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Exterior Decorating on a Budget
by Kathleen Wilson - k_wilson@thebudgetdecorator.com
Description: Tips for decorating your home's exterior on a budget.
Many times we are so busy decorating the interior of our home, we
forget about the view most people see first...the outside! Perhaps we
all believe improvements to the exterior of the home must be
expensive. Not true! What a better place to showcase your clever
creativity than where every passerby can see!
Your best friend here is a building site. Find out where they are
building new homes in your area, and go talk to the contractor in
charge of the site. Most of these sites have scrap piles where they
discard huge amounts of materials they can't use, either because they
aren't the right size, a mistake was made, or a myriad of other
reasons. Ask the contractor if you can help yourself to their scrap
pile, most are more than willing to let you.
Here you can find large pieces of 1/2-inch siding, scrap wood, broken
tiles, vinyl flooring remnants, and possibly even leftover paint or
countertop material. Look at everything with the eye of the budget
decorator, you can make something out of all these things!
Use the siding and scrap wood to make garden furniture, decorative
shutters for your windows, or as architectural elements on your
existing features. For instance, we have several large 6x6 columns on
our porch, very plain lumber. We are using scrap 1x4 and 1x2 to add
wrap around moldings on these columns, and painting them to contrast.
It looks like a custom porch column! You could add simple shapes as
appliqués to doors, gable areas, or empty walls.
Use broken tiles to make a mosaic table for the porch, or create
mosaic stepping stones for the yard. You could even update a tired
old picnic table with the tiles. Create a wood plaque with the scrap
wood, glue or paint your house #,s on it, and add mosaic tiling
around the border for a very expensive look.
If you can find a fencing company willing to give you their discards,
make garden posts for hanging lanterns or plants from posts. Be sure
to cement these in the ground. Use the boards to make rustic
planters, or cut them down to make picket style garden fencing. Make
an shingle style mailbox.
Vinyl flooring scraps can be made into floorcloths for your porch or
patio with a little paint and polyurethane, and can be as decorative
or as simple as you want, custom matching your homes colors and
styles.
As you can see, with a little bit of hunting, you can find the
materials to make the exterior of your home look like a masterpiece
for almost no money, and you are saving a lot of good materials from
our waste dumps!
Kathleen Wilson is the author of Quick Decorating
Ideas Under $20: The Budget Decorator's Bible" and
Editor of the popular ezine, The Budget Decorator.
For more free ideas, visit her at http://www.TheBudgetDecorator.com.
Reader comment: This makes me think of my own yard. Offcuts and pieces of
marble from a company that makes marble counter tops made an beautiful
paved walkway. My favorite areas to hunt for free material is industrial
areas...Johann
