Your '70s trash is my interior decor

It's no secret among my friends that I'm a crafty person. What I am not, particularly, is a DIYer. Maybe it's owed to the fact that I've lived in apartments, where there isn't a lot of room to take on projects. Or maybe it's because I just really didn't have a need to. Either way, I haven't really been that kind of person. But that has changed.

With the new house to decorate and a tighter budget, I started seeing more potential in things we already owned or in things that my family members were trashing. And that's where we start the story of this mirror.

My parents purchased a tiny one bedroom condo on a lake this year that came fully decorated. Trust me when I tell you that it came with no less than a flobbitygillion mirrors hanging on the walls. My mom was trying to pare down but, as she put it, "hates to just throw them away."

One mirror in particular caught our eye. It had potential.

Tacky awesomeness

See the potential? No? How about here?

Gold isn't glamorous?

OK. So it isn't very attractive. It's kind of oddly 1970s traditional. The gold with the "carved" top. It's just weird. But now imagine if it was all one solid gorgeous color. Can't imagine it? Well, lucky for you I did it, so you don't have to. My mom and I thought with a good coat of oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, we might just be able to bring this thing into the 21st century. Never having done this sort of thing before, I kind of just made it up as I went along. Lucky for me, it worked.

The first thing I did was remove the frame from the actual mirror glass itself. It was screwed on, so it was easy to take apart.

All I had to do was pop the back off and then pop the glass out of the frame. Pretty straightforward. I did run into one odd detail.



There was actually cardboard on the glass as a kind of spacer between the glass and the backboard. Not a problem -- I just had to be careful not to lose any of the spacers while I had this thing taken apart.

Next I took the frame outside and set it up on a canvas dropcloth. I propped it up on some old recyclables to keep the frame from sticking to the canvas and to make sure that I could get all of the nooks and crannies around this thing.

Pretty sophisticated rigging

Next: Painting. I went over the entire frame with thin coats of spray paint, allowing it some drying time between each coat. I had to go back over the frame several times to make sure I got it completely covered. Just when I thought I was done, I'd see some awesome '70s gold shining through. But after about four coats it was looking good.

Better already

It's hard to tell from my shoddy outdoor photography, but it was a vast improvement.

Much better

See? Didn't think it would work did you? Granted, I had my doubts too, but I figured a $5 investment in spray paint was worth a shot to see if it would work. And I think it did. After I let it dry (and air out for a few days so my whole house wouldn't smell like spray paint), I put the whole rig back together and was pretty impressed with myself.

Looking good

I hung the mirror in our hallway to brighten it up a bit and to give guests access to a mirror bigger than our tiny bathroom medicine cabinet. I know the picture isn't great, but have you ever tried to take a picture of a mirror? Not easy.

Beauteous

As my sister-in-law said, "It looks like something you would actually buy." With just a little paint, the tacky '70s awesomeness now looks like a "modern-traditional" piece that actually fits in really well with our decor and the overall feel of the house.

For my first DIY project, I was pretty impressed with myself. I've even thought of future possibilities for the same piece. It might look really good in white, but with our cream woodwork we decided to stay away from the clashing-neutrals look. Down the road, though, it's a possibility. Another possibility I've considered is removing the mirror altogether and putting in a piece of wood painted with chalkboard paint. I could hang it in the kitchen and use it to track grocery needs.

What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Wish I had kept the '70s golden glory?

Curb appeal

The biggest difference between the new rental house we've moved into and any place we've lived in before is that we're responsible for the outdoor upkeep as well. Initially I thought, "No big deal." But this house has a lot of outdoor space, so it was intimidating for some first-time home-livers (that sounds oddly anatomical, doesn't it?).

It was no less intimidating because of the -- shall we say -- lack of care the house had before we moved in. The tenant before us wasn't exactly up to the task, so we inherited a jungle. First on my list of projects: Our scary overgrown bushes.

We were "that house" on the street

See what I mean? You could barely see the front porch, and you couldn't see the house numbers at all. And the view from the porch? Well...

Lovely, right?

Mike couldn't wait to get started

Not that we have much to look at (the street), but I'd like to see it without a view of bramble in front of me.

Our landlord offered to loan us her manual hedge trimmers, but we quickly realized that those weren't going to cut it. We needed heavy-duty, but as renters we weren't about to invest in a lot of expensive yard equipment. Enter the local rental place. We called and found we could rent electric trimmers for fours hours for just $15. Sold!

It didn't take very long for us to start to see a vast improvement.

Halfway there!

You can actually start to see our big planters full of impatiens. And after about 90 minutes...

Finished

Ta da!

Ok, so they're not great. The bushes are still super overgrown, but at least they're not completely overtaking the front of our house. Our goal is to keep them up for the rest of the fall just using our manual trimmers and then cut them back more over next spring and summer. I was afraid to cut off too much right away because 1.) The bush on the left looks kind of dead on the inside 2.) I didn't want to kill everything a week after moving into the house.

So for now, at least is looks manicured. Plus, now I get a better view from my porch swing.

Manicured hedges make for a better view -- even if it is a parking lot

No more jungle

It just goes to show that with very little money and very little effort, even renters can improve a home's curb appeal. Now all the outside upkeep seems a lot less intimidating than it did before. I had almost forgotten how satisfying it was to do yard work, but I'm loving spending the time outside in the fresh air and sun, playing in the dirt.