{renovate} decorating a large space on a tiny budget

Happy Monday friends!

As promised I'm back for one more post about the church basement I recently helped reorganize and decorate. You can catch up with befores here and afters here. Today, I thought I'd share the lessons I learned from this project - both for decorating a large space and decorating on a budget. I try to work within a budget on our home, but the insanely tiny budget ($500!) for this room really forced us to get creative!

Lessons on decorating a large space:

- Create "rooms" within a room. Within this space, we create four separate rooms: the cafe, the living room, the mini living room and the kids area. Creating rooms makes the space more manageable, more comfortable and not nearly as overwhelming for people walking into the room.

- Pull the furniture away from the wall. I know, you hear this all the time, but it's true and worth repeating. For awhile we had the mini living room up against the wall and it was weird. As soon as we moved it away from the wall, it completely worked. In a large space moving the furniture away from the wall helps fill up space - one of the reasons we were so excited about the barrels that live in the middle of the room.

- Hang large pieces of art. The church has an amazing artist who'd created large paintings to hang around the church. We raided the upstairs and brought a few down and immediately the space felt more colorful and intimate. 

- Leave enough walking space. The thing about decorating a large space is that you want to fill it! But, be cautious of leaving enough room to move. A large space means you can have large walkways and space around the outside of the room to help it feel airy and open.

Lessons on decorating on a budget:

- Start by cleaning it all out. There was so much stored in this basement - both out in the open and in the two closets - and we started by taking EVERYTHING out of the room. We donated the majority of it, but this was such an important step because it allowed us to shop with what we already had.

- Use what you have. An extension of cleaning out, and important to keep an open mind when doing. Most people have things they can already use, they just need an open mind and a little creativity. In this case we were able to use tables, chairs and a large room divider.

- Repurpose what you have, if needed. Get creative about how you look at what you currently have and how you can use it in your new space. We cut down large rectangular tables into squares and turned a room divider into a chalkboard.

As for this project, I thought you might be interested in what we already had on hand vs. what we bought. 

What we already had/repurposed:

- pews as benches

- cut rectangle tables in to squares

- chairs from basement, spray painted

- scoured our houses for chairs and pillow forms

- room divider with legs cut off = chalkboard

- large table with smaller legs = kids table

- throne chairs with new fabric

- small rug

- ficus plants

What we bought:

- paint (in fact, the BEST paint deal I've ever heard of)

- 3 couches

- 2 chairs

- 2 lamps

- 1 rug

- 12 pillows inserts

- fabric

- supplies for cutting tables - new trim, nails, etc. 

All in all, we spent $475. Under budget! :)  We got lucky and scored some incredible deals. But I can't stress enough that it was repurposing with creativity that allowed us to meet the budget and still make the space stylish.

Thanks for following along with this room reveal! It was super fun project and I am so happy to share it with you guys :)

{renovate} church basement afters

Happy friday friends! Before I get to the church basement, I wanted to share my exciting news for the week - my house is featured on Houzz! Photographer Whitney Lyons contacted me a few months ago asking if I'd be interested having my house featured on the site. Of course! We spend a lovely morning taking photos and chatting about the house. I know you've all seen our house photos, but you might be interested in the interview :). You can read it here.

So, the church basement. Let's review the facts that I mentioned last week. Old building, stark white, overly crowded church basement redecoration. Budget = $500. Timeline = 6ish weeks.

Remember the before?

Here's the after.

When my friend Kate and I were asked to take on this project, the only direction we were given was to make it comfortable and cafe-like. A place where people want to hang out. To start, we went directly to the fabric store where we picked out a variety of fabrics to base our color scheme on. The main colors are grey, blue and orange. Then, in somewhat of a panic, both of us started scouring Craigslist for small cafe-like table, chairs and couches. It quickly became clear that even just buying tables for cheap on Craigslist was going to eat up our entire budget, which lead to brainstorming ways to save money and use what we already had.

In the process of determining the best use for the space, we came up with four separate spaces within the basement. I think the best way to tackle this post is to take you on a photo tour through each small space and tell you what we bought and what we repurposed.

Cafe area

There were already a few pews in the basement and we knew from the beginning we'd use them as benches. They were perfect! The tables though, were another story. Like I mentioned, we knew we couldn't spend money on other tables and we knew we want small cafe-type tables, so after some brainstorming, we decided to cut down the existing tables in the space, which you can see in the before photo. Then we painted the edges black to make them look a little more polished. The chairs were from a variety of sources - some we found in a closet in the basement and some we gathered from friends - all were free. Spray painting them all orange help unify them and provided a much-needed fun color in the space. We used the fabrics we'd picked out to soften the space a little and add more small punches of color, both in the form of pillows and in seat covers where needed.

Of course, the BEST FIND for the cafe space was the barrels. One of the guys that goes to the church was working on a construction site and they were THROWING THESE AWAY. Luckily, he snagged them because he thought we might like them. YES. We did in fact LOVE them. :) We topped them with more of the same cut down cafe tables to make them a little easier to use, and now they're a great spot to stand and eat snacks and chat with friends.

Living room area

Behind the cafe area is a comfy living room area. For this space we bought two couches for a total of $80. Seriously. One of $50 on Craigslist and one was $30 at Goodwill. Both are in amazing shape. We bought the yellow rug and two lights - foreground and background. Do you recognize the coffee table? The side table was from Kate. 

The throne chairs were a fantastic basement closet find. We recovered the seats with the neutral grey fabric (they were bright red!) and they fit in perfectly - and add a little character :).

Extra seating area

On the other side of the room, we made another small seating area. The chairs were from Goodwill, the couch from Craigslist and the bench was another closet find. Seriously, there are two closets in this space and once we got them cleaned out we realized they were full of wonderful and useful treasures. The rug was one I had hiding in my basement that we weren't going to use.

Kids area

Looping back around - so right next to the barrels - is the kids area. There are a seriously large amount of kiddos at this church and we wanted to dedicate a space for them to play while their parents are chatting.  There were large rolling space dividers already in the room, one of which we cut the legs off of, hung it on the wall and turned it into a chalkboard. The kids LOVE it. We also cut down the table legs and paired it with a couple found benches for a cute little kids table.

Friends, this post is getting way too long. I didn't want to stretch this out into three posts, but I think I'll save the lessons and tips for decorating a large space on a tiny budget for Monday.

So come back Monday for tips :). And, if you have any questions about the space, just ask me in the comments and I'll address them next week. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend! 

{renovate} copper cups

Welcome, Houzz readers! If this is your first time visiting my site, you can read a little bit about me here. I hope you look around and decide to stay a while! By way of a quick introduction, here are a few of my projects you might enjoy:
Kitchen remodel
Back entry remodel
Striped hallway


Last month, you might remember, we went to a big antique show and brought home a set of copper cups.

Since then, I've been using them around the house in flower arrangements. But, we actually bought them to drink out of, so I had to get to work cleaning them. You can see, above, that they were really tarnished. Let's take a closer look:

YEARS of built up tarnish. While it gives it a great 'antique' look, that might not be what we're going for when drinking out of them:

I knew for sure I wanted to de-tarnish the insides, but then possibly the outsides.

Here are my weapons of choice:

I had both of these laying around because of the copper counters and a couple copper pans we have. My original thought was that I would compare the two. But I quickly learned they have two different functions! Wenol didn't cut through the thick tarnish, so I first needed to go to work on the tarnish with Copper Glo. But once I'd cut through the tarnish, Wenol really shines up the copper and makes it purty.  So I cleaned all the insides (no pictures, but trust me - kinda messy, not that exciting :) and then had to decide about the outsides. And here's the thing friends, I actually like the outsides all sparkly and coppery. The issue? Chris likes them better tarnished.

We have a divided household. :) For now, half are clean and sparkly and half are tarnished and antiqued.

The antiqued ones are great for flowers.

But for some reason I am more comfortable drinking out of the clean and sparkly ones.

What do you guys think? After I finished with the copper glo/wenol combo, I washed them all with soap and water. Is it safe to drink out of cups so tarnished? Is tarnish bad for you? Which look do you like better? I'd love to hear your thoughts about the great copper debate 2013 :)

ps. I wasn't paid to review these two products, I just wanted to fill you in on what I use!