24/Savvy Home and Money

Surrounding yourself with beautiful art is just so....savvy.  Art inspires you, makes you feel good, and best of all, you don't have to spend a fortune at a fancy auction to snazz up your space. Book stores, thrift stores, garage sales, museum shops, fabric shops, and even wallpaper shops are just a few places you can pick up budget-friendly materials to make inspired creations to adorn your home.  We've used art book clips in our bathroom, decorative wrapping/scrapbooking papers in our bedroom, cut-up calendars in our hallways, and notecard sets in our office to make swoon-worthy art collections for a song, because the beauty is, items don't even have to be new, expensive, or fancy to be beautiful.

Pretty, delicate photo prints by Urban Design are the perfect pick for any blank space in your home and their B1G1 deals are too tempting to resist!

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There's a little trick we do when we're inviting people over for dinner, particularly if they've already been to Savvy Central.  We do a mini-makeover to our dining room table, creating a fresh, new space for guests, giving them a little surprise and a unique dining experience.

On the subject of budget-friendly, five minute upgrades, new shower curtains are our favorite tool for give our john a jolt of fresh color without going through the Herculean efforts of repainting the joint.  How hard is it to trade in your musty old curtain for a bright, fresh, new one?  Not hard at all, friends, and not expensive, either, which is why we've scoped out seven statement curtains that will bring a burst of bold beauty to your bathroom in as much time as it takes to repeat that last tongue twister five times.

We swooned over these scrumptious, colorful ottomans from Anthropolgie until we saw the price tags...up to $228 for a fabric-covered box?  Hooooowee is that a big "work tag" (work tag is our new lingo for quantifying things in hours worked rather than dollars.)  We'd have to crank out a lot of content to pay for one of those colorful, room-defining ottomans when we could probably cover a plain plastic crate with upholstery and get the same effect.

Which led us to this idea….

You don't have to spend a fortune on gardening containers to green your backyard.  Just about anything you can find in your attic or in the trash that you can poke a few holes in the bottom will do--even throwaways: a mini trash can, plastic soda bottles, tin coffee cans, an old boot, a wooden trunk, you name it.  You can even spray paint the ones you don't like the look of and make a color coordinated collection of your motley crew of planters. A couple tips to keep in mind will help make your garden grow beautifully:

• If your container may inhibit drainage, line the bottom with a couple inches of rocks, which will prevent water from gathering at the bottom and will prevent fungus.
• Use high quality soil for your plants.  Nothing will help them grow better than good soil.
• Water and care for your plants as usual.
• If you decide to spray paint your containers, use paint with RustOleum, which will prevent you from having to do it again next year.

Photo via re-nest.com

An inexpensive way to cheer up any room is to paint your dark, drab furniture a bright, cheery color. We chose a Chinese red. A good tip was given to me at the paint shop: put some of the pigment of the color you are going to use into your primer, especially when using red!

3 Steps to Brightening Up Dark Furniture

1. After sanding lightly, cover the piece with 2 coats of primer
2. Paint about 5 coats of high gloss paint with light sanding between coats.
3. Finish with a brown glaze.

(Optional) Put a thin sheet of glass on the top to protect the piece from scratches

Voila! Instantly bright and cheerful furniture makeover, with only a few coats of paint!

Every few years we look around Savvy Central and get that twinkle in our eye that says: things need to change.  Furniture needs to be rearranged, tchotchkes need to be shuffled, frames need to be refreshed, thrift stores need to be visited, you get the idea.

This project doesn't actually even need a visit to the thrift store as you can repurpose glass items straight from the recycling bin if you are so moved.  All it takes is an assortment of glass jars and bottles, preferably with interesting cuts and bevels.