In Praise of Making the Home Decor We Can’t Afford to Buy
Sometimes the most useful thing about a very expensive cushion is figuring out why you like it. Look at it for long enough and you might realise it’s the muddy green linen, or the little bit of red along the edge. Once you know that, you can do quite a lot with a cushion cover you already own and a length of red trim.
There’s a particular kind of frustration in knowing what would look good in a room and finding that the thing itself costs more than you can spend. Especially when it’s something small. A lampshade for the corner that feels a little bare. A pair of café curtains in a stripe you’ve been looking for everywhere. The nice thing about making some of these things yourself is that you can be as particular as you like about the details that matter to you.
Start with the detail you keep coming back to
If it’s the gathered fabric on a lampshade you love, a plain shade with the right shape gives you somewhere to start. If it’s the colour of a painted side table, look for a secondhand table that fits beside your chair and see what a leftover pot of paint can do. A striped tablecloth from the thrift shop might have enough good fabric in it for a pair of kitchen curtains. A stain at one end hardly matters if that part was never going in the window.
These are the DIY home decor ideas that tend to stick with us. They begin with a spot in the house we see every day and a fairly specific idea of what we’d like there. It’s much easier to choose a fabric when you know it needs to look good next to the green tiles in your kitchen.
Leave a little room for how it turns out
It’s easy to spend more than you meant to once you start buying fabric, tools and all the little things a project suddenly needs. The best place to start is usually the cupboard. There might be enough paint left from the hallway to try a coat on that little table. You might even like the colour better there, in a room that gets the afternoon sun.
And yes, you’ll probably see the place where the trim joins. For the first week you’ll look straight at it every time you walk past. Then one evening you’ll switch on the lamp and notice how lovely the room looks with just that one light on. Which was what you wanted in the first place.
-Juliette