Making Re-purposing
Easy and Fun
The fun part about being truly kooky, when it comes to decorating, is you open your mind to using regular objects in unconventional ways.
This is especially helpful if you are a "collector", who has a hard time getting rid of stuff "that's still good".
Drop Ceiling Message Board.
So, in the infinite wisdom of the remodelers of the 1970's, All the ceilings in the front of our building had drop ceilings installed. Drop ceilings are ugly, period. So we are pulling them all out. Downstairs they used the paper based tiles, which slowly disintegrated and warped. But upstairs someone sprang for the spendy and light fiberglass ceiling tiles with the plastic coating. These are "still good", so we saved them. The light weight of the tile and plastic coating make it ideal as a temporary message board.
Ink Jet Flower Pots
So at the local farmers market there was this great deal on annual plants. We bought some and brought them back to pretty up the outside facade of our office. Only problem was, we didn't have any decent pots to put the plants in. What we did have were piles of e-waste waiting for the county's annual Clean Sweep. We found two defunked ink jet printers and carefully removed the circuit boards and guts (and returned that to the e-waste pile for recycling). What were left were two plastic carcasses with interesting openings and built-in drain holes, not to mention attention-grabbing curb appeal. The spring annuals lasted until August. The above picture was of the fall plants.
Fun with Upholstery Swatches
One of the great things about living in small town America is there are still active Main Streets with great sidewalk sales in the Summer. And you never know what's getting put out. While checking out the mattress sale at the local furniture store, we found several boxes of upholstery swatches placed out front from the previous years styles. They were free. So we hefted them back to our cavernous building for later projects.
There were swatches in those boxes of every texture, color, and style conceivable. It was fun just going through through the boxes. We did find a few swatches, however that were particularly appealing.
The chair above was a discarded drop off from a relative. The Upholstery on the chair itself is just plain bad. But the bones of the chair are quite nice. Future plans for this chair include reupholstering in a very neutral fabric with these swatches as possible throw pillows. We'll keep you posted on our progress.