Plan Ahead, Save Money: Part I

Wouldn't it be so easy to decorate your home if you had a huge budget for every room?  I would pretty much look in a Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware catalog, find a room I liked, buy everything and transplant it in my house.

 Ta da!  Done and done.

Having a small budget (sometimes no budget) has forced me to be resourceful and learn how to plan ahead.  I am not a planner, but I wasted enough money on things I ultimately didn't like that I finally learned my lesson.  I've also learned to be patient.  Planning forces you to figure out exactly what you want...then you don't buy a thing until you've found "IT".  Sometimes it only takes a few days of searching and sometimes it takes months. 

This was my kitchen wall for about the first eight months we were in our house:

Absolutely blank, blah, nothing.  I finally decided what I was going to do with it and came up with a plan.  I didn't have super fancy PhotoShop or any other kind of editing software, so I used the Paint program that's on every PC to sketch out what I wanted the wall to eventually look like.

 

Nice, huh?  I already had the small frames ($1 in the Target dollar spot bins years ago), medium frames ($5 at Michael's) and the clock (wedding gift!) so I knew what to draw on the wall.  I was missing the plates and the large frames.  I knew that I was going to get a large frame from Michael's for $10.00, but I didn't know where those plates were going to come from.  I got the frames and clock up and for about four months my wall looked like this:

Empty spaces with empty frames.  I was able to fill the frames pretty quickly with free botanical prints I got online, but plain, solid, plates (I decided on red instead of orange or yellow) were a lot trickier to find.   All in all it took me about a year to get it the way I wanted it.  

It didn't come out exactly how the first draft I made in Paint looked, but I didn't waste any money on stuff that I didn't like or that didn't work. I spent $10 on a frame, $10 on the plates and about $2 on the "R" that I stained myself.