My Favorite House Beautiful Simple Makeover Tips
- Wallpaper the inside of your bedroom closet. (Featured in the magazine: Butterfly in Jubilant, to the trade; alphaworkshops.org)
- Use leftover wallpaper to line the drawers of your bedside table.
- Find a tired old bargain brass chandelier at a thrift shop or antiques shop. Spray paint it white. Or a color — if you have courage.
- Buy a photography or botanical book, take a razor blade, and cut it up. It’s not sacred. Put a dozen pages (the more, the better) in matching inexpensive frames, and hang them in a row or a block.
- Buy a big pretty tray — try lacquer. Take all the things on your coffee table and arrange them on the tray for a whole new pulled-together look.
- Pull apart a set of twin beds and bedside table. Rearrange them in an L-shape, head to head, with the bedside table in the corner.
- Put a real rug, not a bathroom rug, in front of your bathroom sink. It will hold up just fine.
- Instead of one shower curtain, buy two. You’ll love the fuller look — and they will keep the floor drier.
- Buy a large map, poster, or print and cut it into equal parts. Frame all the sections and reassemble them on the wall.
- Hang longish pictures in the dead spaces over doors. Pick strong images you can see from far away.
- Paint just the front edges (the “piping”) of your bookshelves. Or tack on a fabric trim.
- If you always buy white candles, next time buy black.
- Turn a tabletop into a drinks table. Choose liquor bottles for their shapes and labels, then buy lots of glasses and an ice bucket. Do everything in one color: Picture blue bottles and glasses on a blue tray.
- Trim your window frames with grosgrain ribbon. A glue gun will do it.
- Buy all the inexpensive mirrors you find at yard sales, paint all the frames one color, and hang them together.
