My internship is nearly over 😦 We’ve put a deposit on an apartment 🙂 and college is starting back soon!!
Next week me, my boyfriend and two of my girlfriends are moving into our apartment! Exciting times! I haven’t seen them all since may and I miss those guys so much! Me and the boyfriend done the apartment hunting, viewings and paid the deposit a few weeks ago, so I’ve got a good idea what each bedroom looks like, the layout and the kitchen & living area. Which has been driving me mad because although I don’t have the money I really want to decorate this place in a vintage/laid back style as it’s our final year in college and I suspect we all will be very stressed coming home each evening and will want to relax.
I’ve been looking around the big place called the internet and came across some neat little ideas. I’m planning on trying to do most of them but we’ll 
see depending what kind of supplies I can find (cheap ones of course!) So if you’re moving into a college dorm or new apartment with a partner or friends or even if your finished college and in your first apartment and don’t want to spend too much on décor, then keep an eye out and I’ll do little tutorials showing you how I put my own twist to the items. Don’t worry guys I’m not all that terrible at arts and crafts! As evidence check out this mad hatter hat I made for Halloween last year!
(if you want to see the tutorial on how I made this just let me know!)
So here’s the things I plan on creating to make our new apartment feel like a cosy safe house from all the stresses we will be leaving behind at college. Hopefully if I can keep my cool in this apartment during the year I’ll come out with a nice little nifty bachelors degree!
I absolutely love this! We all eat the same food so we just do one big grocery shop at the beginning of the week and then we take turns cooking each night, we all have dinner together (we’re such a cute little college family). So when we start to run out of that one thing that you don’t buy that often we’d write it on a piece of paper but the paper would get lost before our shop and we’d forget to buy it. Wednesday comes and there’s no curry spices/herbs in the press!!
Method: So this is a handy little idea, the way I’m thinking of doing it is if I visit a charity/thrift shop and pick up an old photo frame, give it a bit of a polish and switch the photo/picture for a cute little piece of fabric I have lying around. All you need then is a whiteboard marker and you’ve got yourself a dry wipe/whiteboard that you can use over and over again!
Location: Kitchen area
Estimated cost: (Frame €2 + Marker €1.50) – €3.50/€4.00
In the living room we’ve got a bookshelf in the corner of the room, there’s no proper Wi-Fi in the apartment complex so we will have to use a router which will be plugged in in the living room. I was thinking of doing something like this to hide that ugly router and it’s kinda pretty too 🙂
Method: So again keeping in line with our skint broke student bank accounts, I’m going to visit a charity/thrift shop for this. They always have sooooo many books, especially old books that nobody wants anymore. Because they’re old, they mostly used to only print books as hard back copies, these days nearly all books have soft covers on them. So I’ll get 4/5 hard covered books and take the outside covers off. I’m thinking I might cut the spine off three of the books, keeping about an inch of the front and back covers to make it look more realistic. I’ll probably glue those three together, gluing the front cover to the back of the next and so on, positioning them so that they look good. With the back book I’m going to keep the whole back cover, the spine and about an inch of the front cover. It will be the same for the front book, I’ll keep the whole front cover, the spine and an inch of the back cover. After I glue these I’ll see how it looks, I might find some fabrics in my fabric chest to tie a cute bow on to it.
Location: Living area (also cute for a bedroom)
Estimated cost: (.50 per book) – €2
*It looks as though they just used wood and paper. I think it would be easier and just as stable, but more realistic to use the real books and make sure they’re hard covered books.
I Love this!! Except this will be a bit more expensive… It’s so going in my bedroom I might make three of them cause I think it would look better in a group instead of just one. Although if you have a small gap on your wall it could look really cute. I love reading and have loads of books that always end up in a pile on the ground because there’s nowhere for them and I share a room with my boyfriend so the space is limited enough anyway!
Method: Back to the thrift/charity shop! Haha yes I’m a cheap bitch but I love it! So yeah I love my books and for this I’ll need to ruin three of them so I’m just going to buy ones I don’t want to make these! If you buy a bracket for a shelf, probably in your local hardware/DIY store, I’d say maybe €4 a pop. Get book, if its soft covered you won’t need to do the next part but if it hard covered you will. So you’re going to place the sticky out piece of the bracket into the back cover of the book, to stop the hardback cover falling down when it’s on the wall, use some super glue, blue tack, glue dots, whatever you can find to stick it to the bottom of the bracket. Then get screw and screw that baby into your wall, you should probably make sure your glue is dry first if you used glue. Then get a couple of books from your book stacks on the floor and pop them right on up there! The strength of the bracket will depend on how many books it will hold so don’t put too much pressure on it or it will be a flop!
Location: Bedroom
Estimated Cost: (brackets x 3: €12, Books x 3: 1.50) €13.50
Psst! Even for that price you couldn’t buy something this cool!
I’m a little bit of a craft person so I’ve got all sorts off paints, fabrics buttons and bits and bobs. I think this chair is so cute but I’m not too sure about the roses. I love the colour, this caught my eye because I actually have that colour paint in my chest that’s full of my bits and bobs.
Method: You know exactly where I’m going to send you for this! Yeah you guessed it, the thrift/charity shop. Or if you guys have an old chair lying around that isn’t being used go for it! So when I find a chair in one of the charity shops I’m going to wipe it down, it might need a bit of sanding down too depending on if it’s varnished or not. After that I’ll give it a lick of my sky blue paint. After two coats of paint I’m going to get some lace fabric I have and secure it to the piece of wood at the back of the chair (not the poles) and to the seat of the chair (where your bum goes!). When it’s secure I’ll use either, a turquoise green or orange and paint over the lace, which, when dry, should leave me with a cute little blue chair with the bum and back designed. We’re students so we got a lot of work to be doing on laptops and computers so the desk in my room will just look so nice with this new addition!
Location: Bedroom
Estimated cost: (chair x 1 €8) – €8
So that’s just some of my ideas and plans for our bid move next week! I’m going to start making these over the next two/three weeks and if there are any changes to my methods I’ll let you guys know in my next blog on my decorating ideas. I’ll also post pictures of how they turned out and if you want (you gotta let me know) I can do a step by step tutorial of each one in detail with phtos of each step on instructables and link it to here. Oh and if I find anything else and make it I’ll add that in there too J
I hope you guys liked my blog post, and try them out! They’re not expensive because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do them! Let me know what you think in the comments and if you think there are other methods to creating these décor items!
B_x
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