Guest Post: Upcycled Furniture – Make Your Old Home New Again

Upcycled furniture and home accessories are an affordable way to add unique style to your home – whether you’ve lived in your home for years or you just moved in.  Using items you already have can make even the most boring space seem new again – on a budget.  Read on for some upcycling tips from Ruth Barton…

Whether you’re moving home and want to give your current furniture a bit of a makeover for a completely fresh start, or if you’re a bit bored of your current living situation and want to give your interiors a new lease on life you should consider upcycling. It is a fantastic and affordable way to give your home a new look at low costs, allowing you to unleash your creativity, take on new projects and learn new skills.

New Home, New Look

So, you’ve booked your removal company, and you are ready for your new start and new adventure, but don’t want your living room to look identical to the one in your old home? Then think about a few small changes that could transform your furnishings.

If you’ve moved house then a complete transformation is not necessarily required. The layout of your home and its room sizes will have changed, the lighting will be different and you may have new features like a fireplace or a bay window. Try and accentuate the differences in your new home make them features of the room and if you don’t intend to make many changes to your old furniture, avoid drawing too much attention to it.

A great way of emphasising certain furnishings and helping them to stand out is by spotlighting them, painting them a new colour or placing something unusual, (a statement item) nearby.

Old Home, New Look

Relocating isn’t imperative to give your home a makeover. There are so many ways that you can introduce a fresh look into your living space. If possible why not consider switching up your rooms, the dining room could become the lounge, the lounge, the dining room. Another quick way to introduce a new look into an old room is to swap the furniture around in the home. Bedside tables could become a coffee table and a coffee table could become a dressing table.

Additional ways to spruce up a room is to rearrange the furniture, simply by putting the sofa against another wall, or moving the bookcase into another room can make it seem like a completely different place.

Themes

Whether you’ve moved or want to transform your current house, try and decide a theme for each room. This could be through colour, style or focus and is a fantastic way to reinvent the space and is a great way to direct your creativity.  Look online for room photos that inspire you.

Upcycling

Reusing and reinventing current furniture is a great way to make your home completely unique and put a personal stamp on your furniture. Pinterest is a great place to start, you can spend hours scrolling through the ideas looking for inspiration. Here are just a few ideas:

DIY Headboard bench

Photo courtesy My House My Home

Old door tree

Photo courtesy Ella Ellavines

So, you’ve found a great way to transform a piece of furniture, but have no idea where to start. Don’t fear, social media can come to your rescue again. This time, pay a visit to YouTube – there are plenty of instructional videos that will get you started and explain best practice methods and offer handy hints.

Remember, if you don’t have the furniture you need you can always pop into a charity shop or to a carboot (or, a flea market in the US) to find the equipment you will need to make the perfect coffee table for your lounge.

Swapping Furniture

If you don’t have the time to invest in upcycling or customising your furniture, see if any of your friends or family are willing to swap some of their furnishings. Perhaps a dining table for a dining table, or maybe even just the dining chairs! This will help to mix things up a bit and give your home a completely different feel. There are also plenty of websites like Gumtree and MySkip that have many free items available for collection.

Ruth is passionate about crafts, upcycling and the environment. She works as a content specialist for Fountain Partnership and enjoys sharing her ideas for innovative ways to reduce carbon footprints.