Making your home beautiful isn’t always heavy on the pocket. Instead of buying new things for your home, why not turn utilitarian and make do with old stuff? That way you’ll have a gorgeous interior decor reflecting your own style as well as put all that extra stuff that lay in your basement or attic to good use.
Living room matters
The first place to start off is the living room. It may not be the heart of your house but it’s where the greatest judgments are passed. If you have a glass topped coffee table, get creative with collages. Grab those old magazines and cut out colourful pictures of exotic places or use old snaps of yourself and your spouse. Tape them under the table top and you’ll have a really interesting creation especially when the light falls on it. Fill cutely shaped alcohol bottles with sand and shells for the beach look, or pebbles, beads, trinkets or paper flowers for a more exotic look. Place them on either side of your sofa or near a soft lamp so that it adds that extra sparkle at night.
Making good use of old clothes and cloth scraps
If you have a long old scarf or sari material lying around, you can use it as a divider curtain between rooms. It adds to the softness as well as luxuriant appeal. In case you happen to have some old lace or frills lying around, you can sew it at the bottom as a border.
• If you are good with your needle or sewing machine, you’ll find that old clothes can lead to really inventive creations like placemats, table cloths, pillow cases and even pillows. If you love a bed strewn with pillows, choose your favourite cloth scraps and cut them into pillow case sized squares and rectangles. Stitch them up leaving the top open for the stuffing and once you’ve done you’ve got your own pieces of art. Sew or glue on stray beads for an exotic appeal.
Spicing up the kitchen
• Jars of herbs and spices need not only consume shelf space. Fill plain glass jars with them and stack them up with an eye for colour. Or if you have a glass-topped dinner table with a shelf beneath it for storing things, you can tastefully arrange them to add to the rainbow beauty of the table. Old jam jars are ideal for storing spices, so you don’t even need to buy bottles.
• Baskets can be used to hold fruit and veggies or packets of bread. You can even fill an old glass jug or bowl with water and place a creeper in it. Trail it over your kitchen window. It will look lovely in the sunlight.
In case you find cracks or peeling paint, you can cover it up by placing your children’s artwork or your own. Hang miniature art designs or a cardboard covered with glued on sequins on the wall behind a lamp. It’ll look lovely when the lamp is switched on. You can even place a small, empty ketchup bottle filled with carefully spread branches or dried fern or seaweed. The play through the transparency of glass is magical.
Keith is a time management expert. He bought soap baskets and laundry bags online. He says that having two light weight laundry baskets in the bathroom saves a lot of time rather than stacking laundry in a cabinet or piling it in a corner in the bathroom.