Exterior Decorating on a Budget By Kathleen Wilson
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 ½ 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 6×6 columns on our porch, very plain lumber. We
are using scrap 1×4 and 1×2 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!
Copyright 2002 K. Wilson