Making Your Trash a Treasure

So, if you saw my post yesterday, I refinished some small shelves for my bathroom. I felt like there were some visual "holes" left on the wall, and decided that I knew how to fill them in. With my left over fabric scraps, and some  boxes I was just about to toss. 

What you'll need: 

• Some smaller boxes. I used a lightbulb box, and a box from some crackers. 
• Mod Podge and foam brushed 
• Fabric of appropriate size for your box. 
• Scissors and/or rotary cutter 
• Hot glue and an iron (I left them out of the picture, I'm sure they feel very left out.) 

Now cut your fabric roughly too size, being exact isn't needed, or encouraged. :) Once you get the fabric cut, cut around the perimeter of the box, so it's about an inch deep. You can take the box apart and make marks around the whole thing to follow along to. I chose not to put some paper over my box first, because my fabric was thick enough to cover the print well. But if you need to, cut a piece of paper to the size of the face, and mod podge it on smoothly. It should provide plenty coverage.

Put a nice coating of mod podge on the face of your box. I used my cake-decorating-thingy to smooth it out. You don't want any wrinkles or bumps, because they'll obviously look wonky. Let it dry for 15-20 minutes. (My least favorite part.)

 Now that the mod podge has finally dried, you can start hot gluing the fabric into the inside lip of the box. Leave two adjacent sides open so you can "fold" the fabric over on the edges for a neat edge.

Yeah, it's that easy. You can of course do this with a canvas of choice size, but it's not as cheap! If I had to factor up how much I spent, it was easily under 10 dollars. The fabric was unusable scrap, the mod podge was a gift from Alex (!) as was the hot glue gun, and the boxes were literal trash.

And now my bathroom feels less nakey.

Of Sandpaper and Spray Paint

I've been getting into the idea of finding not-so-perfect but more than perfectly priced home decor, to then refinish and make beautiful again. Typically I wussed out.

Today, I finally made the steps towards a project like this. I got some not half bad floating shelves from my Airman's Attic, which means they were free. I thought, "I can put those in my bathroom!" My bathroom doesn't have nearly as much counter space as my husband's, but it has a tub... So I win. And because I do find myself in the predicament of being a female, I have about 100 too many products that clutter up my small bathroom. Having some small shelves would be a saving grace.

They weren't too beat up, or shockingly ugly, but I wanted them to be matte black. Queue the spray paint.

I would like to take time to say, that as someone who has very little experience with such things, I did purty darn good. I'm the daughter of a painter who's been in the business for longer than I've been on earth, but I somehow evaded all of his lessons through books and studying, and plain old laziness. 

But after a little love, this is what I ended up with.

So, the total cost for this project comes to: 

Shelves: I picked them up at the thrift store on my Air Force Base, so: $0.00 

Sandpaper: $1.99

Spray Paint: $3.99 (had it from previous project, too.) 

Grand Total: $6.00