Ugly furniture.

Frugal decorating tip!

There is plenty of old furniture for free or for very cheap. I get minutes of joy from standing in my loungeroom and pointing at everything and saying "free, op shop, op shop, free, free, op shop, free, free, free, free." Free usually depends on luck: like driving past a hard rubbish pile, or knowing someone getting rid of stuff when they leave town. Cheap means you know a good op shop and check regularly, or you can access a trailer and can collect things off Ebay or Gumtree.

The hazard of frugality, however, is ugliness. That's usually why nobody else wants it. They are replacing 90s pine with IKEA, for example. Or getting rid of something they bought while at uni. But you don't HAVE to keep the 90s pine look. It can be cunningly disguised!

Example of actual cheap bookshelf on Gumtree

Think about how much work you are willing to put in. Stripping and sanding pine so that you can revarnish it, for example, is hard work. I've done it. Do that if you REALLY care about having a nice wood finish or matching it to an existing piece of furniture. It's really hard to match wood, though. I totally failed. But it still looks nice.

But the fastest and easiest way is to just paint it white. My bookshelves, which were free by the way, started out as 1 raw pine book shelf and 2 matching dirty white particle-board office bookshelves. 1 tin of paint made 3 clean white bookshelves. It just takes one or two messy weekends. Flatmate and I took turns doing coats.

You don't have to do boring white, you could do something distressed, or coloured on the inside. But simplicity always looks nice. Plenty of ideas on the internet if you're clever.

Be aware that a lot of furniture isn't solid wood or wood-product, it's chipboard with plastic laminate. Stuff like IKEA Expedit or Billy. It is possible to paint laminate, with the right surface prep products. Maybe it's worth it, but I don't bother with it. But if it's wood you pretty much give it a quick sand and just slap paint on it.

Storage "solutions".

Once you are storing things like this, there is almost no point owning those things. 1) OHAS, 2) Lazyness.

From all over Pinterest.

It LOOKS like genius. But carrying big tubs up a ladder and sliding them onto runners on the ceiling? I would never be bothered accessing them. It could only be really light stuff like pool noodles anyway.

Storage failure leads to a) not putting things away cos it's too annoying, or b) never getting them out because they are stored so deeply and you don't need them anyway, which is why you stored them in the first place, and then you forget you have them.

Here's an example: umbrellas. Failure is leaving it on the table because it's handy. Success is hanging it on a hook on the back of the front door because it's handy. That's a solution.

Another example: art and craft supplies. Failure is keeping it in shoe boxes all over the house on bookshelves and in the top of wardrobes. Sewing patterns here, paper stamps there. That's my current system. Success is getting it all out, gathering it all up, getting rid of stuff, and having it in one place where I can actually find it and use it—my art/utility cupboard, because I am now evicting the laundry powder and books.

I have twice as much art stuff as I need. Watch me cull! Thankfully I my flatmate works with kids so she can use a bit of stuff like that. She was actually really excited about an origami book I found cos she knows a kid obsessed with origami. That's the joy of getting rid of stuff: it goes from clutter, to pleasure-giving usefulness.

I have so many chalk pastels and I'm hopeless with pastels. So utterly hopeless. I can do pretty presentable work with oils, watercolours, pencils, charcoal. But all I do with coloured chalk is make a smudgy mess. I think it might be the paper. Anyway, it just goes to show that even an arty person can't just automatically make art with art supplies. Happily I've already found someone to take a box of pastels :)

Deboxing.

This is my obsession at the moment: getting rid of things that are sitting in boxes and not being used, and taking up more space than they need. Recently I sorted through a couple of boxes of designy stuff, and put my art books on the book shelf so that I can see them, and threw out a lot of printed material I designed. Old newspapers and brochures and stuff. That day I reduced about 2 cardboard boxes and a green bag down to 1 box.

Then I moved on to my box of CDs. I want to keep my legal copies, but I don't need the breaky plastic cases. Innefficient. I bought these plastic sleeves from officeworks last week. They fit a CD and a sleeve, or 2 CDs, in each one. $20 for 100 sleeves.

I've been so excited about this! I reduced a boxful of space down to a reasonably small pile of sleeves! And then fortuitously I got a nice CD box from Kikki K for $3!

Empty cases and besleeved CDs. I kept CD cases designed by friends,
or that were otherwise special, or already thin and cardboardy.

While I was on a roll, I opened my glory box--which is my romantically named wooden chest. It's got all my best homeschooled handiwork (quilts and things) that I can't find a place to use at the moment. Not much to throw out here but I got rid of another cardboard box and some odds and ends. Next project is the art/utility cupboard, which contains many boxes.

The trouble with cardboard boxes is that when you move house, you put everything in boxes, but then you don't need everything straight away, so it's just seemingly efficient to leave stuff in boxes under the bed or in cupboards. It's not proper storage where things are sorted and easy to access, it's just sort of in cardboard deep freeze.

Gallery walls.

I'm starting a tag for "frugal decorating". Ideas to make the best of your rental and make do with what you already have.

Karen, when she worked at MM, had this amazing decorated office wall. She just stuck all her posters and postcards up in a random but evenly spaced way. The overall effect was very cool. She gave me a couple of posters. Since I'm a hoarder of pretty things and concert tickets and sentimental cards I found her poster gallery idea very useful. Why keep a box of these sentimental papery things and never look at them, when they can be stuck up all in one big gallery and admired all the time? Especially when my bedroom has a built in robe with pale green glass instead of mirrors? Perfect surface for blu-tak!

Now any postcard, photo, ticket, or sketch, can be added easily to this area, and as well as reminding me of holidays and friends and family and things, it's a rather beautiful feature. The secret is, a big thing made of small things doesn't look messy, just detailed. Well, it needs a bit of a tidy, but other than that.

I've applied the same theory to hanging framed pictures. I takes a lot of work with 3M sticky hooks, getting them in the right place. But the result is, I can hang a lot of small, low-value pictures in one area and the overall effect is very pleasing. Small pictures look silly when they float randomly on large walls, so they look a lot better when they are all herded together.

This is my first ever cross stitch.