How to re-decorate your home on a budget

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April 4, 2012 by Bob Thomas

Spring is here and so is the need for new items in our wardrobe and interiors. This is something instilled within all of us, like an animal shedding its winter fur, we like to re-fresh our appearance and get rid of the dark winter colours. It all starts with a good spring clean on Saturday morning and it ends with a big old shopping session on Sunday. But when you cleaned your house and fed your wardrobe you also want something new to look at don’t you? Otherwise the clean house feels so empty? Well this wouldn’t be a blog about saving money if we didn’t have any suggestions for your so called empty homes as well.

A new coffee table

You probably don’t have left over pallets honking up space in your house but your local grocery or utility shop will. Chances are they will be more than happy to get rid of a few. Get yourself a nice looking one and transform it in to a great coffee table. You can make a great coffee table from a pallet by simply adding a base platform with four wheels or legs. The rough and ready look is great for the garden but for inside yoru house,  you should add some colour with paint, wallpaper or the earlier mentioned newspapers. This is an easy, eco-friendly and very cheap way of adding a new piece of furniture to your home. Putting your table together is easy and all you need for it is:

1. A wooden pallet
2. Tools (search and buy tools online for great bargains and additional idea’s)
3. A base platform, which you attach underneath the pallet
4. Wheels or legs, which you attach to the base platform
5. Sanding paper to smooth the surface and the edges
6. Paint for adding some colour and decorations

It will only cost you about an hour of your time, depending on the desired decorations,  to make  a brand new table with an edgy authentic look to it.

Newspaper decorations

Is your newspaper basket overflowing but you can’t bring yourself to throw away the old magazines and newspapers? Than give them a brand new purpose. There are so many things you can do with them, the options are endless. You could use them to decorate picture frames, furniture or even the walls and this is how you do it:

1. Cut up a newspaper or magazine
2. Smooth down the surface of the desired object of choice with sandpaper
3. If necessary, clean the surface with soapy water
4. Lather the object with wallpaper paste
5. After that you apply as many strips of the cut up magazines or newspapers as you like
6. Smooth the paper down by using a paintbrush
7. Apply two or three layers for the best result
8. Leave the object to dry

There is a multitude of different options for decorating your home with newspapers but the image below is what we came up with.

A table for the kids bedroom

It does not matter where you get them from as long as you get them. If you don’t know any children that stopped playing with their Lego, than find these colourful cubes at your local charity shop or a car boot sale. You can design and create entire tables and chairs with Lego cubes but it will take a lot of time and a lot of cubes. The other option is to use a wooden frame and glue the Lego on top of that. This way you don’t have to use so many cubes whilst creating the same effect. The result will be a playful object that adds a bit of colour to your home.

All you need for the table below is:

1. An old table of which you smooth the surface with sandpaper
2. 200 Lego cubes which you glue on to the surface
3. A glass cover to put over the Lego cubes so they don’t get damaged