Decorate Your Home With These DIY Projects

Southwestern and western Riverside County is known for expansive spaces with lush vegetation, rolling hills, and sparkling lakes. Make your home match your lush natural surroundings with these affordable and resourceful DIY projects:

Wood Work

Complement the towering sycamores and oaks of Riverside’s verdant landscapes with rustic-themed modern household fixtures:

• Pallet crafts

  Wooden pallets offer lots of great DIY possibilities. To get started, ask around at your nearest home supplies store and you might get lucky with a few free palletshere and there. Taking the pallets apart leaves you with a lot of raw material, and because they’re already measured and cut, they’re easy to work with.

  If you have a whole lot to go around, you can turn plain walls into cabin-inspired wooden walls. It’s a great look that takes you away from conventional paint or wallpaper. You could even match it up with sliding barn doors, also made from pallet boards. Alternatively, if you have more limited supplies, you can use pallets to create artful frames for your photos and other wall décor.

• Liveedge coffee table and stool set

  Liveedge woodis at oncerustic and sophisticated. Itmakes for a great addition to open living spaces, especially as coffee tables and stools that match the vibrant natural views on a pleasant patio or deck.

  Living in an area where lumber is abundant, it shouldn’t be too hard to source wood slices of your preferred shape and size. We recommend matching the slabs with minimalist bases like hairpin-style legs, so that the charm of the liveedge wood stands out.

Repurposed Foliage

Aside from wood, dried and fallen foliage also make great DIY resources that enhance your living space. These projects are so easy, you can have your kids join in and get creative!

• Pillowcase prints

  Liven up your upholstery with some self-designed pillowcases using dried leaves and branches. The fun part here is that you can make designs to match every season, using different plants (and plant parts) and colors to mix things up.

• Metallic foliage

  Another way to turn fallen leaves into classy home décor is to spray paint them with metallic paint. These make nice little highlights for your tablescapes and shelves, and like the pillowcase prints, can be season-themed using paints of different colors and shades.

• Painted twig bouquet

  How about a bouquet that never wilts? Let your creative juices flow, mixing and matching lively colors on twigs and branches – stuff that you can easily find in your backyard! The final product is a surprisingly pleasant and dainty little shelf or desktop highlight.

Wine Bottles and Other Breakables

Chances are, you accumulate a lot of bottles in your home. You live in the heart of Southern California wine country, after all. Don’t just throw your bottles and chipped breakables away; you can still create these wonderful table pieces out of them.

• Drip candles

  Use your empty bottles to add a little romance on your dining table. All you need to do is clean them up and stick candles into them. As drip candle holders, your bottles take on a new life and help create new memories (perhaps to replace the ones that the original contents wiped away).

• Tiered trays

  Feeling that your plates, cups, and wine glasses are out of style? Or maybe too old and chipped to look good on your table setting? Pile and glue them on top of each other and be surprised at what pretty trays they can make.

Need more quick, easy, and affordable ways to beautify your home? Call me up and let’s share ideas!