a little bit of paint and pixie dust – my latest DIY’s

I have talked before about how much I think paint can change up an item in a cheap, but very effective way. Today I am going to share some home DIY’s that we have been doing lately that are making out home feel even better.

Dining Room Crates

When we first moved in we were using an Alex Drawer from Ikea in the Dining Room which was storing kitchen supplies in the top and had some potatoes and onions in the bottom as it was (so I thought) the best place to store them.

Then I discovered that the air flow was not good enough in the drawer and our onions were not doing great at all and we needed something a bit better. A few months ago we purchased some wooden crates from Ikea in the as-is section for 50% off. I realized that they would go great in that corner, but I didn’t want the wooden look.

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We grabbed some white paint from Home Depot and over the course of a few evenings I worked on painting the outside of them. It only took about two hours in total and the crates look great and fit the space perfectly. In the top on we store table clothes, napkins, and hot pads, in the second one is onions and can be found on the bottom.

The holes will actually give enough air flow and they are tucked away since we don’t have a ton of room to store items like these.

Gold Office Furniture

We are in the process of decorating my office (and it is coming along quite well) and while you will be getting a full post about it once it complete I am going to share some of the easy fixes we made to some existing furniture that we already had.

My desk is an old cheap desk from Ikea that was bought back when we lived in Ontario. It existed as our dining room table in our basement suite, but now it is back to being a desk again, but I knew I wanted to spruce it up. We picked up a can of gold spray paint in in just a short while it almost looks like a brand new desk. We also used the spray paint on some brackets to reinstall a shelf that was put up very badly, but now actually looks good (and stable) as well as a white board/cork board my dad made for me years ago, but was originally black and didn’t match the room.

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We are also planning on painting a cedar chest in white to go in this room (once I move it from my parents house) and I hope that it will look something like this. My plan is that it will be used as seating/storage for now and may one day transition to be a toy box of some kind.

Lego Art

Back at our wedding almost 4 years ago we decorated with little purple lego pieces, of which we have had no idea what to do with. This past month I took some of them, with a space lego frame and made a piece of art in a chevron pattern. I really like how this turned out and it currently lives in the second bedroom.

Now just to figure out what to do with the other 22,000 pieces since this used only about 1,700.

So there are some pretty cheap and easy DIY’s I have been doing around the house lately. Have you been DIYing at all lately? What have you been doing?