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.

The Look for Less: Vintage Botanical Lithographs

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Bellacor Leaf Botanicals

Collecting Botanical Prints from Country Living
When I started looking for art to put on our walls I knew I wanted something that looked authentically old, but not too formal or anitque-y. Because we have a ton of wall space I didn't want anything that would be too expensive to do as a grouping. The cost of six to eight prints can really add up even when you're shopping at Home Goods. I started searching for old botany books that I could take pages out of, but those proved hard to find. I ended up getting my prints from a vendor at the NC State Fair Grounds flea market. He's there every weekend in one of the permanent buildings and sells old prints like botanicals and old maps (I would love to buy one of the maps). The ones that I bought were $5 each. They are chromolithrographs from a 1916 botany book. The frames I used were $5 from Michael's. The quality of the frames is not great, but from a distance you can't tell that they're cheap. The grouping above our TV cost a grand total of $80. I think that's pretty good considering how much wall space it covers. I did a similar grouping in our kitchen that has mainly fruit prints, plates and a clock.

The Look for Less: Restoration Hardware Key Art

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Key Art
These are 18.5x18.5 and retail for $199. I saw some old keys at the flea market at the NC state fair grounds and did a similar piece of wall art with a shadow box I got from Michael's. If you go to the right guy you can get a handful of keys for $5 and if you go to Michael's at the right time or have a coupon you can get a shadow box for about $25 or less. Here's what mine looks like:

I tacked on the thicker ones in the center with thread and just hot glued the flat ones.