Jazz Up Your Home With These Crafty Ideas
There’s a lot to be said for imagination, and if you have imagination then your life has color. If you get to be someone who can buy a house, it feels like finishing a race. You’ve saved the deposit, you’ve spoken to the solicitor and the bank and you’re finally on your way to getting the keys. A brand-new house is an empty shell just waiting for you to stamp yourself across and that bit there is the fun bit. You get to choose fixtures, install kitchens – should you choose to change what is already available. You get to design and purchase a new bathroom with stunning mixer taps and shower jets that go from floor to ceiling. You get to choose the furnishings for every single room and you get to hang as many paintings as you like. Carpets or wooden floors? Curtains or blinds? Do you go for valance or other window treatments? So many questions will be swirling round your head right now and it’s all going to take some time to choose everything you want. Of course, this is the dream thing to do with a new home. Unfortunately, we live in a time of don’t move, improve. This means that with the financial state most people are in, buying a brand-new house is out of reach so we must make do, mend and recycle what we already have. The fixtures have to wait. The deposit has to wait. And that’s totally okay – because now you get to put your creative hat on.
To be able to furnish and decorate without the consideration of a budget constraint is what we all do when we imagine winning the lottery. You can, however, decorate and fill a house you already live in with beautiful accessories and furnishings on a total budget. You just have to get creative, get clever and teach yourself a few tricks about where to start and what to do. When you decorate your house, you want to make it comfortable and beautiful. Doing it on a budget can be a challenge but as you’ve just purchased your first home, you’re likely quite comfortable with new challenges! There are some fantastic ideas you can jot down for your home that all help the purse strings and if you have some time, you can teach yourself some handy new skills
YouTube has become quite the revelation to most people in the last few years. Not only are you able to find music and funny cat videos, but you can take tutorials on make-up, hairdressing, drawing and wonderfully, upholstery and crafts. Usually you have to pay out to attend classes to learn to upholster your old sofa set, and it takes a lot of time and money to learn to do it. But with tutorials online you can learn for free, meaning you’re making savings on your interiors already! To be able to upcycle old furniture, make comfy throws for the lounge and add beautiful quilts and duvets to the bedrooms, you need to be able to sew. By hand, this takes a long time, but you can check this guide to find the best sewing machine for quilts at seworbit.com. YouTube again comes good with fantastic tutorials about learning to sew and in no time at all, you’ll be making throws, curtains and beautiful fabrics for the house you’ve just bought. Thankfully, with all this in consideration, you’ll be able to beautifully decorate your home on a budget. Fabrics and patterns don’t cost much when you order online in bulk and if you think about it, buying fabric is still going to cost a lot less than buying a new sofa suite! There are so many ways you can save money at home that don’t just mean new soft furnishings. Take a look at some of our ideas below on ways you can get crafty with your interior decorating:
- Adding colour to plain walls can immediately warm a room. paint is considerably cheaper than wallpaper so always head for
paint if you can; it’s also easy to remove cover should you choose to change your mind later. If you’ve got sofas and cushions in shades of blue, adding a blue feature wall will not only immediately transform the entire space, but it will match the items in the room. By only painting on a feature wall, you’ve just given yourself creative license to change as much as you like whenever you like while saving yourself buckets of money! - Getting the kids involved in crafts will make your home more personalised to your family so break out the salt dough and start baking. Salt dough decorations harden up in the oven but not before you create amazing shapes, including hand and foot prints. They make excellent shelf decorations when painted and varnished and this way you have something uniquely beautiful that has cost you pennies. Who needs a Tate Modern in the lounge when kids are around!?
- Go potty for pottery. If you are able to attend a class, or buy a potter’s wheel for yet another handy tutorial online, get crafty and learn to throw a pot or vase. Being able to have funky shaped items of crockery on the shelves in the home can mean you have an exclusive piece just for you. Slightly wonky vases are all the rage at the local art gallery, so have fun with it. Have a moment of wow when you paint and varnish something you made yourself, by hand. Then get the mop, because clay is messy!
- If you’re a fan of internet shopping, you’re likely to be pretty savvy about where to find the best deals on purchasing materials and craft supplies. Ordering online in bulk for fabrics, wool and threads of all colours can give you a jump start to creating knitted blankets, coverlets and making curtains. Being able to double line your own curtains at home can save you tons in energy and cash in the winter months; meaning your new YouTube-related hobby just made its money!
- Upholstering furniture can save your wallet when you’ve bought a new home. If your furniture is looking faded or tired, buying new material and changing the current can seriously give your sofa the upgrade it so desperately needed. Going back to the blue feature wall, if your couch doesn’t match and its fabric, change it!
- Head to the local charity shop and buy new picture frames to give your walls some oomph. You can choose to recover these with fabrics, paint over them or even glue gun some sequins and gems onto the wood to make a beautifully colourful and reflective pattern, without spending money on something entirely new. While you’re there, look for any quirky furniture items that you could add to the house; giant plant pots for the back garden for example.
- Rescuing pallets from timber yards can give you the chance to make coffee tables, footstools and even chairs in your new home. Treat the wood and paint it to match your home and you’ll have some funky new items of furniture dotted around. Truly unique home furnishings are a talking point among friends and family.
- Creating and changing the throw pillows on the sofa or on the beds in the house can immediately transform a room in the best way! You can choose to add colourful pillows to a nursery or children’s bedroom and creating it all yourself will be far cheaper than buying from a shop. Not only that, but you can harness your new sewing skills that you learned online to make them!
- Going back to the timber yard, large pieces of MDF wood can be upholstered to create an amazingly unique partition for a bedroom if children have to share, or even be made into a brand-new feature headboard. By adding some fabrics that are brightly coloured or patterned to match your room, you can give it a whole new lease of life.
Truly, there are hundreds of ways you can make crafts work in the home and spend little money, from the garden to the bathroom. The less you spend updating the rooms of the house, the more you get to save toward a holiday or toward a deposit to buy the dream home you’ve always envisaged. We live in a time of renewal and recycling, you need to invest in a glue gun, a wall stapler and a sewing machine. With these basic items, you are able to create any home craft you want and you’re truly unlimited to the possibilities. Being able to recover and renew your entire home can not only give the house a boost, transforming the tired and old items into beautiful, new ones, but it can give you a sense of pride and uniqueness. You’ve just touched up your entire house, for less than new furniture would have cost you. And all because of YouTube.
