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From Waste To Good Taste - Minimalist DIY's For any home!

Hello everyone! šŸ

For the past few months I have been absolutely in love with thrifting, to the point where I no longer shop for home decor or clothing outside of a second hand shop. There is something so personal about buying a second hand piece and making it perfect for your home with a few little tweaks here and there. Not to mention I have been saving a tonne of money and actually finding some amazing pieces that I haven't seen anywhere else.


So today I will be turning a couple home decor pieces into something a little more minimal and making them look a little more high end. I will also include links below to where you can find some items like these, but I do highly recommend visiting your local charity shop and picking out some goodies yourself!


Disclaimer, I am using real leather in a couple of these DIY's- However, they are leather scraps that my partner had and these pieces that are left were purely going to be thrown away and rather than waste the material I wanted to re-use it. I do not agree with the process of creating real leather or endorse it in any way, I just thought it would be worse for the leather to go to waste and the animal have suffered for this in anyway.


Here is my thrifted basket, originally from Asos for Ā£15, but mine was only Ā£1.99 from the local charity shop! Such a bargain. This DIY I have planned can be created using any basket and can obviously be changed up to suit your own personal needs and taste.



This is just the way I have decided to change it up so it fits better with what I want.


For this DIY you will need:

šŸ Scissors

šŸ Hot glue

šŸ Leather or material of your choice

šŸ Flowers (Dried or faux) (Optional

šŸ Paint (Optional)


First of all, I absolutely loved this basket, however I do not like the black and white combination as my room decor is moving into more creams, browns, greens and golds. Natural tones with hints of colour. I started off by removing the pompoms from the basket as the look isn't really for me, I did this with a pair of nail scissors just to ensure I didn't cut any of the material on the actual basket. I will be holding onto the pompoms to use in future DIY projects as well.


I was going to leave it at that but I decided its really not for me and that replacing the handles with a soft brown leather would be more aesthetically pleasing. You can find lots of really good faux leather scraps online, or even go to the local thrift shop and buy any material to use for your handles.

I used the original handles to trace around and gauge the correct size for mine. I turned my leather over so I was tracing it out on the back side of the leather, ensuring that I wasn't pressing too hard when tracing it out in case it left any indentations in the leather.


I used a white gel pen to trace around the handles to make sure that I got the right length and width, also giving me the gorgeous round ends on each side.


I cut the two pieces at 12 inches each, however because my leather is very soft it didn't feel sturdy enough to actually use as handles. To make them stronger I could have used some metal or even glued the leather onto the original handles, but after some consideration I am so glad I didn't.

I played with a few different ideas at this point as I really stumped myself, unsure whether to keep the longer handles, do to smaller handles or one larger one. However if I was going to do one larger one I would still have had the problem of it being quite soft, so I finally decided to go with the two smaller handles as I felt these would look a lot more dainty and add a small element of detail rather than overriding the design of the basket.


I really wanted the main focus here to be the woven basket and not the handles, I simply wanted them to accent what was originally there and make it look a little classier without adding heaps of adaptions.


So I simply cut two handles out of the first 12 inch piece and I honestly think they look super cute and wish I hadn't cut the leather out, but not all DIY's go as we expect and it was a good learning curve.


Then I used two clips to hold them in place until I thought they looked good. The basket had a rim along the top where it had been woven in a circle and I wanted to ensure I hid the last end of the ring under the handles as it was a bit distracting to me to see it poking out, it just drew the eye the wrong way. This is something I honestly find so annoying, if there are little ends poking out or anything I much prefer to find a way to hide them if I can as it gives the piece an overall cleaner finish.


I also thought it could look really nice to tape off the bottom half of this basket and you could paint it with a gorgeous pastel colour that would really highlight the leather. If I were to do this I think I would use coffee grounds dissolved in water to stain the bottom few rings or I would use turmeric dissolved in water as it would make a gorgeous mustard colour that would match my bedding really nicely!


I then hot glued them down to the bag, I use very simple glue from the range and its Ā£1.99 for 12 individual glue sticks and I only used one here so it was only an additional 16p for me to do this DIY, considering how much the item has changed it looks so much better to me and for the cost of Ā£2.15 it is such a cute addition to my room.


That same night my charger cable completely died so, when it came to me setting the basket down, I tried it in different positions, but it really felt like it needed to be hung up. So using my charger cable I knotted it through the handles and poked the ends of the cable back through the new leather handles. I then used some artificial trailing lavender that I have honestly had for years and was just saving in the cupboard. It was the perfect addition to the basket and this is honestly my favourite DIY.


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The second DIY is even easier than the first, it involves adapting a piece that I got from the local charity shop, and taking inspiration from another charity shop piece. I know I have a charity shop addiction, what can I say, i'm helping someone and making something actually beautiful.


This is the original thrifted piece, it cost me Ā£2.75 and I am abseloutely in love with it. It is so simple but has a really effective design, I love the contrast of textures in this piece. You've got raw wood, faux leather and bronze metal, honestly what could be better.


For this DIY you will need:

šŸ Scissors

šŸ Hot glue

šŸ Leather or material of your choice

šŸ Any kind of label holder

šŸ 3 tiered storage box


Although I have suggested using a 3 tiered storage box, that is simply because I am, this method could work for any drawers or storage box.


I didn't want to make the other one I thrifted perfectly the same as I wanted to be able to tell them apart, but then both still have similar aspects that tied them together really nicely.


This is the piece I was intending to DIY and what I had planned is really simple, just adding some leather straps to pull the drawers out and adding the bronze labels to the front.


Firstly I started cutting the leather, I measured the leather straps on the others. As they were folded over I measured one side and doubled it, so half was 3 inches, meaning I would need to cut 6 inches of material for the length, the width was 1 inch and this was really easy to measure out.


I drew these lines out with the same pen I used earlier on the opposite side of the leather than I wanted to use. Then I glued them together creating a pull tab and let them dry completely.


I originally planned on glueing these inside the drawers, but another learning curve got thrown my way! Hot glue does not adhere well to the leather meaning that when I glued them to the drawers they literally pulled right off. However, it was super easy to fix.


The label holders for the drawers came with little screws to fix them to your surface. I knew I wouldn't be using all 50 and especially not on this DIY so I took 3 extra screws from the set and used them to screw my leather tabs to the inside of the box. This actually worked really well, made it a really strong fixture and honestly it looks a lot more professional than glue.


I then sanded the front of the box a little more as there was some residual glue from where I had taken off the last handles on the box. This was really handy as it meant I could line my bronze label holders over these dots and it would be around the central mark, but just to be sure, of course I measured.


I lined my drawers all up next to each other and then placed the bronze holders on, marking where the screws would need to go with a red pen to ensure that I would be screwing it in the right place. I then decided to create a little dent with the screwdriver over these marks so that the screw would have somewhere to lean into, this just made sure it didn't wobble all over the place.


Then I cut the paper and put all the drawers back in there place. I did think that the drawers were a little lighter than I liked so I ended up using a bit of coconut oil to darken up the surface, and it was actually a really cheap alternative than using something like a staining oil or polish to darken the surface.


All in all the 3 tiered drawer set only cost me Ā£2.75 and the coconut oil I have and use everyday. I bought the bronze label holders and the pieces I used worked out to 4p each making it Ā£3.27 in total.


I put these on my windowsill at opposite ends and honestly they look so pretty with my basket and net curtains. I know they aren't perfectly matched but I really love that they are both individual and still share some similar textures and colouring.


I really like how these DIY's turned out, they make my windowsill look so much better than it did. Please excuse my little Christmas tree, I feel like it's still too cold to chuck outside at the moment so i'm keeping it inside until the sun perks up a little more in the UK.


As always, thank you for reading - I hoped you enjoyed! Feel free to leave a comment, like or reach me on social media!


I hope you all have a lovely day,

šŸ Stay smiling


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