Inspiring Ideas & Step-by-Step Guides

Home Decor

Four glass cylinder vases, a bag of felt pads, and a can of flat white paint that was already sitting in my garage. Under eight dollars that Saturday, and two of those vases are still on my mantel getting asked about by people who assume I paid real money for them. That is the whole […]

Home Decor

Thrift store home decor ideas only work if the piece itself is sound. Before anything goes in my cart, I flip it over. Four seconds. That one habit has saved me more money than every styling tip I have ever bookmarked. Screws and corner blocks mean someone built it to last. Staples and glue mean […]

Home Decor

Five things. That’s what I carried home the first time, and I laid them out on the rug like I’d pulled off something clever. A small framed print, two candles, a fake eucalyptus stem, a serving tray, and one of those woven baskets that turns out to be roughly the size of a cereal bowl […]

Home Decor

Previously, I thought luxury decorative objects were just more expensive versions of the ones I already had on my shelves, for instance, a heavier vase, a shinier sculpture, or one with a brand name on the base. But that kind of luxury never really stayed in my house; it always appeared as though it had […]

Home Decor

An accent stays in this house only if its color or its material shows up somewhere else in the same room. That’s the whole test. A lot of home decor accents fail it while looking perfectly good under shop lighting, and the fault is rarely the object; it’s that the object ends up being the […]

Home Decor

Two console tables, same showroom, maybe nine feet apart. One was two hundred and forty dollars, the other was just over two thousand, and from where I was standing they were the same table in two different stains. I got down on the floor with my phone flashlight, and it took about ninety seconds to […]

Home Decor

Two years back, I would have rolled my eyes if someone said: “Put aluminium decor in the living room.” Metal felt like a dentist’s waiting room. One cactus. One chair nobody sits on. Then I found a dented aluminium vase in a messy neighbourhood thrift shop for three dollars. Scratches. Dents. Looked like it had […]

Home Decor

The tape measure came out because I was irritated. Half the decorative vases in this house were sitting empty on a Tuesday afternoon and I wanted to know whether that was my fault or theirs, so I measured the mouth of every one, inside edge to inside edge, and wrote the number on masking tape […]