Paint Plant Holders

This hack is probably a craft that your children have completed in school or a summer camp. It’s popular with children, which makes it better for parents as it’s a way you can get your kids to walk away from the screen for a few minutes. Plus, it’s cheap and accessible for everyone in your family to do.

First, you need to make sure that you have paint and flower pots. Clay pots work best as they’re easier to paint and will hold the creativity of your family. From there, you set up a work area and then have fun! You can paint stripes, designs, or anything you want — even use stencils and stickers.

Stencil Your Nightstand or Table

If you stencil your wall and enjoy it, you can continue this theme around your home by choosing specific furniture. It only takes a couple of hours to create a unique piece of furniture for your family – even if you have had this furniture sitting in your bedroom for years.

After choosing your favorite color of chalk paint, it’s time to cut out the stencil design you want. Cardboard works best as you can cut it with a scissor, and it’s easy to use. Once the piece is finished, you can proudly display it in your room or even show it off on your social media accounts.

Organize Your Pantry, Closet, or Entryway

Like you can organize your craft table, you can do the same with your pantry, closet, or entryway. All you need to do is set a plan in motion and then have fun with it. It means you will want to find baskets, jars, and storage containers for your items. Ensure that you have a marker or way to write what is in the box on it if you can’t easily see the things.

Alternatively, you can also paint the jars and boxes to help you get some color in these areas and organize them. You might have specific good categories associated with certain colors. On the other hand, you could also use chalk paint to decorate and write on the storage containers.

Stamped Napkins

Napkins are a part of your kitchen that you probably go through a lot. Not only do you use them during meals but also to wipe up messes and maybe other uses, such as crafts. For many people, napkins tend to be a bit boring. While you can find some with a few printed designs, usually they’re one color and uninteresting.

Of course, this is unless you decide to have a fun little project with your napkins. It’s something that can also keep your children busy for a few minutes, which is always positive. All you need to do is have stampers with animals and other designs and stamp them on the napkins. Let them dry completely before you decide to use them.

Wine Cork Necklace Rack

Do you have a lot of necklaces and no place to hang them safely? You might find that storing them in jewelry boxes only adds time when you’re getting ready in the morning or for a night out because all of your necklaces are tangled together. Maybe you have thrown some because you couldn’t find a way to untangle the chains.

One easy and cheap project, especially if you like to drink wine, is to keep a few wine corks and build a necklace rack with them. All you need is a smooth wood block, paint for the corks, glue, and nails to hang up the shelf when you’re finished. Hang up your necklaces, and be able to quickly grab one and put it on without needing to stop and untangle several necklaces.

Chalkboard Wall Paint

It seems that chalkboard wall paint is a new interest for many people, especially parents. That is because it’s not only a great way to let your child freely draw on one wall in the home (saving your other walls and furniture), but it is also easy to do and cheap.

You can also use the painted chalkboard yourself as a reminder board or grocery list. It’s a great project because you can put it anywhere in your home. Plus, these paints are also magnetic so you can let yourself and your children get as creative as possible. That means you can hang pictures up or even show off your children’s coloring skills.

Moroccan Dream Stencil

Do you look at your walls and feel they are boring? Are you tired of the regular white (well by now) off white color? You might even be looking at old wallpaper and wondering what you can do to give your living room walls a unique design.

Instead of turning to buy new wallpaper, you can choose some paint and then cut a cardboard to use as a stencil. This method will give you a creative design of your choosing and a look that no one has seen before. One of the best benefits of this project is that your wall looks like wallpaper, but it’s not. That means that you can easily paint over it without needing to tear down wallpaper when you’re tired of the design.

Floating Bookshelf

It seems that there is never enough space when it comes to your books. You’re always looking for a new way to display them and a place to keep them safe. Depending on the age of children and pets, this can be more complicated than other times. Fortunately, there is an excellent addition in the world, and this is floating bookshelves.

These are shelves that you can make out of metal and will hold enough weight for 4 to 6 books, depending on their size. They are thin and easily installed on the wall, so people don’t even know that a shelf holds your books as it looks like they are floating.

T-Shirt Grocery Shopping Bag

With the current crisis and recycling, many people have turned to reusable shopping bags for their trips. While you can buy these bags in stores, it’s also possible to make your own (which is a benefit for many people because it allows you to save money and put your designs on bags.

When it comes to t-shirt grocery shopping bags, you don’t need to worry about creating a design because it’s already there (unless you focus on color). All you need to do is take a t-shirt that you no longer wear to cut and sew. There is very little work that goes into it. Plus, you no longer need to worry about what to do with the dozens of plastic bags in your kitchen.

Wine Carry All

How many times have you had guests over and offered them some wine, only to realize that you need to make two to three trips from the kitchen into the living room because you only have two hands to carry several wine glasses and a bottle of wine? Well, you can start a little project to help with this problem by making a wine tote that will safely allow you to carry a bottle of wine and four glasses in one hand.

All you need is a block of wood where you can make a hole in the middle and then four slits on the corners. You will set the wood block over the wine bottle and then slide the glasses through the slits, so they are hanging upside down. When you carry all of these items to your guests, you will use the top of the wine bottle as a handle.

Cabinet Crafting Table

Do your children like to craft throughout the day (everywhere in the house), and you feel that a crafting table they can transport would be the best solution for them. Even if you have to help them carry it from one location to the next, it’s a lot easier to pick up a small table full of supplies than make several trips transporting a handful of supplies back and forth.

The trouble with craft tables is that they usually cost a bit more than you want to spend. However, if you have an old cabinet lying around or find one for a low price at a garage sale, it’s time to scoop it up because you can turn this into a craft table. You can even use chalk paint to paint the top of the table so your children can draw on it without a problem.

Turn an Old Headboard Into a Bench

Have you always wanted to have a bench in your home but haven’t found the best fit or the right design? If you have an old headboard, now is the time to make it into a bench. Of course, you can also look for a cheap headboard that you like at garage sales as you can usually get them for a pretty reasonable price and much less expensive than the average cost of a bench.

Either way, all you need to do is a little sawing, painting, and assembling and measuring. The measuring means that you will find the perfect spot in your home for the bench and create it to that size. Therefore, you might want to measure before you look for your headboard so you can make sure that you have enough wood to work with. Of course, you can always buy a few extra pieces of wood to use as the bench’s seat and legs.

Make a Suitcase Table

It happens to everyone. You don’t know if everyone in your family has enough suitcases for the trip, so you buy a few more. Next, you find better and newer suitcases, or maybe a friend gave you a set of them as a gift. Either way, you are now left with many suitcases, and you’re not sure what to do with the older ones because no one wants them.

If you have a few suitcases that are just lying around, it’s time to transform them into a table. The old, hard-sided bags are full of character, so they make the best storage table. All you need to do is add four legs and find the perfect spot for them in your home. You might find they are perfect for storing linens at the edge of your bed or for toys in the living room.

Play Kitchen Stool

When you go shopping with children, there is one area you are bound to go to but sometimes dread – the toys. This spot is the place where you can have a little fun and play with a few toys (specifically the ones that make noise), but it’s also the place where you can have a few behaviors from kids because they want something, like a big play kitchen, that you won’t buy them on the spur of the moment. Plus, even during holidays and birthdays, these kitchens can be a bit too much money.

So, what else can you do when it comes to your children wanting a play kitchen? You can build one with a step stool. A little chalkboard paint on any steps as this will allow kids to draw as well. You can help your children set up their kitchen in any way, such as hanging up baskets for pretend spices.

Pool Noodle Wreaths

With Christmas right around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about decorating. You probably already have many decorations, but there is always room for more. Besides buying new decorations, you want to fill your home with homemade crafts, and one way to do this is by making pool noodle wreaths.

Pool noodles are relatively cheap to buy, and you can find them in several stores during the Spring and Summer. They make an excellent template for wreaths as all you need is the fabric you want and to tape your pool noodle together in a circle. You can even make wreaths for other holidays or any day of the year without worrying about your bank account too much.

Make a Chalk Fireplace

There are many features of a home that you would love to have. While searching for your perfect home, you probably had a list of features you needed and wanted. Granted, you may have changed this list and done without a few features, and there are ways you can incorporate them into your home once you’ve settled in.

For instance, if you don’t have a fireplace but want one, you can easily create your own with a little chalk paint, chalk, and canvas. All you need to do is coat the canvas with the color and then get creative with the design. You can even draw in your decor. Even though it’s not a real chimney, you can still get the illusion that it is. The best part is that you don’t have to worry about any maintenance.

Outdoor Garden Hose Rug

Do you find yourself continually buying new rugs for your home because they’re ruined? Maybe you feel that you can’t find the perfect rug for your home because you aren’t as unique as possible. If either of these reasons sounds like you or want a change with rugs, it’s time to look for an old garden hose.

While you probably don’t want it to be too dirty, you can build a rug directly from that hose. It’s the perfect outdoor rug because it’s meant to be outside, and it can withstand different weather conditions. Plus, all you need to do is wrap the hose around itself like a rug and tie it together with zip ties. The zip ties will give the carpet a unique look as it seems stitched together.

A Book to Hold Your Jewelry

You’ve probably seen those hollowed-out books. They’re wooden and are meant to look like books on the outside; however, you have a little box that can hold small items when you open it up. Well, you don’t need to wait to find a wooden box to do this project. You can use a book that you’re ready to throw away because it’s just not your cup of tea.

Leave an inch of paper along the edges but then cut the pages out of the book. You can then place smaller positions or meaningful jewelry into the book; people won’t think twice about if it’s a real book or not. Why? While the inside pages are cut, the book gives a better illusion of being a regular book more than the wooden boxes.

Rustic Wine Rack

Maybe your dream has been to create a bar in your home or build a wine cellar. However, these projects become relatively expensive and difficult to complete, especially when you are about to go back to work or need to continue distance learning again, even part-time. So what can you do to bring wine into your home creatively and neatly? Build a rustic wine rack with some wood that you polish; alternatively, you could paint a particular color and a few large nails to hold the wine on the shelves.

You can make any size wine rack. The key is to make sure that you have nails large and sturdy enough to hold the stand; it also has to hold full bottles of wine, and keep the wine on the shelves. The giant pins add a wonderful rustic touch to this project; luckily they are strong enough to keep the wine from falling from the shelve onto the floor.

Sources:

“17 DIY Projects That Will Make You Say “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” Lauren Smith McDonough, Good Housekeeping. January 2016.

“15 Simple and Affordable DIY Projects.” Jane Scearce, Life Hack.

“24 Amazing Cheap DIY Projects for $10 and Under.” Lauren Thomann, The Spruce Crafts. May 2020.

“18 Unbelievably Cheap But Awesome DIY Home Decor Projects.” DIY Cozy Home. April 2020.