Photo Ledge Made Easy

I love all these fun new ways to display pictures! Which is why chicken wire projects are such a big part of our apartment, but I also love cute frames. At Target there are always tons of frames on sale, and with a little luck a cartwheel discount to make them even cheaper. But in a small apartment there is very few table top places to display these adorable frames. Oh and hanging them on the wall is just way too generic for me. So Pinterest and Target introduced the photo ledge into my life. But $25 dollars just seemed way to much for a skinny shelf. That's not how we roll anyway, obviously we were going to find a better, cheaper, way to do it.

My way was to recreate the concept of the photo ledge but without the boring shelf that usually entails, and that high price. So it was off to the beach, to be honest the woods was also checked. Within the week I started looking I found the perfect piece of driftwood. Originally the plan was to cut out of the soft driftwood the ledge I needed but in this little gem nature had already taken care of that for me! Add my discount Target frames and a little free dried flowers, BAM photo ledge done the college chic way. 

College Chic Driftwood Photo Ledge

So the run down on this fabulous photo ledge goes like this: Actual wooden ledge, FREE!! Still makes me smile, and shelving hardware to install it was four dollars at Menard's.  So instead of $25 for a small fake wood photo ledge my large one cost me $4 and looks so much more unique. As for the rest of this wall the tennis racquets were a dollar each at Goodwill and the mirror was five dollars at a local thrift shop. And that is how you do chic on the cheap!

Spray Paint Works on Anything, Even Rugs.

So when we started out decorating our place we saw this beautiful rug at Hobby Lobby. It was black and white chevron, and absolutely perfect. Except it cost $50 when it was 50% off. Well that's just not a good enough deal for us. So we decided to come up with a way to do it ourselves for less. Shortly after the forever amazing Pinterest offered us an answer, painting a rug.

$20 rug all taped up

Step one in this plan was finding a cheap rug. Not only did we want it to be cheap to satisfy our thrifty side but also just in case it didn't work out. This may be the first project where I had my doubts. We found a large, 5x7 black rug at Family Dollar for $20. Usually I'm not a huge supported of the "fake dollar stores" as mentioned in our earlier post Favorite Hotspots, But in this case they really came through for us. While creating the chevron pattern, it was crucial to keep it the same size, slope, and everything lines up. Even the slightest offset would be extremely noticeable with our drastic color difference. In order to accomplish this we cut out a stencil in cardboard. The stencil was the same distance wide as the rug, five feet. We would tape out the bottom side of the stencil, slide it so that tape line was even with the top of the stencil, then tape the next row from the bottom of the stencil. Every other of these taped off sections would be painted white. Since both sides of the tape would not be seeing paint, we only had to exact-o knife one side of each piece of tape. We couldn't have any little overlap messing up the straight line of where the white paint would go. The inspiration pin directed us to use fabric spray paint. After two seconds of using this we realized that was so not going to work, The fabric paint came out in an a very tight stream. This made it impossible to keep the shading consistent and meant we would have to use about 200 cans of this $10 paint. Definitely not our style. Winging it our next idea was to sponge on regular wall paint. We tried to make this work and put a lot of effort into making this method work, then realized it was not. It would have taken forever and the sponges were not up to the task. We were finding little yellow sponge pieces painted into our rug. So still winging it we came up with plan number three and bought the cheapest white spray paint money can buy, a dollar a can at Walmart. However, before executing this method another step had to be taken.

We laid out and folded multiple plastic bags over top of the sections that were not going to be painted. Then taped the bags down over the exact same tape line as previously laid out. Oh and by "we" I mean our Personal Contractors. Let me explain, by this point we were getting pretty annoyed with our rug and our methods not working, the Personal Contractors had more patience and were more precise than we could have been at this point. From here we just laid the cheap spray paint on thick. We did two coats that each took three cans of paint. We realized that we reached a point where we just couldn't get it any whiter. With this method we can paint or dye the entire piling of the rug, just the top surface. Therefore there will always be a little black visible in our painted sections. This worked out ok though because it was consistent. I know what you're thinking and yes its a little rougher of rug. Its obviously not soft and fluffy, but its also not as bad as you would assume. The rug was stiff to begin with so at this price we are willing to live with a little rough.



 

This beautiful rug for under $30

All in all this rug cost under thirty dollars. Beat that Hobby Lobby! The rug itself was $20 and we spent $6 on spray paint and about $3 on painters tape. I'm choosing to not count the methods that didn't work because you guys won't make those same mistakes :)

Cooking Chic: Whatever Vegetables Inside the Fridge Soup

Cooking on a college budget can be a challenge. Especially if you want to eat something more than  preservatives and don't want to eat the same thing every night. An extremely easy change up meal I've found is soup. Really the only extra ingredient to remember at the grocery store for this is broth. Personally I choose chicken broth, one box of this can make 3-4 meals for one college chic girl. This makes it a very budget friendly meal.

Step 1: Chopped any desired ingredients

The vegetables I pulled out of the fridge tonight were carrots, celery, broccoli, garlic, and spinach. I highly recommend garlic or adding garlic powder, it adds a lot of flavor to the broth. All of these vegetables were things that I would have in the fridge anyway for various meals and snacks, putting them in a soup just creates another easy cheap meal option that doesn't involve purchasing a lot more groceries than necessary.

Step 2: Soften vegetables in olive oil

To soften the harder vegetables, in this case the carrots and celery, I sauteed them in virgin olive oil along with the chopped garlic. Adding the garlic gives these vegetables great flavor. One of the great benefits of making your own soup is the ability to chose portion size and the ratio of ingredients. 

Step 3: Add broth and remaining ingredients

Next, simply the broth was adding along with the broccoli and spinach. Allow this to all simmer together for few minutes. Any kind of broth can be used for this. Also it is very easy to adjust how much soup is made in this recipe. 

Enjoy you're healthy soup and new favorite, easy, frugal, fast, meal. :) 

Kitchen Revamp: A Vanity in the Kitchen?

Like any roommates who love food and have a small kitchen we needed more storage. Let me stress the small kitchen space again. Minimal cabinet room around here. So we moved our eating island and contemplated our possibilities. With some shelving ideas in mind we headed to our favorite antique store. Just like it always does, our project size grew as we walked around the store. After an hour and a half we decided on a shelving unit with a counter top and an antique vanity, also multiple glass decanters and canisters. Needless to say it was a successful day, especially since both of us only spent around twenty five dollars. Our purchases looked like this coming out of the store...

$20 Antique Vanity.

The antique vanity cost twenty dollars and was in need of a good scrubbing. However we immediately thought it was adorable and fell in love with the possibilities. This was no where near what we expected to get for our kitchen storage, I mean it is a vanity, but it's charm won us over. Just keep reading and you will see what we mean. All we did to this was give it a good cleaning with a Mr.Clean Magic Eraser. It definitely worked its magic, the vanity looks marvelous and shiny once again.

$22 Counter shelves with counter top, in desperate need of love 

This very red and bland counter was twenty two dollars. As you can see we really had to use our imagination to see what we were going to do with this. However it was definitely the item in the store that would give us the most storage for our dollar. The first step was sanding down some of the red plastic counter top. Previous owners burned a spot on it which created a large round ripple. Once sanded smooth we were able to add some basic contact adhesive paper from Walmart, this meant we could say goodbye to the aged red! What I believe was a key step in this project was taking the time to precisely cut around the metal edge. This really gave it a nice, finished, professional look. We wanted it to still look like a counter top and not just a shelving unit. After a coat or two of some left over antique white paint was added it looks like a completely different piece, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

The Finished Project

The colors all ended up looking like they were really forever meant to be together. The finial price breakdown  for these revamp looks something like this;

The Vanity: $20, No additional cost besides some elbow grease, cleaner, and screws which we already had.

The Counter: $22, and we paid $5 for a roll of adhesive contact paper for the top. The paint we had from a previous project so a grand total of $27. The decanters and canisters were $2-$4 each and the basket we are using for bread was $2.

First Project of the New School Year: Chicken Wire Window!

A new year, new projects, same thrifty chic results! As college girls we love taking pictures of our outings and our new friends we make each semester. We are always looking for ways, or getting new cute ideas thrown in our face on Pinterest, to display these pictures. Putting them on Facebook is fun at the time but having them displayed in your apartment means you get to see them everyday, not just when you scroll down your profile. And don't we all what to look at those pictures where we were having fun and dressed cute everyday? We sure do!!
The project idea for this wall in our apartment changed multiple times  but i can not imagine it turning out better than it did. We stated with an old three sectioned window we found buried in an antique store basement for $15. It was already green and already missing the two side panels of glass. Ideas on what to do with this window immediately started to flow, once again thanks to Pinterest.

Pinterest inspiration

 We settled on the chicken wire idea. It seemed like, and was, and cheap and easy way to display multiple pictures on this one window. We chose to add bright colored clothespins from the dollar store to hold the pictures.

Our $25 picture display!

This brings out more color and makes it extremely easy to change out the pictures displayed on there. The chicken wire was purchased from Menards in huge roll form $7. There is a ton left so don't be surprised when more chicken wire projects pop up! The slowest, most patience consuming process of this project was cutting the chicken wire. We simply measured the two side openings and cut out two sections of wire with wire cutters. The new wire however looked way too shiny and new to go with our cool old window so we brainstormed ways to induce age fast.
The resulting idea was very effective and fun for all. The idea of waiting to create real, natural rust seemed way too long for our impatient selves so we decided to burn it. Plus burning it meant there had to be a fire and honestly who doesn't like bonfires? We took our wire, left over project wood, and friends to the beach one night and the results couldn't have been better. The wire lost its shine and has many different shades of brown, gold, and black on it. Once happy with the wire color the wire was added to the back with a staple gun and the sides of the wire trimmed up. Two small screws were added to the sides on the back of the window. Definitely use a drill bit first to prevent splitting your window frame. and then wire was wrapped around the screw creating a nice durable support for the window to hang from. Some string was added to the back of a dollar frame so that can hang from the wire as well. there are many things to hang on there, not just pictures. Flowers, cute magazine clippings, anything that you want!

The end result!

A large picture will be added to the middle glass section but we were too anxious to show all of you that we couldn't wait for it to be printed. Now for the cost run down of this project. The window itself was $15 at an antique store. The Wire was $7 at Menards and has left us with plenty extra. The pictures were printed from Snapfish which gave us our first prints for free besides a $2 shipping fee. The white frame was a dollar from Goodwill. This gives us an overall total of $25! And very minimal work. We couldn't be happier with our $25 photo display.

What can't be a shelf?

There are so many creative and inexpensive ways to make decorative shelving. Before this project my room had four very empty white walls and something needed to be done. First came the idea from Pinterest to hang a shallow create on the wall for shelves. I was able to find my very dark and graying crate at one of our favorite antique stores for $12. The color and size were perfect. Still, something to accompany it on the wall was needed. During one of our many Goodwill hauls I came across a perfect desk chair, more on this later, however in order to transport this in one of our small compact cars two of us needed to stay behind at the store. While me and one of our personal contractors Caleb were waiting we walked around the side of the store. Our Goodwill has an  old railroad yard running right up to the side of the building. This is where we found the huge, thick pieces of railroad wood and the idea to create shelves with them happened. After that it was just purchasing some large 60 cent screws that were long enough to go through the entire shelf and then adding the décor.


The finished under $20 unique décor wall.

 

All of the glass vases on the shelves were from the Salvation Army or Goodwill for a dollar and filled with free stuff collected on the beach. The total cost rundown for this wall, $12 for the crate, The wood was free, four long screws to hold the large shelves $2.40, and roughly $3 in décor items. Complete cost $17.40 and I couldn't be happier with my under $20 wall. It fits in perfectly with the rest of the room and really adds a wonderful uniqueness to it. Much more personality than just adding normal book shelves. 

Is it a crate? A basket? Or a shelf?!

We have a very small bathroom, not uncommon for college apartments, but this space crunch has forced us to get creative with our organization. Once again inspired by Pinterest we set out to find some cute way to add shelving above our toilet. One of those boxed shelving units at Target would just be easy too easy and generic for our taste. Walking downtown armed with Starbucks and one of the first sunny spring days we ran across our new favorite antique store. This place has it all, even sales! Our first day there were made quite a haul, almost more than one of our little compact cars could handle, but we never let car size hold us back. Someone might be riding home wedged between the new gems but we, almost always, make it work. This crate, $4, and wire basket, $8, were finds of this day at our new favorite store. Add a couple of basic nails and bam they become shelves! After looking around the antique store we decided we liked the idea of two different styles of baskets instead of two matching ones like in our inspiration pin. Luckily we were able to find two different ones which were the exact same length and look good next to each other. 

Our $22 bathroom organization

 Not everything you find at thrift stores or antique stores has to be used for it's original purpose in life, think about how it could be used for what you need. Pinterest is great at opening your mind to new creative uses for things. We added a few extras from Hobby Lobby, orange frame, $4 in the 90% of isle, and two covered boxes, $3 each when 50% off. We also stacked our extra toilet in the crate, perfect location and looks cute. These toilet paper rolls were "donated" to our apartment from our dorm building. This whole project cost $22! It's cheap, works great adding the discreet storage and decorative flare our bathroom needed.