Inspiration boards – Front lounge

So awhile ago I started to put together images or rather inspiration boards for the different rooms in our home (OMG I have a HOME!). As you may guess I am pretty flipping excited about owning our first home. You may think that doing inspiration boards is a bit over the top especially because we are going to be pretty poor after the next few months. It will be so weird to see so little money in our accounts when we have been saving like crazy and had very healthy accounts.

Anyway I thought I would share with you my inspiration for our front lounge room. I have never had a proper lounge room before that was a separate area of the house. Here we go…

I’d like this in a 2.5 to 3 seater. I LOVE this fabric. The lines are great and the style is Ruby which is one of my favourite animated characters.

I love the armchairs too. Would love two for either side of the lounge either in a matching colour or something completely different like a turquoise.

We actually already have these bookshelves so this will cost us nothing. Have always loved these and can’t wait for them to be a feature in our home.

I love the look of this light and would love it for the corner of the room. It is a little expensive for my budget now so will wait for a sale or maybe birthday or Christmas.

LOVE this rug and the tri knot pattern matches the pattern on my engagement ring and our wedding rings. Would be a great piece to really stamp our personalities on the room.

Because our place was built we had a lot of pallets hanging around and a few were really good quality wood. The plan was that I would use these to build us a coffee table as part of my “Try Something New” resolution. Unfortunately someone came into our backyard and took them. I still plan to do this project, but the plan now is to go for walks in our new neighbourhood and wait for someone to put a good one out for cleanup 🙂

This is what I hope to end up with from the pallet. The larger pieces of wood I have already scored from offcuts from our build.

I plan to be quite industrious. There are a lot of off cuts around our neighbourhood currently due to everyone building. I am hoping I can save us quite a bit by knocking together some of our own pieces and you can get bottles of “trial” varnishes and/or paint for a couple of dollars so in all a coffee table like this might cost me $5 haha.

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Upcycle – Birdcage succulent planter

One day I came across a beautiful vintage look birdcage that was a bit worse for wear and so had been cast onto the corner for garbage pick up. I loved the style of it and thought it would be a terrible waste to send it to the dump so I grabbed it and took it home. I have always loved the idea of upcycling and I decided I was going to figure out a way to make this into a beautiful planter.

Here is what I was starting with. Meanwhile check out the little photobomber I just discovered haha.

I have no idea what this horrid, tacky, stubborn, pink, sticky crap was, but it was everywhere and a pain in the butt to remove!!! I resorted to an old toothbrush, boiling water and detergent, followed up with some alcohol wipes.

Evil pink stuff

So once it was all clean and pretty it was time to decide what I was going to do with it. I had a vision of creating a succulent planter. The idea being that in time the succulents will grow and poke out through/overhang the bars. So I went shopping…

My haul 🙂

Then it was time to find out if what was in my head would translate well to real life [I should note that I know others have done this successfully, but I was doing it without any instructions from any of those people 🙂 ]. I lined the base with Coconut fibre to stop the soil from falling straight through the bottom of the cage.

Make sure you compress it well. I tried to make mine a bit like a nest with the edges raised.

Then I added in the succulent planting mix and my succulents. Here are some photos of the finished product 🙂

 

I chose succulents that would spread, grow and hang out between the bars nicely as well as flower in different colours.

 

 

I am very proud of my first upcycle attempt. Especially considering there were no instructions… I am happy to report that there were no pieces leftover post construction 🙂