around the house: repurposing ideas

Last day to enter the giveaway. :)

I stumbled across this book at our local library last year and loved the fun ideas for re-purposing items and also saving them from the garbage heap.

I especially was inspired by "The Salvage Sisters'" idea to create a quilt from past-their-prime jeans and decided to put together a quilt for our family. It's still a work in progress, but here's how it looks so far:

Here are some other ideas that I've used around our house:


Converting a wall hanging to curtains: Dave had a batik print hanging on his wall back in his bachelor days. When we moved it got stored away until I repainted our boy's room last year and thought it would work well as curtains. All I did was cut it in two, hem the cut edges and create a casing for the curtain rod. Easy peasy.

Using curtain rods as garden stakes: we used this idea in our garden to support tomato plants and to support netting we needed to put up to keep out the deer. This is the best picture I have of using the curtain rods. Note the decorative finals (which we eventually removed because they were too sharp and pointy - but if you use this idea, consider using rods with interesting finials)

Plastic cupcake holders make great change holders: we have one of these to hold our spare change in a cabinet near our kitchen phone. They'd also work well organizing items in a drawer such as buttons, safety pins, elastics and paper clips.