Amateur DIY on a budget
One of my favourite things about doing up the house is giving an old unloved piece of furniture a bit of TLC and rendering it unrecognisable. My dressing table came from a local seller on eBay. I bought it for £10. It was good and sturdy but nothing special to look at: just plain pine with pine knobs. Over the course of an afternoon I upcycled it to make it bright and pretty. Here’s how…
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Your front door is pretty much the first impression somebody has of your house. When I first moved in, my front door wasn’t exactly making the impression I wanted. It was ugly wood, had random dirt and paint splatters and mismatching attachments. I decided that I needed a new door and asked a well known company around to quote me up. After getting a quote of almost £2,500, I quickly decided that I didn’t really need a new front door!
I then decided that all my front door needed was a facelift. I bought outdoor wood paint and attachments and set to work. Read the steps I took below.
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I think when doing up a house, or indeed taking on any big project, it’s easy to assume you can’t do something just because you haven’t done it before or have no experience in doing it. These jobs are normally the ones that you pay over the odds for somebody else to do for you, meanwhile getting no satisfaction from doing it yourself and remaining completely unaware that you could have done it.
I’ve always been overly stubborn and convinced that I can do anything I set my mind to. This is how I ended up fitting a laminate floor for the first time all by myself a few weeks ago. It’s turned out to be one of my favourite jobs I’ve taken on in the house so far.
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If you have an alcove in your bedroom, why not turn it into a makeshift shoe wardrobe/shoe storage space? My bedroom has a small alcove that was going to waste. It was hidden away in the corner and was too small to fit any of my furniture so I decided to turn it into a much needed shoe wardrobe. It was surprisingly cheap and easy to set up and is perfect for keeping my shoes organised so that when I’m rushing in the morning, I can find exactly what I’m looking for.
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As well as being a great way of giving old furniture a new lease of life, painting furniture is also a great way to put your own stamp on a rented property (once you own the furniture that is!)
I bought a dresser for my dining room on eBay a couple of years ago and had a go at doing it up at the time. I didn’t do a great job of it and recently decided it was about time I finally gave it the facelift it so badly needed.
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As my bedroom faces out onto the street and directly overlooks my neighbours’ houses, one of my first priorities was frosting my bedroom window. There are a few different ways that you can do this but I chose to use window frosting in a can.
So after getting my keys to the house, the first thing I needed to do was pull up the carpets. Cat shit walked into the carpet wasn’t really the look I was going for so they had to go. Fortunately, like a lot of things in the house as it turned out, they hadn’t been fitted very well so it wasn’t too much of a mission to pull them up.
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