest bathroom yellow sink vanity and the closet doors were also in need of some new knobs as well.

For the most unique looking knobs, I looked around and was able to find some really great ones at Anthropologie. There is such a variety and if you catch them on a sale day, it is the best! I have also been told that Hobby Lobby has some great picks as well.

This bed side table is one of two found on Craiglist. I gave them a fresh coat of paint and added two flower knobs.

I replaced the guest bathroom vanity knobs with these fresh, fun new knobs.

I found this vanity on craigslist and gave it a new fresh coat of paint and some new knobs.

This dresser was $10 on Craiglist! I added four new white knobs to match.

It is always fun and easy to change up existing furniture. Adding knobs is a great way to do that! Good luck with your garage sale, flee market, craigslist, and side of the road finds!

Simple and Easy Wall Art

This is a great way to use an old poster, artwork, or in my case an old map, for a great inexpensive piece of wall art. I had found this old map in the back of my closet which I acquired in Berkeley awhile ago. I decided to put it up in my office as a fun piece of artwork. The print is an old world map in an antique style and goes perfectly in my office.

Step One: Go to the craft store and pick up four cheap canvases from the paint section.

Step Two: Measure and cut the map into four equal pieces.

Step Three: Take each section of the map and wrap it around the canvas and with a staple gun, staple the map to the back of the canvas along the edge.

Step Four: Hang all four sections on the wall so that the image is in the correct order!

Make sure to arrange the image so that is recreates the original map.

Items you will need:
Image (map, poster, artwork)
4 canvases
staple gun
scissors
ruler or measuring stick

Oh Yeah!: Boring Lamp - Bold Transformation

This is a great project for those of us who like to put our own creative mark on an everyday item. For the guest room (the Door County room) I needed a white lamp to go with the other white items in the room, the bed, the nightstands, the white pillow cases, but I didn't want the lamp to blend into the background, so I gave it a personal touch.

I found some blue iridescent ribbon and some really great fabric covered scrap booking buttons. Both of these items went with the coloring of the room and so I thought it would make a great statement and give the plain white lamp some personality.

It is amazing how handy my architecture tool box has been since I graduated back in 2004. I find that every time I need to get creative it starts with me pulling something out of that box to get going. So I pulled the glue gun and my X-ACTO knife out of the architecture box and began the transformation:

Step 1: Adhere ribbon to white lamp shade
With the iridescent ribbon, I wrapped the shade in an Argyle pattern. Make sure to glue the beginning end of the ribbon first on the interior of the shade. Then, begin wrapping the ribbon from corner to corner to get the argyle look. Finish by gluing the end piece on the inside of the shade where you started.

Step 2: Make small incisions in the shade for the buttons
Since the buttons have a folding metal piece behind them, they are very easy to stick onto the shade. First make sure the make the small incisions with the very sharp X-ACTO knife into the shade and at similar intervals of length. For this lamp, I wanted to make sure that each side had four fabric buttons to make the best impact. After making the incisions, place the buttons into the holes and secure by folding the metal piece on the interior of the shade.

Step 3: Enjoy a creatively personalized lamp with incredible personality!

White lamp with Argyle pattern

Fabric buttons placed evenly onto shade

Good-to-Know (GTK) - Organized Chaos: Wall Frame Collage

Here is a fun GTK for every home. This project works really well for a large blank wall that you may want to hang some photographs, but know that it will take more than one photo frame to cover the wall. There is nothing more disturbing than a large blank wall that has only one small item hung on it, or even a couple tiny random items placed not in relationship to one another. In my living room, I have a large blank wall behind one of the couches. This is the only wall that doesn't have an architectural feature on it, like a set of windows, fireplace, or french doors. This makes it the perfect opportunity to make a wall frame collage.

This is what I call Organized Chaos. One might think, at a first glance, that the arrangement of these photos are random, but really they are well thought out and the placement is calculated making the visual of this collage very appealing.

Here is the wall photo collage finished.

First Good-to-Know:
Within this collage are several horizontal and vertical alignments that make this collage work and also makes the eye read the arrangement in an interesting way. The great thing about this collage is that all of the frames come from different times in life, different places, have different sizes, and have different finishes. They have one thing in common: they are all going on the wall together! And this is what makes the chaos organized.
To begin: make a practice arrangement on the floor in front of the proposed wall. This is where you can try out sizes, shapes, and alignments. In the photo below you can see that the blue line shows the centering of the arrangement on the couch and on the wall. This makes the arrangements the centerpiece of the wall and really brings it to life.
Next: the white lines represent the vertical alignments of the photos and the black lines represents the horizontal alignments. By doing this, you make sense of the different sizes, shapes, and colors and really make the arrangement cohesive.

This photo shows the blue centering lines with white vertical and black horizontal lines.

Second GTK:
As you are pretty happy with the arrangement that you have pre-arranged on the floor below the selected wall, take one last look at the composition (and maybe take a picture of it to remember what goes where). In the photo below you will notice an oval shape over the wall arrangement. This oval represents the organization of the arrangement that your eye follows as it sees the outer-edges of all of the frames and it begins to make a circular motion. This seemingly simple configuration makes a great focal wall without competing with the other prominent architectural features of the room.

This photo shows the oval superimposed over the collage making this a true focal wall.                             

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.