A Little Paint, A Little Imagination....

You don't have to spend a lot to decorate your home. It's incredible what you can do with yard sale finds, plus a little paint and imagination.

Case in point? Here's a little table I found at an estate sale. Half the veneer was peeling off, but the shape is lovely, with beautiful hardware. It cost $2.

I found an "oops" can of primer paint at Home Depot. A full gallon of high-quality paint, tinted mauve, marked down because the color wasn't right. Cost? $5.

I stripped off the peeling veneeer, gave everything a light sanding, and used perhaps a tenth of that gallon to give this little table two coats of paint. Here's what it looked like at that point.

Now, I really didn't want a mauve table, so I took perhaps a third of a small squeeze bottle of terra cotta craft paint (87¢) mixed it 3 to 1 with water to make a glaze, then coated the table. When that dried, I took perhaps a third of another craft bottle of dark copper and dry-brushed the table to "antique" it. Then I scrubbed the very dirty pulls with powdered cleanser.

Here's my table now, in the entry of my house. Total cost? $2 to buy the table, 50¢ worth of the mauve paint, 30¢ each of the two craft paints for a total of $3.10.

By the way, the little box shown cost $1 at a yard sale. The Polish crystal-and-gold candlestick was 25¢ at a yard sale. The central glass paperweight was $2 at a yard sale, the red vase was $3 at an antique mall, and the greenery was free. (A guy who got a promotion at the company where I once worked got a huge floral basket from his wife. He hated it and was about to throw it away. I took it off his hands. The darn thing probably cost $200.) So the total cost of everything you see here was $9.35. A little paint, a little imagination and a visit to a few yard sales!