Repurpose When You Decorate
Not until I decided to write this article had I thought how we had been practicing this in our own home.
We didn’t repurpose items so much for conservation as we did because we liked the design of an item.
Just in the last year I can think of five places where we repurposed objects starting with a lazy susan that came with a new patio set we purchased. Since the patio set was going to be located on our lanai we didn’t need an umbrella and therefore we didn’t need a lazy susan. The lazy susan was about two feet in diameter with a unique Celtic knot pattern and of course a hole for the umbrella in the middle.
We had been searching for art to put in our master bathroom without much luck. The lazy susan mounted on the wall in our bathroom clearly looks like a one of a kind piece of art. It went great with other objects we had placed in the bathroom and best of all it cost us nothing.
In our midwest home we have very high sloping ceilings. In the familyroom we had been searching for an object to put on the walls that would not be so weighty as the very large, over-sized mirror we had just removed. Here we clearly made an effort to look at many options in an effort to get exactly what we wanted. Ultimately we ended up using a screen we had stored in our basement. The screen looks like woven sticks or reeds in each section. We disassembled the screen and used two of the three panels mounted horizontally (one over the other with a space between) to visually cover a large section of the wall. It worked great, with it’s see through design the wall color was visible in the background. We didn’t think it was perfect because it didn’t show off the height of the ceilings and finally place a wire basket above and to one end of the screens and it looks great, almost like a piece of modern art.
The mirror we took down was so large it really didn’t go in any other room in the house, but a large piece of it did go in my workout room in the basement and gave it some class which it needed badly. Those healthclubs have nothing over us.
If you watch any of the decorating shows on HGTV you will see one of their favorite ways to make a space feel larger is mirrors. And one uses of mirrors is to back bookshelves. The remainder of the large mirror removed from our familyroom was used to back a book shelve in a guess bedroom. Remember large bathroom mirrors can be cut to size and repurposed for this use without much effort.
In a very similar vein we have repurposed serving trays, wallpaper, tile samples, and fabric pieces to make our own unique wall hangings. Serving trays can be used after attaching a mounting wire or hook to the back. We have a tray we purchased in Spain that had the exact colors we need for a bedroom. And another tray collected from our travels we used in a plate rack as decoration in our familyroom. The plate rack works great because we can press the serving tray into action anytime we need it. Framing a piece of tile or wallpaper is another way to take a color or pattern you liked and incorporate it into your house.
All of these ideas were free or very low cost. All created one of a kind pieces of art or furnishings. And all are more enjoyable to look at everyday because we came up with this repurposing of these objects.