frame wall

In an attempt to make our apartment feel more like home, Travis and I have been on a decorating kick lately. And since we're poor and have way too much time on our hands, we decided we would go to DI and other thrift stores to buy old stuff and refinish it. We just finished our first project and it turned out so cool!

So we went to DI and bought these frames first just to test things out.

$1

$1

$3

We then bought spray paint from Michael's. Each time we bought it we used a 40% off coupon that Michael's has every week. I Googled "Michael's coupon" and found it. The website allowed you to print as many copies as you wanted so we printed a ton. We bought the Krylon spray paint, which is originally $5.99 a can. That price with 40% off came to be about $3.60 a can. Since the coupons always say "One coupon per customer per day," we could only each buy one a day so it took a few days to get all the colors we wanted. We ended up with six colors - cherry red, sunrise yellow, ocean blue, purple, leaf grean, and pumpkin orange. Once we bought the colors we began to spray paint.

We bought a tarp at Lowe's for about $2 and put it on our balcony and sanded and spray painted the frames out there. This picture shows the frame flat on the tarp; we later realized that that didn't work because the tarp would stick to the sides of the frames a little bit and pull the paint off when we lifted it up. So we later switched to putting the frames on cans and then spray painted them (which resulted in all our cans of food to be covered in paint so thick we almost can't read the labels. But hey, at least our cabinets are more colorful now!)

After painting that first frame red, I went back to DI on a quest to find more cheap, cool looking frames. I had $20 cash and I wanted enough frames to fill up a small wall in our apartment. I ended up with all of these!

Total, I spent $23 dollars on everything here! However, in the final project I did this time, I didn't use that big octagonal mirror on the side. That cost $10 by itself, but it was worth it (for another project coming soon!). That means all of the frames besides the mirror only cost $13 put together! 14 frames for $13. Crazy.

To decide what color we wanted to paint each frame, we measured our wall and recreated the space on the floor. After playing Tetris to see how we wanted to arrange them in the space, Travis made an Excel spreadsheet, Google image'd pictures of frames in the colors we wanted, and we played around with the colors on that. He is so brilliant! After painting, this is what we came up with!

Then to hang them up, we started at the top row and just eyeballed the spacing all the way down. This is how it turned out:

(This picture is so much bigger than the others because it was taken with Travis's phone and not my small, dinky one).

We love it and keep staring at it in awe and the best part was that even though it took a while because the frames required lots of coats of paint, it was very easy! All in all, I'd say this project cost about $45 ($18 for frames, $21 for paint, $2 for tarp, $3 for sandpaper). Now that we have the colors of spray paint, we're going to reuse them though. For example, the octagonal mirror we didn't use - we are going to take the mirror out, tape off the gold outline of the frame and spray paint the middle part of the frame with the cherry red color and hang it in out bedroom to match our red and gold bedspread.

Next we're working on painting our bedroom furniture (dresser, bed-side table) shiny black. We bought a chest at DI for $10 (I think?) and we've already painted it black, just need to add the finishing touches and when I go down to Arizona again next week, my mom and I are going to make a cushion to go on top of it :)