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.