DIY Decor Journal
Real room makeovers, weekend craft tutorials, thrift flips, and budget decorating advice you can actually do with your own hands.
Furniture & Upcycling
7 min readThere’s a chair in my garden right now with a fern growing out of the seat, and it looks lovely, and it should never have ended up there. It wobbled; I decided it was finished, I cut a hole in the seat and called it a planter. Two years later, I took a proper look […]
Furniture & Upcycling
7 min readI dragged a dresser home off a curb once- seven drawers, good lines- and it sat in the garage for two weekends while I sanded and primed and bought paint for it. Then I tipped it forward to do the bottom edge, and the whole base came apart in my hands because the particleboard had […]
DIY Projects & Crafts
7 min readThe first thing I ever made was a set of wall panels out of an old TV box, and they looked fine for about two days, and then the paint dried properly and you could see every single ridge of the corrugation pushing up through the white like a washboard. From across the room, it […]
DIY Projects & Crafts
7 min readMy first planter came out of the mold looking almost right, and then I turned it over, and there was a lump of gravel sitting in the wall of it the size of a grape, and about a week later the whole rim broke off in my hand while I was carrying it to the […]
DIY Projects & Crafts
9 min readThe first curtains I made were four yards of quilting cotton with a print I’d been staring at for about twenty minutes in the shop. They went up on the rod and immediately hung there like two tea towels, with no weight at all, and by six the next morning the light was coming through […]
DIY Projects & Crafts
8 min readI’ve made seventeen things out of clay since last spring, and about nine of them live in a cupboard now. The ones still out in the house all have one thing in common, which took me embarrassingly long to notice. They hold something: keys, rings, a tea light, a fistful of dried grass. Purely decorative […]
DIY Projects & Crafts
7 min readThe first plant hanger I tied looked right for about five weeks. Then the pot sat a little lower than it had on day one, lower again after the next watering, and by the end of the summer the whole thing hung at a tilt with the ceiling hook doing most of the work. Nothing […]
Furniture & Upcycling
7 min readI needed a coffee table, and I had forty dollars. That’s why I started messing around with pallets, and I never really went back. Since then, I’ve built a sofa, a bed frame, a potting bench and a few things that were bad enough that they ended up in the fire pit, which is part […]
Furniture & Upcycling
8 min readThe first time I tried to paint furniture without sanding, three coats of good latex came off the top in one rubbery strip, the way a label peels off a jar, and all I did was pull up a bit of painter’s tape I’d stuck there to mark where the lamp would go. It was […]
Furniture & Upcycling
8 min readAlmost every DIY coffee table makeover I’ve watched fall apart did so on the top, usually within the first month, because the top takes the hot mug, the feet on a Sunday night, and the juice cup somebody left there overnight. At the same time, the legs get kicked maybe twice a year. So I […]
