Absolute TOP 50 + Best Outdoor & Patio DIYs & Hacks On a Budget!

warmer weather is quickly coming upon us and with that in mind I wanted to compile some of my best outdoor DIYs and hacks for you so sit back relax and maybe even DIY right along with me so let's get started every day I pass this free wood pile and I think to myself I should really stop there and grab some of that free wood it just like calling my name let's get on the [Music] road all right we are here to the free wood let's see what we can find here so there's a lot of like broken pieces but we'll just sort through this and see what we can find and see what we can [Music] build okay so most of that was probably not fit for what doing or using it for and it was probably not very wise of me to not bring gloves cuz they're I could have easily gotten a sliver I didn't but we'll just see what we can make with this but I'm probably going to need to supplement with what I have at home so let's head back we are going to try to build an end table out of the wood that we picked up from that free scrap pile an outdoor one and so the first thing I'm going to do is start cutting down the board so we are going to get powerful and again my goal in doing projects like this this with power tools is to really not necessarily get you to do the exact same projects as me but really to inspire you to get out of your comfort zone and try something new maybe it's not using power tools maybe it's something else but we can do amazing things and surprise ourselves that it might not be as hard as you think and we're going to do that right now okay so this is a the underside of a patio paper that we are going to actually use this as our end table toop ER so we need to make the dimensions which is 15 and 3/4 by 15 and 3/4 so this is square and we are going to build a frame based off of these Dimensions okay so these are used boards so I'm going to try to cut off where they Nails on the ends um and they're a little weak on the ends anyways so there's a darker side and then there's a lighter side I think I'm going to try to use the lighter side because seems like the the darker side has more heavy Dam Dage so the first thing we'll do is cut off this end and then we'll make our Dimensions remember safe as sexy ladies so we cut off that one end and now we're going to measure 15 and 3/4 and we can just take our cut off piece here and use it as a marker so we know where to cut and then you line up the edge of the blade with the edge of the line you don't Center it cuz otherwise you'll C cut it too short okay so we're going to hang on to this cuz we may need it so you can see that is perfect so then what we'll do is write a tiny P somewhere and that way we know this is the pattern and so we can use it to make several cuts and let's just start [Music] cutting [Music] okay so now we're going to build two sides first cuz that will help us to determine the design that we're going to do this is about 2 in tall and I want it to be about 20 to 22 in so then we got to measure this and that is just shy of 3 and 1/2 so we're going to just call it 3 and 1/2 for ease purposes cuz these don't have to be exact everything just needs to be cut equal so what we need to do is that 7 in + 2 in is 9 in so we've got 9 in of height right here to get it to the 20 to 21 we're going to cut 12 in length for the side pieces so we're going to take off as minimal as possible here because we are going to try to get two pieces out of one so we're going to just cut off the very edge that we [Music] can okay and then we're going to measure [Music] 12 okay so we need some support for the top so then I cut an interior one like so and in theory it should line up so that will be the support on this side so we are going to try to attempt to build one of these side panels so we are going to attempt to do pocket holes here pocket holes here so I'm just going to kind of Mark that we're going to do that so we know which side we want to do that on and then what we're going to do is we have this handy little Contraption here and we are going to kind of Center it and then we just squeeze and since it's kind of wider we are going to use the two outside pocket holes and we've got it preset so there are really specific instructions on how to use these little jigs but you can kind of see what I'm doing here we just drilled two holes and then there's a little release button right here we release it and you can see that we have two two pocket holes and we're going to flip it over and do it on the other [Music] side we've got our pocket holes for this piece and now we'll do the same thing for this and it's easy [Music] peasy and then it was wood glue the pocket hole screws and we built like basically like a box for the front and a box for the back and now we need to make it secure cuz this is obviously not going to do much so what we're going to do is take our pieces here and run them into here using the same pocket holes so we'll do pocket holes boom and we'll screw them in like that and then we'll do one up top here [Music] too [Music] once that was done I just set it in place where I'm going to use it and I put the heavy concrete paper on top and it is very heavy now I did not apply mine with an adhesive like a liquid nail just because it was so heavy I really don't think that it's going to need it but you could definitely do that I wanted the ability to remove that and move it around because it was so bulky but it makes for a very solid piece and all in all I now have a really adorable end table that matches my outdoor furniture set really nicely it looks beautiful out here it was $4 can't go wrong I just love it out here it's so cute I didn't do anything to finish it cuz I actually like grayed out wood with my furniture it looked really really nice but you get a paint it you can stain it you can make it look however you want but I hope that gives you inspiration for some fun projects with some free wood that you might find on the side of the road all right do you remember this beam this is left over from a project that we did several episodes ago where we took a huge column and turned it into some oversized large candles and now we are going to use it in conjunction with oh my word I think I'm going to lose this canopy I hope not it's getting pretty windy here but we're going to use it in conjunction with the solar powered lights that I picked up at the Home Depot basically very simple project we're going to just cut three varying Heights then we are going to bore out some holes with a wood boring bit and then stick them down like so into them maybe we'll paint them that black we'll have to see but let's just start by cutting random Heights I mean we'll just figure it out as we go so I'd like to get three pieces out of this so we've got about 40 1/2 in and we're just going to just kind of eyeball things here let's do the first one to 10 in and then we'll go from [Music] there okay so that's piece number one and so then let's stagger it about a palm width that's so super scientific that seems about [Music] good all right look how perfectly that worked out so we've got three staggering Heights so the idea is is that we'll drill holes down and we'll stick one of these in each one and then we'll have a set of three how fun will that be and then I took out my drill not my drill that's still to come I'm so excited for that to come but a drill we'll say and I used a one inch wood boring bit on the tip of it so the first thing we need to do is Mark Center we'll go corner to corner and corner to corner okay x marks the SWAT we're just going to put that Spade down in [Music] it you guys this is really hard wood this might not be as easy as I had hoped I was hoping to get down really really far but this is not going to be that easy okay don't judge that I'm wearing flip-flops you probably shouldn't be wearing flip-flops but it's super hot but I wanted to put it on something a little more sturdy and not wiggly at all and put my weight into it this is going to kill my battery but it is working so that's what I recommend hard surface put your weight into it okay before I keep doing this let's test it out all right we're going to test this out perfect I do think I want to get it a little lower though cuz that's kind of weird [Music] otherwise and then what I did is I painted them out in a black chalk paint know up to me to say and then I took an epoxy kit I could have probably been a lot more generous with this and you could also use Liquid Nails just some sort of permanent adhesive on the base of that solar lamp and put that on the bottom and then I would then put it down into the hole and then let that dry and that's it so so easy I put these on my front porch they can charge all day get all the power and then they light up your porch at night and it was so simple to do it is just a couple of cuts drilling a large hole gluing down a light fixture so easy very affordable as well I could imagine that you could maybe make a smaller version of this using Dollar Tree ones such a simple project to do for your Outdoors dress up your front porch looks great and I hope you enjoyed that okay so these are a couple of wethered Barnwood that I picked up at Hobby Lobby 6 month months ago I don't know a long time ago but I figure if you have like some old fence pickets cuz it's very similar that you can get the job done with that as well I don't even know how tall that let's see that's about 48 in tall I think they're about 6 in wide we are going to build a simple DIY address box that has like a little place for floral or herbs or whatever um on the front and I figured a good size for that would be 16 by 20 so that's we're going to start out by doing is cutting down a couple of pieces three pieces of 20 in long length and we'll go to that point so these are straight cuts super easy if you don't have a electric miter saw you can use a miter box for this as well okay so we're going to measure 20 in it doesn't seem very long but it's going to be just right and I'm going to cut two boards at the same time so just make sure that they're even [Music] together okay and then we're going to need a third one so we're going to hold on to this cuz we're going to need [Music] that hang on to that for sure okay so this is the width and this is the back this is the ugly side I went into my scrap pile and found this piece and all we're going to do is cut it approximately two of these cuz we're going to need one for here and one for the bottom really maybe we'll put a third one but I don't know that will actually be necessary so we'll just play that by ear yeah so two of these and then I'll show you what we're going to [Music] do okay so we need shorter Nails in our nail gun so we just put those in close that so this is basically how we're going to attach it is we're going to put some wood glue on this but we're going to flip it all over but we're attaching it on the top and the bottom so that these boards would attach together this is too thin for pocket holes but the pocket hole would be cleaner look but it's just too thin for that so we're going to just pull these aside put these here and here and then going to put some wood glue uh oh I think I did this the wrong direction whoops I always have wood glue all over me yeah these got to be laying the right thickness okay good thing that's on the back side we are going to try to line this up just to make make sure we'll just measure so it's even let's see that's a half [Music] in all right now what we have to do we'll do two Nails in each okay that looks pretty good and we'll just repeat on the bottom just make sure they're nice and snug together all right super easy see so now we can measure the width of this and it's 16 and 5/8 and we are going to build like a little planter box here this is a scrap piece from another one this is not from our cut offs we're going to need this now we need to figure out how how deep we want our planter let's see what we've got left over of this board and then we have a little bit of another board if we need it that's 11 and 1/2 so if we cut that exactly in half that would be 5 and 3/4 and then we have this little piece here if we need it okay let's just do 5 in because that feels like a good depth for it so we'll do 5 in we'll make that cut and then we'll cut a second [Music] one so we've got the front piece we've got the side pieces okay so these are the side pieces but we're going to need something to go on the bottom here now depending on what you want to do if you want to do it solid or if you want to just put like terra cotta pots in here you could do a FL let's think this through this is all I have left which is not quite big enough so I'm going to have to play around with what I've got let me go see what I've got in my scrap [Music] pile this one's going to be a little too short but I wonder interesting what if I do I do it like that that's going to work and then I wanted to build out the planner part but again it didn't really have a lot to fasten itself to if it was thicker it would be as simple as shooting in some nails or screws or something like that but I had to beef it up with some additional scrap wood which was not too bad and I was able to just kind of build out a frame to attach those boards to and it wasn't that bad I mean this whole project took me not that much time maybe an hour or two at the most only because I was like trying to calculate it and my head so not bad with working with just scraps like I said if we were working with thinner wood we probably wouldn't have to go to all of these extra efforts but it's going to be really cute and it is now sturdy we could do some drainage holes and things like that but there are cracks that it can drain out of as well now we're going to add our address and just for point of reference I'm not actually doing my own address so anyways we're going to add that now um this will just hopefully give you a good idea you can pick out whatever style of number that works for your house and I attached those with screws and the screws are short so it went in super good then I needed a way to hang it and for my purposes I'd probably add a couple of them but I already had a screw outside and it's just one single screw and so I just kind of had to go with that this is a little hack that I use all the time is I take a little tab off the top of a soda can and then I screw in a screw and it works as a hanging device works great so there's a little hack for you and then I just hung it on my exterior screw outside and then I got a variety of flowers that hopefully I'm not going to kill that um are beautiful and add a lot of vibrancy a lot of color and it's just so much fun it's got a lot of Personality just a different way to kind of spice up your house numbers instead of just putting them on the side of your house you can add some flowers now if you wanted to switch this out seasonally and do some Christmas greens or fall and pumpkins and leaves and stuff in the Autumn time a lot of flexibility in this house number I love it I think it's so much fun so cute and I hope you enjoyed it too okay so if you've been watching my channel lately you will know we're trying to use up some things that I have already on hand and I found these tiles years ago on a clearance rack I think at Floor and Decor and I just grabbed three of them I don't know why but I think I did it because I had in my mind the idea of making a tray with it so we're finally going to do that and I just think this would be really pretty I don't know if you can see the design isn't that really pretty and I think it would be a really cute outdoor tray so we are going to build this with scrapwood and these tiles that have been hanging around waiting for their turn and so here's what I found so what I came up with is I found some oak scrapwood scrapwood oak can you imagine in my pile I had some like a 1 by by two of Oak in my pile and I thought this would be a perfect thing to make a tray out of then I had MDF MDF is probably not the most ideal for outdoors but I figure most of it covered and the bottom part is not going to be really exposed and really when I use it it's not going to be really taking on a lot of water so you might want to just keep that in mind and maybe use a different piece of wood but I just grabbed this piece cuz it was handy and I could cut it down to work it was right about the right size so we're making this work and then I just did a simple minored out [Music] box and then glued and nailed that into the MDF board and then sanded it down so it was all nice and smooth well you look at that for all intents and purposes built like a frame or a sign or something but we're going to be using this as a tray and we are ready to move on to stain the first thing we're going to do is condition the wood with some pre-stain and then just follow the directions on that and then I bought this whitewash stain we'll get on to that step you should probably use a bristle brush but I had this handy and so I'm just going to just get this on here this is just so the stain doesn't go on splotchy time for stain we are going to go ahead and stain this of white and hopefully it will look good on [Music] this and then I decided to paint out the MDF because there were a little tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny gaps in between the tiles but this is something that I see foree myself just using to serve like drinks on and then I feel like I can wipe it down really well but I didn't want the darker wood to kind of show through those tiny little cracks again do this project the way you would see best then I just took some silicone adhesive and used that and I used that to attach our tiles to the bottom of this tray and it fit perfectly let that dry then I drilled two holes on either side for some beautiful handles that I found at Hobby Lobby on sale of course for $4.99 a piece they were marble they had gold accents and I just thought that that would look really elevated and elegant and beautiful with this serving tray and attach those and it turned out awesome I love how this looks I think it's a very beautiful project I'm kind of regretting that I waited so long to go ahead and do it but it turned out wonderful I'm really thrilled with the overall look of it and I think it's going to be a fun tray to serve drinks on and maybe even use when we're doing our s'mores station and put s'mores items on it it's just going to be overall a fun piece to have this summer outdoors and it would also look good indoors you could use this indoors you could use it in a bathroom to store your perfumes on so many possibilities with trays I love doing them as projects because they're easy to do and just always good and handy to have around and I hope you enjoyed that a couple of years ago we did an Extreme Makeover on my back patio here I had been using it primarily as a workshop but then I wanted to create a nice living space for my family to kind of extend the real estate of our home it's covered it's nice we live in Florida and it's been working out really well however I still had to use out of necessity like a little corner of this patio to do my DIYs occasionally I try to do it out on the grass but sometimes the weather doesn't permit and I have to work underneath the patio and so today it's looking for the most part really good but there are some areas that need a little bit of cleanup and work and while we're about sprucing it up I thought we could do some outdoor DIYs maybe use up some of the scrap Lumber that I've got in my pile and just make it look really really good through the help of Walmart which I'll get into in a little bit so let's just start out by assessing the situation seeing what I have and we'll go from there maybe build something and then do a really good cleanup and get it looking really really good again it is what it is because my HOA won't let me build anything and we really love this area so we're going to make it work okay so this side doesn't look too terrible I mean obviously it's a little bit dirty it's when we start getting over here and to this side where I kind of been using at my workshop and as you can see here I just finished a project so that's why this looks particularly bad it usually doesn't look quite this bad and then walking around over here I also want to clean out this I don't even know what happened here so we're going to get this all cleaned up and [Music] organized just cleaning alone really elevates the space when you have a clean environment you just feel better I will continue the cleaning process and get this place looking amazing it so deserves [Music] it [Music] a couple things I wanted to point out right in each one of these sections there is like a little drain so if for some reason this did take on water you could drain it out from the bottom but this should be pretty watertight I love it cuz it kind of matches the plant stands that I built a few years ago and then you don't have to use this to store tools like this would be great for storing cushions and pillows and outdoor pool equipment so super super hand handy to have around it's really good quality I love it now let's load it [Music] up okay so I've got some tools on this side I have a few more that will go in there but on this side we're going to now put any usable scrap that I think of value problem is is I think everything has value so that's going to be difficult so I'm going to try to get rid of the really tiny stuff and focus more on things that I can actually probably make something out of and we'll see what [Music] happens okay we're going to kind of sort this as we go what I think I can use and what I'm not going to use [Music] okay now I've got to venture into snake territory right here I'm a little scared but we're going to address it and I think once we get rid of the mess there will be less places to hide hopefully I don't know we're going to take care of it now wish me luck that I don't discover a snake hopefully he's already gone and I don't need to see him ever again [Music] [Music] sweeping and Shop backing it all up it looks so much better I feel like it can go outside and hang out in this Outdoor Oasis it's amazing I am so [Music] excited okay before we get everything all cleaned up fully and all the tools put away I thought we could do a couple of DIYs the first of which is I had this kind of aqua colored cart in my craft room already and I thought it would be fun to kind of convert it into a very simple Grill cart or bar cart I found some scrap wood in our cleanup that we're going to use and then everything that I have here has been in my stash so I have these handles that are in my stash and some hooks they're not matching so we'll probably spray paint the handles black since we've got a lot of black in our design out here and so we are going to do that now just a couple of cuts a couple of nails some glue and a little stain and hopefully we will have a little topper that can sit on top of this cart and then we can use it as a grill cart so let's build this very quickly so we are going to measure the length here and that is 17 in and then we already know that it's just about right on the depth and so I then I'm going to decide whether I want to put some braces on the inside or if I want to wrap it I'm leaning towards wrapping it to give us a little bit more space to do some hooks we're going to go make those cuts [Music] now so we made some simple miter Cuts all the way around and used a little wood glue and some finish nails and nailed that into place and let that dry then I went ahead and took some wood filler that I made myself filled in any nail holes and cracks that were needed and let that dry then I took a sander to it sanded it all down as best I could and then I had this like gray sponge little staining kit that I picked up somewhere I got it on and it was a light gray color which is kind of a nice beachy Tone It kind of has a butcher block feel to it and then we let that dry now if we're going to be leaving it out I'm going to probably need to go back and use a a water sealer on it but I think it will be under the covered patio area so it's probably okay and it needs a little time to set up before I do some kind of sealer coat and then I spray painted the handles a matte black because we've got a lot of black out here for one but for two we wanted it to match our little hooks that we were putting on it and so then we screwed that into place and we also put on all the hooks now I eyeballed all of this and it turned out fine but if you're meticulous you may want to break out your measuring tape and do it that way it worked out great for me I think it looks fine but that might bother some people and this little cart is going to be really fun to have around in this summer season and year round because I live in Florida but I just love this this is all stuff that I had either in my crazy wood stash or you know up in my craft room and it worked out so cute so just think outside of the box reimagine some things and you can come up with a new purpose for this I love this car it's so super cute and I hope you liked it okay so I got my outdoor sofa set from Walmart a couple years ago I love it it's beautiful and holding up really really well it's a little dirty and so are the Shay lounges over by the pool here so we are going to get out our pressure washer pressure wash everything down get it looking good and then we're going to do some pots and we might replace some of the tired looking pillows and freshen it up get it looking really good out [Music] here [Music] just to give you an idea of the power of a pressure washer this is before and that is after that is so disgusting but we're going to be having it look brand new [Music] a hey they're still drying but these look almost as good as the day that I bought them so I feel really good about that and these twoo so as you can see we need to put a new top on that I'm actually going to take the little wood round that was on that put it on this the original one kind of fell apart because I never put a water seiller on it so I'm going to put a water sealer on this one and hopefully it will last a little bit better [Music] you and I have worked really hard have we not so we are pretty much clean I do need to pressure wash our whole entire pool deck but our hose is not long enough so it just had to do with a good sweep and the chop back now we're to the pretty stuff and I really think adding um plants and all that is really good and I cannot keep anything alive if it's in a pot I've tried I get busy I either overwater underwater it you know what bow plants are now coming in to where they're not so Taboo in fact I know some very big name designers that will do faux plants even outside the new stuff looks so realistic and so I'm not going to feel too guilty about it I'll probably get harassed a little bit about it but all the power to you who out there who can make anything grow I can if it's in the ground mostly U but if it's in a pot it's a guaranteed death sentence and I don't want to do that I'm tired of feeling guilty about that so I got these beautiful pots that we're going to be making a couple of these to put around the pool area I haven't decided whether we're going to put them at the back on either side of the pool or if in the front area I'm going to kind of play around with it and see what looks good and it turns out this styrofoam's going to come in handy cuz I'm going to put it in here and to to lift it up I don't want it to weigh 1,000 lb we want it to be level I'll show you what we're putting in okay so I think this will be the last one that looks pretty level and then I might go find some rocks to give it a little bit of weight cuz we don't want it too lightweight but we do not want it to weigh 1,000 lb either and then what I was thinking is we'll put this topiary there and hopefully that's about the right height and then I am just going to take all of these silks are UV resistant we'll just make sure that's in the center and these look pretty legit and then I think these ones look really cool hanging over the edge so we're going to put a few of these in H [Music] looking here's how bad it is I can't even keep like ferns alive so these ones are F to sh I know people are going to say it's tecky but I'm excited about it [Music] and honestly yes or fo they've really really improved that and then I put in these little Firefly lights I'm not exactly sure if that's what they're called they kind of Twinkle at night and I think it kind of gives like the effect of fireflies especially if there's a little bit of a breeze and it blows it's so cute they kind of like blink and everything so much fun and then my umbrella of course has the solar powered lights on the underside of it anywhere you can add some additional lighting it adds Ambiance it's just a really nice touch and I love that idea and then finally it is all the just little finishing touches from the pillows to all of the accents I had a mess on my hand because I was using as a workshop and I kind of let it go a little bit too long just stay on top of it and and you won't have to go to the amount of work that I [Music] did [Music] it is so beautiful this evening I am so enjoying it wish you were here and so does Dolly do you wish they were here do you wish yes I know in my childhood it was filled with water balloon fights there's something nostalgic and fun about water balloon fights but getting the balloons ready for that water fight can be kind of tedious so hopefully this next hack will make it a little easier and honestly maybe a little bit better for the environment because it is reusable so what you're going to do is I just went to the Dollar Tree and picked up several packages of these two packs of sponges you might be able to find a better deal elsewhere as well I got them in the two different colors an equal amount so you could do this the long way and you cut them into half and then in half again and you get four strips but I found that if you cut them The Wider Direction you got more out of them they were good for smaller hands I think that they might be a better way to do it and the way you do it this way is you cut them in half and then you cut those halves in/ thirds and then you get a total of six equal pieces and these do not need to be like perfect so you can totally eyeball this and just get them approximate and then you just kind of bunch them together take some elastic bands and wrap that around the center and then you kind of pull them out and tweak them and it kind of creates it's this like little orb thing like a spiky orb and they're just soft sponges so I did that with the pink and green ones and I bunched those together and then I did some in blue and yellow so that way if you're doing it on teams or if you're doing it in groups it's easy to sort out who is who I mean not that when all heck Breaks Loose with water bite maybe it doesn't really matter but then you toss these into buckets I picked these ones up from the Dollar Tree as well so all you have to do is dunk the sponges and throw dunk and throw dunk and throw instead of tediously and painstakingly filling water balloons knotting them off only for them to pop a second later it just makes sense doesn't [Music] it still a fun way to cool off and have a water fight but without all of the work that is associated with water balloons so I hope that that brings a little bit of fun into your life this summer I hope you like this next idea and it's got a lot of flexibility in it so what you're going to do is take some kind of citrus piece of fruit so that could be oranges that could be limes in my case I decided to go with lemons and my lemons were really big so you can cut these or not cut these but in my case they were so big I had to kind of cut them I kind of just put them on the outskirts of a cylinder vase so you can take the principles of it and apply it any way that suits your needs and then what I did is I took some tulips in these kind of orange and yellow colors I thought this was really pretty and I just kind of tucked them down in the center and then the way the Tulips fall is really really simple and beautiful and elegant I love that look I also have seen this look done with hydrangeas you could do this with roses whatever's in your garden the idea really is just getting some summery Citrus items in the glass vase it really kind of elevates the look of the arrangement and provides that summertime cheer and so hopefully you can take that and adapt it to your favorite flower and make it work for you simple easy classy Arrangement and anybody can do this I promise no fancy floor degree [Music] required okay so we are going to be making a simple t tabletop s'mores setup in case you have like a gas grill or you are having some other kind of dinner party or maybe you just want to have a fun little treat on an evening you don't have to go through the whole Rigo of doing a fire this is like a compact way to do it and so you can take just a simple terracotta pot which it is universally available I got one at Hobby Lobby for $150 on their 50% off sale or I found this one also at Hobby Lobby that had the little legs on it and I'll tell you what if you do the regular terra cotta pot you are going to probably want to elevate it somehow anyways whether you set that on like a piece of stone or something you do kind of want to lift the heat off because what we're going to do is turn this into like a little mini charcoal like holding thing so that's why I liked this one if you can't find this one just elevate it somehow put it on a piece of wood separate it from your table somehow then what you're going to do is you're going to line your pot with some tin foil and I would use heavy duty and you're going to make sure that that is all covered then you're going to take some barbecue charcoal briquettes and put it in there make sure there's a little bit of space in between you don't want it like super compacted you know for things to burn there needs to be a little oxygen of course and I use the pre-lit ones just cuz it eliminates a step and I found that it does work and then you light your briquettes and let them get nice and charcoal if you we're planning on doing this at a dinner party I think it would be a really fun little piece to have going while you're eating dinner as like decor and I don't know I just kind of think that that would create a little bit of an Ambiance and while you're eating then it kind of can burn down and get to that nice charcool stage that you need to roast marshmallows on I had some marshmallow roasting sticks now you don't need marshmallow roasting sticks to do this you could simply use bamboo skewers and then roast your marshmallows now this is a little side hack if you want to keep things simple I really like using the fudge stripe cookies because they've got the chocolate and kind of the gram cracker Vibe all ready to go but you could do the traditional s'mores as well and there's a lot of fun ways to make the s'mores fancy there's a lot of fun ways you can do your s'mores but the idea here is you just have a compact thing you don't have to have the whole mus and puss of a big barbecue or a fire and you can still get that summer s'mores experience not me just cuz I'm not eating sugar doesn't mean that my kids can't have some let's bring them out and have them make some s'mores let's make some s'mores [Music] boys okay so maybe this is the same like dinner party maybe it's like a fun pool party and it starts to get dark outside and here is a fun pack for you for your drink bin with the ice you throw in your ice in your bucket that you're going to put all of your drinks in and it's starting to get dark outside but here's a little fun element you can do you break off some glow sticks just crack them and you tuck them down underneath the ice and it makes the ice glow and so not only will you be able to see your drinks a little bit better but it adds a little bit of spice a little bit of fun at nighttime to have glowing eyes how much fun is this it's so easy to do it's just shoving in some little glow sticks into your ice bucket lots of fun colors you could do it all one color but I liked the kind of mixture of colors and I thought this would be really fun thing to do at a party now on the same note of glowing things we have a pool now if you don't have a pool you can take this idea and kind of adapt it I thought it would be really fun to have glowing balls and glowing floating devices and so I found these little floating tubes at the Dollar Tree you might want to get some bigger ones these ones were kind of smaller than I was thinking I should have expected for $125 that they would be a little on the smaller side and then I got some balls now at my Dollar Tree they actually had a glow-in-the-dark ball that was ready to go now if you can't find that they do have these other blowup beach balls and the same principle applies for all of these items what you do is you break the glow sticks shove them through the blowup hole and sometimes it doesn't want to go through it first but once you get one fed through it's easy to get more feeding through so it's just kind of getting that first little portion of like the little stem to open and shoving those in I put three in my tubes I would recommend doing about five just for a bigger glow it still worked and it was really fun now for my little beach ball that glowed the one that I got at the Dollar Tree and there was only one of them it was the only one that I could find but you could probably order these online I'll make sure to link them below if I can find them you break the big glow stick and you shove that there's like a special hole in the ball where you can shove that and then you can get refill ones and just replace them and use that all summer long and if you don't have a pool the ball would be really fun to kind of play kickball or just play around with a ball that glows in the dark it's so so much fun and I just Envision if you are really trying to have an epic pool party having a whole bunch of glowing balls floating around in the pool think it would be so much fun and really make for a memorable summer party so I hope that this gets your wheel spinning gives you some ideas of how you could Implement that if you were doing like a beach ball the blowup ones that you have to blow up yourself I would probably put about four or five in there but if you can find the ones that already have like the spot for the big glow stick I would definitely go with that route so much fun with glowi in-the-dark stuff and I hope that brings a whole lot of fun for your summer so this next one is a project that I did actually 2 years ago so that's why I know this is a really good hat cuz it's still holding up maybe you have some tired patio furniture that's starting to look Rusty and faded and ugly I did but the Shay's lounges and sometimes patio furniture can get really expensive very quickly so instead of checking them and buying new stuff give them new life I did this by just taking some black spray paint and get giving it a fresh spray and I covered it on the underside and then I flipped it over and spray painted it on the other side and I wasn't even sure that this was going to work or last but I figured if I got one more summer out of it I would be good well that was two summers ago and we're about to go into our third summer with these spray painted Shad lounges here and they are holding up amazing in fact like if I needed to touch up a little spot here or there they are just fine I have just been totally Blown Away it really did work that was in a patio makeover that I did a couple summers ago and then it's holding up so well so maybe instead of tossing out your tired looking furniture just spray paint it and give it new life and hopefully that will save you a ton of money okay so I am probably one of the lucky few I don't get sunburns too often because of this it makes me sometimes forget to do really good with sunscreen I'm trying to do better about it but inevitably sometimes you stay a little too long out in the sun and you end up with a sunburn so here's a little hack for your kids when they get a little bit too much sun you might want some aloe and it's hot and it's stingy and it hurts the aloe is nice and soothing but if we can make it even a little cooler make some fun little aloe ice cubes I found these really cute summer looking ice cube trays there's silicone I think you can even look like in the cake decorating supply area at your Walmart and there's all kinds of different options dinosaurs teddy bears butterflies all of that and you just take your aloe gel and you squeeze it into the tray tap tap tap throw it in the freezer keep it in the freezer so that when you do get a sunburn or maybe you've got a cut or maybe you've got some fire ants we get those here in Florida you can take one of those aloe ice cubes out rub it onto the owie I'm such a mom and then make it feel so good and it's just kind of silly but I like the idea of the Frozen aloe because it's going to be really soothing and the shapes are just more for kind of fun so put that in keep it in your freezer so you can pull them out as you need them and I hope that helps some of you out okay so for this next hack what you're going to need is a shower curtain and I picked one out at Target just to kind of demonstrate what you're looking here is you're not looking for the plastic ones you're not looking for the totally fabric ones but there's like a fabric plastic one if that makes sense it's not really plastic but it's definitely a more water repellent fabric type of shower curtain and you're going to use this at the beach maybe but also on your picnics because it's very wipable it's easily clean easily washed and it's not sticky underneath you like a plastic shower curtain would be but it's not hot and heavy like a blanket there's lots of fun prints that you can find so you could have a lot of fun picking out one that suits your person personality but the idea is you use it in Li of a regular blanket out picnicking out on the beach and it's water repellent and stain resistant and mildew resistant and all of that good stuff so I know it's a little unconventional but if you have an old shower curtain that would work that maybe you don't like the style of you could use it as a picnic blanket instead and there you go I kind of brandom but hopefully it helps you out this summer okay it gets really hot here in Florida especially in the summer so what you do for that you either go in the pool or you eat popsicles of course but popsicles can start to melt really fast if you're not eating them fast enough and then they get all over your hands and they're sticky hands it's just kind of annoying I don't I know I don't like sticky hands and as a mom I really don't like constantly cleaning sticky hands cuz sometimes those little hands don't want to cooperate very well when they're younger my kids are a little bit older now but I hope this will give you grandmas and mothers out there and frankly myself I will totally use this hack it's easy take a cupcake liner shove your Popsicle stick through that cupcake liner it's very easy and that cupcake liner will catch all of the sticky and keep your hands clean it's a super super simple summer hack and I hope that it helps you out and keeps your hands nice and not sticky do you want a water fountain but don't want to hard wire one this next hack you're going to love we are going to be doing like a solar powered fountain plan thing so the first thing I did is I got a similar black ear pedestal base to the other pedestal bases that I have on my front porch and then I took kind of another black planter and flipped it upside down and kind of tried to level it out and then what I did is I added some herbs in this pot some like oregano and Thyme and I thought that would be kind of a cute little herb garden so with those planted up I kind of tried couple of different combinations with some other black pots but it wasn't really working for me so I went to some stores to kind of see what other options there were and then I found this really cool big heavyduty plastic bowl from Ross and so I bought it and then I set that right on the upside down portion of that one pot that we kind of Tuck down in the soil and then I put some River stones that I picked up at the Dollar Tree into the base of that and then added our solar Fountain feature what you want to do is you peel off the little top portion and you submerge it into the water as quickly as possible so it sucks that water right in and it will start working it works fantastic in the daytime really really well there's a lot of little different Toppers that you can put on it it also does have the straws that kind of keep it in Center if you want and here's the other thing is when it's spraying all this water out the sides I'm like hey it's watering the plants for me it's letting me off the hook a little bit maybe it will stay alive and so I'm like that's a benefit to me and then it just works on its own and then during the day it kind of stores energy so at night it has this really cool effect where it lights up it changes color and it's just kind of like something fun in front of my house and I love how this turned out so it's awesome and I hope you loved it too maybe you're going on a picnic maybe you're going to a park and you don't want to Lug along a big barbecue but you want to have some burgers and hot dogs or some other yummy things and maybe roast some marshmallows this hack is for you all you're going to need to do is go to the Dollar Tree and pick up a big roaster pan and a cooling rack then you're going to take some self-lighting charcoal and put that into the rooster pan and kind of spread it out then all you need to do since it's already like kind of soaked in that that fuel is light the charcoal kind of all over and let it heat up and then I made a tent with some aluminum foil to kind of keep that heat in get the charcoal going and then we could put our Burgers on now I very comfortably got four large burgers and a couple of hot dogs on there I could have definitely SOS on a couple extra hot dogs and I tinted it with that aluminum foil and let it cook and then you know it just cooked like you normally you would with a grill let see how we're doing here I got my little tongue so we're going to pull it off oo that's looking good oh those hot dogs are looking beautiful flip oh my word this is beautiful I can't believe this this is totally [Music] working these are perfect let's just kind of tint this [Music] again oh they're looking perfect look at this this is totally doable you guys oh those are good look at those Beauties total Beauties let's just kind of lift up and see how these are looking I think they need a little bit more time but they're about [Music] done I thought I might try to toast a bun here cuz that would be fun [Music] yeah I know these Burgers look perfect perfect there's definitely enough Heat going on this you could do another round of burgers and hot dogs and maybe even uh roast some s'mores then you're going to want to make sure that it's fully cooled before you dispose of it so if that's dousing it in dirt dousing it in water you're going to want to make sure that it is fully cooled and then you can wrap it all back up in the tin foil and dispose of it properly just make sure that there's no possibility of starting any unwanted fires just be be very careful so the ultimate way to tell if this hack was a success is to taste test and we'll just see oh yeah try it out so for our next outdoor home hack if you have some mosquitoes you're going to want to take note because our next hack is a decorative mosquito repellent all You' need to do for this is take a fresh lemon and a fresh lime slice them up and slices and then you're going to kind of rotate those in a jar and then you're going to add a couple of sprigs of Rosemary and you're just going to place it all in there make it look pretty and then over the top of that you're going to just Add Water now I have three of these containers I got these containers at the Dollar Tree they're really pretty I like that they have lids and you'll see white in just a second and then you're going to want to add some essential oils now there are several essential oils that kind of keep away the bugs keep away the mosquitoes the recipe suggests that you add about 10 to 15 drops of Rosemary I did about 10 drops of Rosemary but I also added 10 drops of Terra Shield which is doa's version of mosquito repellent it works really good by revive there's one called bugs away lavender essential oil is also really good at repelling mosquitoes and bugs so there's lotss of options and whatever fragrance works best for you and then I just took some tea lights you could take floating candles and I lit them I think fire detracts the mosquitoes so the combination of all these fragrances plus the CLE really helps to repel the bugs I think these would make such a beautiful centerpiece but you could put them around your outdoor area light them they smell amazing to me it's a mystery to me why this would repel bugs because it smells really good and it's really pretty and so this is a really good hack for you the awesome thing is is when you're done you could blow out the candle leave the candle in if you want or you can pull them out but put the lids on put them in your fridge until like the next night if you want to reuse them so this is one that can last a little bit and this is one that would be really good for like an outdoor gathering this summer so I hope that you enjoyed this hat so my next hack was inspired by one of my viewers Gil Barnett she suggests using Listerine as a mosquito repellent so I did a little research on this and it does actually work and in addition to it you can actually use the generic mouthwashes just go find the ones that are strong um in the minty flavors the mint is a repellent as well but there's also some ingredients in the mouthwash that helps to repel those bugs and mosquitoes so so for my version I took some mint mouthwash and I combined it with about a cup to a cup and a half of a I think it's a mint eucalyptus Epsom salt and all of those fragrances as well as the Epsom salt kind of repel the bugs I also found recipes out there that included flat beer that is another option for you to kind of put in this natural mosquito repellent now Gil recommended spraying your screens and your doors to kind of keep the bugs away from them but you can also use this on plants and around your yard um you would need to make it in a little big bigger quantity if you're going to really be using it out in your garden and out in your yard um and it would probably be a little bit more expensive than like a traditional bug spray but what's really cool about it is it's all natural and here's the other thing the mint coupled with like the eucalypt and all of these scents it smells super good I'm like how is this going to detract the mosquitoes cuz it smells really good it smells so good that you can actually spray it on yourself it does kind of feel a tad sticky but I think a lot of the bug sprays that you spray on your body are a little bit sticky and it smells a lot better than those type of bug sprays so there's lots of options with this mosquito repellent and I hope you find it beneficial so maybe you've got an outdoor gather gaing plann and you want a really fun and different way to keep your drinks cool well this next hack is a lot of fun and it will kind of add like a beautiful touch to your drink Cooling and what we're going to do is we are going to take some flower heads and now I just picked up a bunch from Walmart but you could go out to your garden and just pick some little flowers to go in these I thought it would be really cute with pansies or violas I only had these daisies to work with but you break off the heads of them and then you take a balloon and you kind of take your fingers and stretch it out it would be easier if you had two people doing this one to stretch and one to drop the flower in it was just me so it was a little tricky but we got the job done put the flour inside the balloon and then you fill it up with water now you'll see in a second that you may want to consider using like a distilled water or something for your version because I think it will give you a little clearer water we'll get to that in just a second the next thing you need to do is freeze it and I would recommend freezing it 8 to 12 hours I think that's about the amount of time you need for like a snowball siiz Ice Cube that you've got going here and then you pull them out once they're frozen and kind of clip off the edge and peel back the balloon and it reveals this beautiful kind of decorative ice now what I will tell you is it actually looks prettier once it starts to melt a little bit because it removes that initial layer of frost and kind of reveals a clear thing and I do believe that if you use like a distilled water or something that's been filtered a little bit more than my bathroom sink water you would get a little bit clearer shot of those flowers and there's just a lot of possibilities on this and then you can just throw it in a bucket throw your ice on it I only did this small amount but you could do a huge bowl or bucket out of this and I think it would be really cute but I hope that brings a little personality to your summer events so this next hack is how to create an easy tabletop firebowl because maybe you don't have an outdoor fire pit maybe you don't have the room for it it's a lot of work and expense but you could do a tabletop Fire Bowl now I did this initially in one of my Ikea hacks last summer it was a huge hit I love how it went and what you're going to do is you're going to pick a bowl that you like in this case I found a ter one that I really like the shape of but I didn't like the color of it but you could totally leave the color alone this part is totally optional and I ended up spray painting the inner part in this really pretty shimmery gold and the outside a really pretty satin black and then I thought that looked really really cool I first stuck in these like shaping cans that have the fuel that you use to kind of keep food warm they do sell that some at the Dollar Tree but I actually found that the ones on Amazon are a better deal because they burn longer plus you don't have to switch them out as often which is nice because they'll burn for about 6 hours and then I kind of just put all the empty bags and like random stuff so we didn't have to totally load it down with some stones but I picked up these black stones from the Dollar Tree and I filled it up sometimes I and it just adds such a nice little Ambiance to your evening to your Gathering and then also provides you a way to you know toast some marshmallows and make some s'mores and I just think it's a really fun and easy summer hack if you haven't created a firebowl I'd highly recommend it because it's a lot of fun do have a pot that looks a little like this black but it's kind of dull it's plastic well I've got a hack for you this is another use for WD40 this won't be a permanent fix but it should last you a good while what we're going to do is just spray this on and rub it all over and it will give us a nice like new shine how awesome is this seriously got to love WD40 now you may have to repeat this one a couple of times during the summer it's not a permanent fix but it will last a while and it's a really quick and easy way and you don't have to like replace the pot so I hope that helps you oh my heck how many of us have oil spots on our driveway tell me I am not alone those darn leaky cars and we have a PA driveway that had a lot of oil on it so let's see how to fix it so I got this off of Amazon it's a Degreaser it had really good reviews so we're going to see if this works I also got this little brush so what we're going to do is we're going to pour this on our grease spots scrub it really good let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes and then I'm going to break out our power washer and power wash our [Music] driveway after two treatments I would say this process gave me about a 60 to 70% improvement over what it was before so I am really happy with these results but I think that if I give it a couple more treatments I can get it all the way removed because this has been sitting on our driveway for months now and it might take a little extra effort to get it all the way out now this was in a video like last summer you may or may not have seen it I got a lot of comments in the comment section on that video that there are a lot of other really cool oil removing hacks including Coca-Cola I have not tried that one out yet so let me know if you've got some fun hacks on removing oil oh goodness it is hot outside a I got my personal fan if you've seen me talk about this and my Amazon episode I just need it to cool off for a second you might need one of these this summer this is not a hack but just a little helpful tip I will link this in the description box below because woo it is warm it is definitely getting hot outside okay now back to the hacks I love little kind of Trash to Treasure hacks and this one is a really good one if you have some fabric softener bottles or maybe you have a milk jug or maybe you have an orange juice container you can reuse them and turn them into a awesome watering can so what you're going to want to do is like for me I just removed all the labels washed it out really really well inside and out and got it really clean and then I personally took my I have a hot pen which is meant for cutting like Styrofoam and other Plastics and I knew that it would be perfect for this so what you're going to do is you're going to take the lid of whatever your container is and poke several holes in the lid to where water could potentially come out so just poke poke poke poke the hot pin makes this super easy and I use it for my crafting so multi-purpose and it's not very expensive I'll link it below but if you don't have a hot pen what you can do is take a nail and heat it up with like a lighter and poke that through um you can you know just take a nail and Hammer it through there's lots of ways to get a hole the other place you want to put a hole is kind of like right above the handle um poke another hole in there and you'll see why that's important in just a second and that's it and then you fill it up with water and you take it out and you can water your Planters with it and the cool thing about that hole right where the handle is is you can kind of control the flow in some cases you can kind of stop the flow Al together but most cases it's going to slow it way down and then you lift it up and then you get the full flow so just whatever you're looking for it's kind of Handy to have that around and you have a perfectly acceptable and in my case even beautiful watering can was something that I would have just tossed in the recycle bin and so that was free to me and it's going to work great all summer long and so I love that say you have some glass on a front door or an exterior door and you want a little privacy but you don't want to spend a ton of money cuz that those frosting films that you get that are meant for doors are kind of pricey but guess what there is a very cheap substitute and you can pick it up at the Dollar Tree and that is just their regular clear contact paper it works great for adding privacy and a frosted look so to do this just cut out your $1 contact paper just a little bit larger than the window pane lightly missed with a water bottle and then stick your contact paper to the window and smooth it out using some kind of flat scraping tool then you're going to take a razor blade and cut off the excess as close to the edge as possible now my water bottle went went a little overboard and was pretty blotchy with the way the water sprayed out and a few days later the water bubbles are still dissipating and then in my case you know the the bubbles did eventually disappear and it looks completely like frosted glass you would never in a million years know that this was contact paper from the Dollar Tree and you did it from potentially under a buik depending on how much glass you need to cover but isn't that a fun and easy inexpensive hack that gives you a little privacy say you're going to the beach say you're going to a pool and you don't really want to haul around your purse but you might need a little extra cash this next hack is for you all you're going to do is take a ChapStick or some kind of lip balm container and then you're going to want to empty it out I threw mine into the microwave to soften it up a little bit and then you take a Q-tip and then you're going to take a toothpick and maybe some paper towels and you're just going to clean it out really really well just wipe it down really good you might even want to remove the label to make it look even more boring the more boring the less enticing right the better and then you have a perfect container to hold some cash that is super inconspicuous so all you're going to do is kind of fold your cache lengthwise first and then you're going to roll it up really really tight and then you're going to put it on the inside of this tube and put on the lid lid and that is it and nobody's going to want to steal that cuz who's going to want to steal like somebody's nasty old chapstick really it's so gross like if you think about it and then really cool all you have to do is kind of twist it up and your cash comes out and there you go you can pay for all of your summer refreshments and you don't have to carry around a purse and nobody's going to steal it and so it's awesome that's just like a super easy hack you may have seen that before but I just thought it it's so so brilliant so genius to kind of find like something completely that nobody's going to be interested in and store some valuables this is going to be an easy build so even if you're a beginner you can totally do this we might use a miter saw and some power tools but I'm going to kind of walk you through that process from my fireplace build I have a whole bunch of these 2x3 that I've had forever we are going to turn them into some kind of tall Planters we are going to cut these down so let let me show you how to use the saw it's easier than you might think so we are going to start cutting some wood a lot of wood so I'm going to show you how this works there's usually a button here mine's yellow and you pull that with your thumb and then you wrap your hand around this and pull it with your hand and when you squeeze the two together at the same time it turns it on that's as easy as it is I'm going to plug this in and we're going to put on our safety glasses looking good those are dirty dirty all right put on our safety glasses and we are ready to start cutting I'm going to wear gloves because these have a lot of slivers on these [Applause] ones okay and then we can use this as a pattern I'll put a p on it for [Applause] pattern we' have used up pretty much all of our 2 x3s and 2x4s to build one planter I was hoping to get a little good start on a second one but it really took up the wood we are going to just be attaching these with screws and we are going to just pre-drill some holes and we're going to just put one screw in each area building a whole bunch of boxes and then we're going to hook them all together and you'll see how in just a second so let's get drilling these ones are the longer ones this is a shorter one we're going to shoot the screws in this [Music] way okay so we've got some pilot holes any warped edges I'm going to try to put on the inside make sure it's lined up on all [Applause] [Music] sides there we go okay so that's pretty sturdy and we'll just build a whole bunch of them and then we're going to stack them together I had originally planned on taking it up a bit taller but I'm really happy with this height and of course I want two of them so I decided to hang on to the extra pieces and use them for my other planter and I'll probably still have to get some extra lumber for that isn't this Fern so pretty I think it's going to be gorgeous when it's all set and done so I've just kind of set this in here so you can kind of see what it looks like but let's lift this out cuz I'm going to show you what we're going to do next so all of these boxes are kind of separate but we need to attach them so what we're going to do is we are just going to cut down some 1 by two for the front long sze and then this 1x3 see if I can do this without dropping it to kind of hide all of that and then we'll use a little wood glue and finish nails and nail them all into place and that should kind of hold them together and we've got some kind of ominous weather looking I hear some Thunder I haven't seen any lightning but I'm kind of hoping it holds off so that I can keep building we're kind of working around some weather this week I just take my 1X tws and my 1x3s and hold it up to where we're placing them and kind of make a mark where we need to make cuts then after I make the cuts I just take some wood glue and a nail gun and nail them into place now if you don't have a nail gun you could definitely do this part by hand the first couple you nail into place may want to move around so you want to give it a little support as you [Music] go so looking pretty good right I love that if you wanted to do kind of a natural look I would go ahead and get some natural colored wood putty fill in the holes and kind of give the whole thing a good sanding and then you're going to want to find something to seal it with it's actually a really pretty look I'm going to go ahead and paint mine black but first before we paint them we need to build a second one well this one is really nice and we built it with screws which is you know if a drill is something that a lot of people have on hand it took a while so I am breaking out my big framing nailer and we are going to bust the second one out in no time I like this gun this nail gun is the coolest so we'll fill in the holes let it dry and then probably tomorrow we're going to be painting a bunch of stuff tomorrow because of the rain delays and all that I am going to delay one of my bigger projects for probably the Extreme Makeover so you'll have to stay tuned for that but I've got another really fun one one coming up now it's time for the big guns oh yeah protective eyewear for this is a must woo see look how fast that is one down several more to go but that was way [Music] faster now we're going to fill in the holes with some wood putty and seal the crack with some caulking that I had on hand and since we're painting it I felt like I didn't really need to match up the color cuz it didn't really matter this is what I've been dealing with this week just lots of Rin delays after it's dry I sand it down and I use the same paint I used on my front door in my recent front porch makeover episode I believe the color is called caviar I do one one good coat and then I go back in and touch it up a little bit with a light second coat you'll notice at the tops that I did add a couple of cleats and that's because my pot didn't end up fitting in there as well as I had hoped so just keep that in mind when you are making yours but I just love how my scrapwood planners came out you could totally make these with with 1x3s and 1x4s if you want something that doesn't weigh quite as much as these ones cuz these are definitely sturdy we are taking this pot and we are going to be creating an umbrella stand slash end table we are going to take a PDC pipe and cut it down to fit underneath and then I'm going to take some Gorilla tape and kind of like tape it down to the bottom right in the center and then we are going to put cement in the bottom now I'm not going to fill all the way up cuz I don't want it to weigh 1,000 lbs but I do want to fill it up far enough that I feel like it will be heavy enough to hold an umbrella in place if the winds pick up and not be tipped over and that ended up being about 40 lb of cement and I just added that little by little adding water each time and kind of mixing it up as I went and then when it was full enough I kind of just bounced a little to even everything out and have it settled down and then I wiped all the edges and cleaned up any mess on the rim and let that dry overnight while that's setting up I'm going to take a wood round a decorative wood round that you have seen me use on this channel in all of my way cool dirt Sheep episodes I've used these wood rounds for trays I've used these wood rounds for a lot of things and I thought it was the perfect size and kind of thickness to to create a little table top we going to Mark where Center is and then I take a 1 and 1/4 in hole saw and saw out a hole and my battery on my drill was kind of dying in this process so I ended up having to pause while it charged but it eventually did make it through then I simply stained the top in a Brier smoke Gel Stain which is the same kind of undertones as our pot is and I let that dry for a few hours [Music] hours then I took some wipe on poly and polyurethaned the entire [Music] thing once that was dry we put our top onto the pot make sure the holes are centered up and then we slip our awesome new bana striped umbrella in through the holes and that will hold everything together where it should be I don't permanently a fix a tabletop because you never know when you need a little extra hidden storage but I just adore how this turned out it is super stable and it's quite heavy for me to handle which is good I think because it means the umbrella is not going anywhere now here's something extremely awesome about this umbrella it has solar powered LED lights and it lights it's up at night and has like an onoff switch and everything this was just another opportunity to add some Ambiance in a place that people want to hang out at night so for this next one we're doing a double hack we are doing a f plant and a Bo and bar little pot now this is a smaller version I did actually a little bit larger version in a past Ikea Hack episode I'll link that and all of my Ikea Hack episodes in the description box below so if you want to see how I did that basically this is going to go inside here and you could leave it as is but for me I like to design things to the nines maybe a little bit over the top sometimes I don't know I created this little stencil that we are going to actually put on the front of our [Music] pot and then we're going to just take some black chalk paint and just chalk paint this on now this little stencil is my definition of f the name of the plant it translates to fake or a plant that you can't kill but still looks real and if you watch my channel you know that if I put things in a pot I'm a seral plant killer and I don't mean to be but I just end up killing plants I just put this silly little definition together for this now if you don't have the ability to cut a stencil I have not forgot you I have a free printable which I will link in the description box below you can size this to whatever you want just take some graphite paper and transfer it onto your pot and then take like a paint pen or paint with a little brush I've done this like on pillows and all kinds of things in the past and it works out really great I've been seeing all these plant stands around and I thought it would be really fun to create a little plant stand so I have a 3/4 in Dow that I picked up at Hobby Lobby for $150 I think we can get the job done with this one 36 in dowel now I've seen these made several different ways online I've seen them made with just glue which doesn't seem very sturdy and then I've also seen it done probably the proper way where they kind of cut out and then chisel out and like a do a little crisscross pattern and kind of like smash them together that's probably the correct way to do it but I wanted to offer an option that was a little bit more sturdy than glue but maybe a little bit easier than the crisscross chisel option and here's what I came up with we are going to take our dowel and make these Cuts either on a miter box or on a miter saw like you see me doing here the cuts are 4 at 6 in 1 at 4 and 1/4 in and two at 1 and 5/8 in which you should be able to get out of one dowel and once we have those cuts we are going to pre-drill a hole exactly in the center of the 4 and 1/4 in piece then we are going to take what is called a screw dowel and you've seen me use these on my channel before and we will place that in a drill and tighten it up as if it were like a regular drill bit and we are going to simply drill that through that bow and you want a little bit of screw dowel on either side of your wood dowel how many times can we say dowel then we're going to pre-drill some holes in the centers of the two 1 and 5/8 in pieces and add a little wood glue to those and then simply twist those on to either side of that screw dowel until they are nice and [Music] tight then I took mine outside so I could use my nail gun to then glue and shoot Nails into the legs and I kind of propped it up on a 2x4 board to keep everything the same height while doing this if you don't have a nail gun you could use smaller screws on each of the legs or just use some finish nails and nail them in by hand then you can fill in those nail holes with some wood putty or there's a little hack that I recently learned that will give you the perfect match and it's next to free you can just take a little tiny bit of that wood glue and some of the sawdust from your cut offs and kind of mix that together with the glue and fill in those holes that way and once that's fully dried you give everything a good sanding and do a clear coat over the top and let that dry now if I were to do this again I'd probably make this stand prior to doing our stencil because as you can see here a little bit of our definition gets cut off by it so I probably would have made this stencil a little bit smaller if I was planning on putting it on a stand but it's okay together or separate I absolutely love this double Ikea Hack the cement pot is a very easy Ikea Hack and the plant stand is probably a little bit harder but much easier than the chiseled method but I just think this is so super cute most of the supplies that I got for this project were from the Dollar Tree except for a couple and those items were basically the lemons and a dowel the first thing we're going to do is start out by taking a little pot that I got from the Dollar Tree they come two in a pack it's a little terracotta pot and then we're going to take our black chalk paint and paint the entire thing so it has a nice black finish to kind of go with our whole overall Motif and then what we're going to do is just take any foam and shove just enough to be nice and firm inside there you and then we're going to need a dowel and we're going to just cut this down to to fit and I haven't even decided the size yet so we'll kind of just eyeball this so I'm going to just go with about that long I'm going to measure it right now so you guys have an exact measurement I'm so scientific sometimes on this channel all right we are going to say about a 10 in dowel okay and you won't need any fancy tools to do this you can just pick up a hacksaw at the Dollar Tree for one buck and just saw it off and that will be great because the ends don't need to be perfect cuz you're not going to see them and just to give it more of a finished look I'm just going to take some antiquing wax and rub that onto my dowel just so it doesn't have that raw look and make sure it's nice and snug and don't try to like try to get where you're going to poke it first so you don't pull it around KN it you don't want it to get loose so you kind of want to do this in one shot if you can now I always have this floral Moss from the Dollar Tree on hand it's perfect to cover up this ugly foam and it's great so we'll just use that to cover up the floral foam then just take your floral foam sphere and shove that onto the top portion of the Dell I got this little bag of tiny Lemons at Michaels and they were running a 60% off sale I always am looking for good bargain and then we're going to just take some bamboo skewers and I believe I picked these also up at the Dollar Tree and we're going to cut these in half maybe even thirds honestly and you can do this with a not good pair of scissors I wouldn't pull out your nice fabric scissors for this but we're just going to cut them down a little bit that's about 3 in long and what we are going to do is we're going to put a little hot glue on these and just shove them into the lemon now we're going to take our lemons and we're going to shove them into that Styrofoam ball even L as possible and I just used two bags of lemons for this I have these left over from my pey wreath that I did a couple of episodes back and I always am trying to keep my cast off Greenery just for this and that and the other you never know what you're going to need it for so instead of going out and purchasing actual lemon leaf or salal as it's called in the floral industry I'm going to use these rose leaves and we're going to just shove that in between the lemons to kind of fill in and you may want to add a little hot glue to the bottoms of the leaves just to keep them secure in [Music] place I just love this little lemon topiary it's like a ray of sunshine it is so cute and I love my little lemon topiary what do you think so the first option is option number one go find a 2x6 cut off you're going to just keep the regular width that it is and then cut it down to somewhere between 8 and 1/2 and 9 in basically the width of a piece of paper maybe a little bit more and you'll get to see that in a second and then all you're going to do is just paint the the whole thing out front and back white I'm going to be using my white chalk paint now I'm going to go cut this down on my miter saw and that's a tutorial for another episode I do lots of tutorials on how to use a miter saw so you'll have to check out some of those but if you don't have a miter saw you could definitely get away with just using a miter box they're pretty inexpensive to get I'll put a link for one on Amazon below and that will work for the other option that I'm going to show you here which is this was one of my fun favorite finds and I actually featured this on another Trash to Treasure episode and all it is is it's kind of a packing material I found this on an aisle in Home Depot and it was going to be discarded so I asked really nicely if I could just have a few of these and take them home go in and say it's packing material kind of explain it you can see that there's like a little Groove in it right if you ask really nicely I think that they'd probably say okay cuz I think they just toss these now this is a piece of scrap wood I have a lot of scraps still from my DIY shelf build um for this shelf behind me and it's really awesome cuz this is like 3/4 in wide and it fits inside this little slot so perfectly so I'm going to cut this down to fit our printable but then we're going to just paint this top portion in a white chalk paint and get it prepared and then we are going to take the bottom portion and we are going to paint this out in Black chalk paint okay so now here's our awesome printable isn't this so cute I love it you can print this out on your own computer but for some reason I get such a more saturated image and a more beautiful image by running down to Staples so I printed this out at Staples it cost me about 59 on their self-service color printer and my husband's being silly over here and trying to distract me anyways if either of these methods don't work for you you could shrink this down just a little bit print it out and put it in a 5x7 frame and call it a day and that would look cute too now I've got a few different methods of how to go about this and you're just going to need to pick the method that's going to work best for you so I just decided to put them both on the same 8 and 1 half by 11 printable to kind of simplify it so you can see that this top one reads normally and all you're going to do with this top portion is cut it off and then you're just going to put some Mod Podge on the front of the block and place your paper on top of that using a rubber scraper or even a credit card to smooth it out this is a little technique that I learned from my good friend Lisa burningham over on her Channel then after that is dry you are going to put on a second layer of mod podge over the top of the paper and your paper will bubble up but do not worry because once it dries these bubbles should disappear once it's fully dry then you are going to want to sand off the edges to give it that rustic feel and at the same time make it look like it's painted on the wood and not just a mod podged piece of paper this really helps to disguise that fact the bottom one you'll notice is a reverse image it's all backwards you are going to take some liquitex and do a moderate layer of this medium you can pick this up at Michaels or I'll provide a link in the description box below I've had this on hand and used it for several projects and it really doesn't take very much at all then you're going to carefully want to place your reversed printable face down on the liquitex without wiggling it too much so you're going to want it to get it all nice and lined up before dropping it face down then you're going to want to smooth it out with your hands making sure that there is very good contact then you're just going to let is completely dry for a few hours once you're sure that it is dry get a soft washcloth and a bowl of water and you will carefully and gently remove the paper by getting it wet this part can be a little messy so I would recommend putting a plastic bag or something underneath to protect your [Music] table once you've got the paper removed the image should be on there in the proper direction and once this fully dries then you can scuff up those edges as well as the black painted base and give it that antique look that we are going for then you should be able to just take the sign portion and place it right into that ledge sitter base all right so we have our two versions of the the lemonade sign now this one is the image transfer technique and it definitely has like more of a rustic vibe to it and then this one is our Mod Podge version which is actually really good I think if you're careful about mod podging you can get a really good look I like both versions for different reasons so I'm just curious which version would you do would you do the image transfer technique or the Mod Podge version and also which base would you do would you do just like the thick block of wood or do like this ledge sitting one as well so let me know in the comment section I picked this wood canvas up at Walmart for $4.97 sometimes they have it online not always but they typically do have it in store so if you go in there you can find it it's meant to be like a wood canvas this way but I always flipped it around to have this kind of like framed effect and in that episode which I'm going to link below I paint the edges black and the Center White white and that really gives us a nice backdrop to switch out now these are just attached with sticky putty so we're going to just peel these back and expose the backdrop for this what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be creating a tiny little wreath out of these lemon picks they were originally $5 but with a 60% off it made them $2 a piece now you could probably get away with just using two but I'm going to use all three so it's a little bit more full and we are literally just going to bend these and shape them into a little tiny mini wreath and so you can see that we can put them all [Music] together and then all we're going to do is take some green floral tape and strategically tape this into place so we've got a cute tiny little wath and what we've got our little lemon wreath created so easy I might add we are going to just take some ribbon now I'm using what I have on hand and I had some black and white buffalo check and I also have some black and white stripe and I think I'm going to go with a buffalo check just because we've already got a lot of Stripes going on and so I kind of want to break it up a little bit we're going to just take maybe like a foot long of it and then cut it off and then Loop it through our little wreath and then we're going to just find the center C and Center up the wreath in our picture frame and then on the back use some duct tape and just tape it into place so I love this look I love that we've taken a little twist on what I've been doing with a sign and put a little mini wreath on it isn't this so cute I just had so much fun designing this printable for you and it's kind of going along with our lemon Motif sweet lemon farm fresh squeeze so cute I really think that this is striking and pack a punch and I'm putting the link for this free printable in the description box below click on it follow the instructions it's not too hard then I take this to Staples I love Staples they are always good to me there plus I just like their quality of print there and what you do is you email this digital copy to [e-mail] and you can print this out at Walmart you can go to Costco and print it out there Costco I think is the cheapest it's I think $6.99 it's a little bit more Staples but I really like the color saturation and the paper that they put it on it's kind of like a regular paper but a little bit heavier weight and I love the kind of that matte sheen on this so that's this printable this is always a good DIY because it's so easy to put together cuz all we do is we to take out our frame backing and we put it in our frame and we call it a day and so easy we're actually going to be turning this into an ottoman and I am so excited to do this because you know how many times do we have a tire sitting around our garage kicking around taking up space if you don't already have a tire in your garage you could totally just ask around somebody will be happy to give you a free tire so let's start let's do it okay so for the first part we need to put a top and a bottom on this tire so it has some stability so it can actually hold um something in the middle of it without caving in and so I picked up this piece of lumber at Home Depot for $4 and we should be able to get the top and bottom out of it if you had a bigger tire you might need a little bit bigger piece of wood but you can use anything any scrap wood you can get your hands on that's in a sheet form and what we're going to need to do is make a circle and so the easiest way to do that is to find Center all right so we're basically going to be using this entire piece of wood we need to be very careful in our measurements because we don't really have a lot to spare we need to find the center x marks the spot then we're going to take a nail put it on the center of that tap it in just a little bit flip knot that on there and then we need to take some sort of um writing utensil and we're going to just tie it so it hits the edge here and in theory we should be able to do a circle okay so I have a jigsaw here and we are going to cut out the circle that we just traced and honestly best practice would be a much sturdier table than mine but I do have it clamped down and we're going to just be a little careful here and we are just going to cut the circle out it's a little Hut outside so I've brought the party inside we do this we kind of go in and out it's just how we roll here anyway so we've got our top and our bottom cut out of the wood and now we need to adhere it I have some leftover Liquid Nails so what we're going to do is we're just going to squeeze some of this Liquid Nails this will just help everything kind of stay into place we are going to put this right on top it's not going to be perfect it's cut with a jigsa and so there's just going to be some waviness and I thought that was okay I'm going to screw it down just for added measure now I flipped it over and we're going to do the same thing on the bottom side so that we will have a place to screw in some feet I'm going to be wrapping rope around the entirety of the tire and the top and then we'll put on some feet to make an ottoman I got this rope it's about 50 ft of rope it's a/2 in thick and I really liked it and it was really the best price that I could find and it also had the look that I liked and I got it at Michaels it was regularly $16.99 and I used a 50% off coupon you always have to use use a 50% off or 40% off coupon Michaels always has one so I got this rope half off making it 850 for 50 ft so what we're going to do is we're going to start right in the center and x marks the spot we still have that from when we did our Circle earlier I'm going to use a mixture of liquid nails and some hot glue the hot glue kind of has more of a immediate contact and the Liquid Nails will be way more durable I've actually seen some of these rope Auto before and one of the problems with them is the rope unravels and we're going to prevent that because I've got a trick to show you what we're going to do is we can see that it's wound this way and we are going to create a lashing what you need to do is create a loop like this and then we are going to line it up like so and then we are going to wind in the opposite direction and we're going to do about three or four loops and make sure they're kind of snug and then when you get those three or four Loops what you're going to do is I've just started and made like a tight coil and we've already got where x marks the spot so I'm going to start by doing some hot glue and I'm just going to be very generous there and then I'm also going to put some construction adhesive cuz that's going to hold up better over time make sure that that's nice and center and then all we're going to do is just keep doing this all the way around you just want to make sure you get it really nice and tight together you don't want any [Music] gaps this is going to be a little bit time consuming so we're in it for the long haul we've made good progress it's looking really good and now I'm at a place where I need to transition from the wood to the tire so the idea is to try to kind of make this transition as seamless and unnoticeable as possible [Music] okay so what we're going to be using for the feet of our ottoman these are actually just some finals that I got at Home Depot for 3.98 a piece and I liked them cuz they were a little bit chunkier they had a flat bottom and I just thought that they would be the perfect height and everything about it worked and the price was right um so what we're going to do is we're going to stain them right now so I'm just using the same Kona Gel Stain that I've used for my outdoor tuna can Chandelier and then I've used it on my bench I have hardly made a dent on it and so I'm going to use it on this as well and it's like a nice dark chocolate which will actually contrast next to the Rope really well oh yeah that looks so good I love it patience is going to be virtue in this project now it's time to attach our feet and I've kind of marked where I wanted them I've kind of evenly spaced them out and now we're going to pre-drill for the feet and then we are just going to twist them right into place and again these are just fence finals um you could use actual Furniture feet but I found them pretty pricey and these were smooth and perfect for what we're doing [Music] I thought it would be fun to do an outdoor Street Lamp on a smaller scale we are going to convert this into a solar powered lamp there's a lot of options with this project so let's get making over the lamp the first thing that we're going to do is we need to take this lamp [Music] apart so I then just untwist the light socket until it's [Music] undone and then I decide to just cut the wiring and pull it out the bottom leaving just the base of the lamp this in includes the felt liner on the bottom of the lamp there's already texture on the lamp so I have a flat black matte spray paint but I thought it might look cool to add a little more texture so I also have a hammered black so hopefully I make the right call here I'm going to start with the flat black because I figure it will be kind of like a primer and if I'm not happy with it then I'm going to resort to this one and these are both by kryon so we're just just going to start spray painting these now if you're not lucky enough to find a column lamp base go ahead and substitute it out aren't these already looking so much like lamp posts now I ended up going with the matte black and it's actually not very matte in my opinion I definitely would put it in the satin to semi but I really did love the spray paint because it coated extremely well and I could turn it in different angles and the spray paint still came out so I really like it I didn't end up going with the hammer finish because I felt like the lamp had enough texture after all so we are going to really take it to the next level on the Street Lamp look I scoured high and low looked in my local home improvement stores and finally ended up on Amazon where I found a two pack of uh solar powered lamp post light right here so they don't require any electrical wiring which I love but we still like up as long as they are charged by the sun which in Florida here we have a ton of that so we're okay now it comes with this square and my lamp's round and so that looks to me a little funny fortunately the bottom part does pop off and so we can get rid of this the problem is is when I get rid of this it makes it a little bit wobbly on here so my thought is I will take a little hacks off and try to cut this off because this part does fit nicely onto our existing dowel and it will be nice and snug so I'm going to try cutting that off but if it doesn't work we'll brainstorm some ideas so I'm just going to try this is my $ Dollar Tree hacksaw and this is just plastic so I really think that we can cut through [Music] this success so we can push that back into here line it up push it in okay which is perfect so now it will fit on this really well look how cute that is I have some Liquid Nails just a little bit left I thought I had more of this so hopefully there's a little bit in there just so it's a nice permanent fix and that's it for the lamp post part other than char ing up our lanterns outside in the sun now these could look really cute on a dining table or just somewhere in your outdoor decor but I thought we could bring up the spring and summer Vibe just a little bit more so meet me outside I'm going to show you what I've got in mind and it's going to even add just a little bit [Music] extra because of all the beautiful weather I'm getting the bug to kind of spruce up my pool area here it really does need a makeover and I do want to do that pretty soon so one of my ideas was is I picked up this pot from Walmart for about5 or $6 and then I got this one at Dollar Tree for $1 and I spray painted this in the same black as I spray painted the lamp post at the same time and I thought we could take some liquid nails and glue these together to make a kind of style one except for at a huge discount because this is $5 this is a doll so we've got like6 or $7 into this whereas you could easily spend on an earn this size $30 without batting an eye so this is a huge [Music] saving so I thought I'd start out by putting some sand into each one of the bottoms not a whole lot but just to add a little weight will also help with drainage and then I'm going to put some potting soil on top of that it kind of looks like brown [Music] sugar okay so my plan is to put our lamps right in the center of this and to give it a little added support where I have these little dowels left over it's just to help it from not toppling over it's not really I'm not going to attach it to it I'm just going to stick it down in the center so the lamp doesn't want to move around and topples so for a little spring flare I've got some Greenery and we will just kind of nestle those down I actually might pull this out plant them towards the edge and then put that back down in there but then it will give it that kind of spring and summer feel that we're going [Music] for now I picked this up at Walmart for I think this was $2.50 and the violets were $112 so very [Music] affordable [Music] so we've kind of planted this around the edge and that looks so pretty I love it now we're going to take our lamp post and very carefully moving the vines out of the way and any flowers out of the way place this into its spot all right I'm going to water these even though I worked in a floral shop that had a nursery in it for a couple years during college I tend to kill things in pots so if you all would just take a second and say a prayer that I don't kill these amen I'd appreciate [Music] it so just for the solar powered lamp post I ended up spending about $30 a piece adding in the Potted earns and the flowers was approximately another $15 each but for the impact that this gives I think this is a crazy good steal I am totally in love with these slightly [Music] obsessed found this basket at a thrift store I believe it was for $6.99 it kind of has like a suitcase feel but it's definitely a picnic basket and I knew we could update it and give it new life and the first thing that I did might seem scary to some of you but I just decided I really wanted it to be white so I went ahead and spray painted it very well we did it the inside we flipped it over and did the outside and we kind of just got it from every angle making sure it to let it thoroughly dry the the nice thing about this is you kind of can spray it on a little bit thicker than normal because there's a lot of nooks and crannies and it kind of just sucked it right up you don't want to go too crazy I wanted to do something more than just spray paint it white I wanted to give it a little character and all of our Thrift flips kind of have a little bit of a French flare if you will but if that's not your style I hope you still watch because there's a lot of good techniques and ideas that you can kind of implement your own look into stick with me even if French isn't your thing but I knew I wanted to have kind of like a picture of something yummy that had a French flare so I designed this image for you and I will be giving you the free printable in the description box below so look for the link for that this image is going to go on this oval wood round that I got from the Dollar Tree back when it was still a dollar not $125 it's not painful at all I I don't keep talking about the fact that they went up I'm just kidding but we needed to prep the surface for what we are going to be doing cuz there's a little bit of a Twist to this printable so the first thing I did was fill in those little holes with putty and then I let that dry and then of course after that was dry I sanded it down prepping it for paint we are going to paint that out in two coats of white chalk paint and and prep the surface for it then we are going to print out our image on to what's called water slide paper I've used water slide paper in the past and I just absolutely love this technique I love it over a couple of other techniques and I'll tell you more about that in a minute because I I do try one of these different techniques and it didn't go so well so you'll see now that we've got our image printed out on this special water side paper this is the most important step for this whole process you're going to spray three coats of this triple thick Crystal Clear glaze by kryon this is the one that I recommend you just need some kind of like acrylic based clear glaze it dries pretty fast especially in nice weather and so every 15 minutes you can put on a coat and then when it's dry we're going to cut out that oval shap and then we're going to submerge it in water and this is where the whole water slide feature comes into play once we've submerged it under water for about 30 seconds it might you know give or take when you can start to feel it lift off of the backing we are going to set it right on top of our painted oval and we're going to line it up how we want it and then we're going to slowly pull out the backing from underneath now the water kind of activates like a wallpaper kind of glue paste and so that's going to help it stick and then you kind of just press out all of the air bubbles and then you let it fully dry now you could because it already has the polyacrylic on it you don't need to seal it again but I always do because I kind of wanted it to have more of a matted finish and the triple thick glaze is definitely a high gloss look and so once that is fully dry I did one coat this time around of that matte sealer and we sprayed that that on now while that's drying we are going to add a little bit more detail to our basket we kind of spray painted over the brass little buttons and everything so I just went back in with some gold leaf rubb and buff and just kind of added those little gold accents back onto our basket just to give it a little bit more personality and bring some of that character back and then with our oval shape dry I I centered it on our the front of our basket and used some E6000 to adhere our little sign to our cute picnic basket and that's it and it is a super cute picnic basket that you could take I I really love really love how this turned out I really love that extra added element of the oval round with like the really cute French pastry on it again I'll link that free printable for you in the description box below and I hope you recreate this look and if you do send it to me over on Instagram I had this Frame that I picked up on like the Hobby Lobby like clearance shelf so it's not technically a thrift but it was like an outcast at Hobby Lobby so and it's this just beautiful wood frame that's just been sitting around waiting for the right project then I went and hit up my scrap pile to see what I could find so I'm going to just check my scrap pile here to see if there's anything I think I have something yeah like this piece right here that might fit in this Frame let's just see how this fits ooh that is super close okay so I just need to cut off a little tiny bit but it's the right thickness and everything and all we need to do is trim Just a Touch then I cut down the piece of scrapwood I didn't have to cut off much it was just a couple Quick Cuts to make it fit and then I got to painting the scrapwood in two coats of white chalk paint and then I attempted to do the image transfer on that one well I actually kind of did them like at the same time so I didn't really know that it wasn't going to go well but like it's just that whole same process of the image transfer of like the polyacrylic putting it face down using the water to kind of you know remove the paper and then it like so bad I was like you know what the picnic basket looked kind of bad it wasn't like my favorite but it was like passable this to me was just a total fail so at this point I'm like I am so over the image transfer I'm I'm I'm good I'm good so then I flipped the board over and proceeded to start again and I did two coats of white chalk paint so can you guess what I'm going to go back to that original water slide paper now the reason I didn't really do the water slide paper for that last picnic basket and initially for the tray was because the sheets only come in like an 8 and 1/2 by 11 and there would have been seams and I just didn't know how it would work so after the failure of the picnic basket and the epic failure of what I'm tempting to be like a little serving tray here with the French floral I'm like you know what I'd rather see a little seam than have these results so what I did is I split the image down the middle and two and I printed out two sheets of this water slide paper it's affordable too a lot more affordable than having these images printed out at Staples I can tell you that much for sure so then I repeated that same process of using the triple thick Crystal Clear glaze three coats I I think I even did four coats on this because it was going to be a serving tray and I just wanted to be extra sure with that dry I made sure the cuts were super straight with my crcket like little paper cutter we just repeated that same water slide method of submerging the paper into the water waiting about 30 seconds because it was a little bit bigger it might be up to a minute and this is where kind of like the rubber meets road if you did it properly it won't disintegrate if you don't do that Crystal Clear coats then like the paper kind of disintegrates into the water and it's just a total mess so make sure you do that step but we didn't have that problem this time around we submerged our paper laid it out where we wanted and like car carefully removed the under backing and then we did the second piece making sure to match up the seams as close as possible so that it was almost like non-existent and then pulled that sheet out and then I was like yes I don't even care that there's a seam this is looking good so far and then I smoothed it all out got rid of the air bubbles and let that dry really well for like an hour or two just to make sure that like all the water's gone and dissolved then I knew that I'm going to be attempting to use this for a serving tray so I did like two or three coats of a matte clear finish um a non- yellowing this Watco brand that I really love and I made sure that it was really sealed well and also it was kind of Dual Purpose cuz I was trying to hide as much of that seam as possible but overall I was like doing a happy dance at this point going woohoo this is looking good and so then all we needed to do was put it into that frame that we got from Hobby Lobby and and around the edges I just took my finish nailer and nailed that down into place because we did not want it going anywhere you don't want to be holding a serving tray and have the bottom drop out so it needed to be secure now you could stop at this point and just turn it into a beautiful piece of art as you see here I I think this could be a really good technique for art or you could continue on like I did and I used some of these really cool like iron handles that I love to get from Hobby Lobby in a black and I just screwed those in on either side and then we have this beautiful serving tray and I have to tell you this might be my favorite Thrift flip of this episode it's so cute and summery and fresh you could use it indoors you could use it outdoors I just love it I think it's beautiful now I might have a lot of you asking well why don't you just Mod Podge it on well I have not had great uh success mod poding things I think ultimately over time it bubbles up you know I just I am just a huge fan of this water slide paper because it gets it suctions right down and and really has such a beautiful finished look I love it we are going to be customizing some outdoor pavers now these papers were not expensive at all they're like a $158 at the Home Improvement store a piece so I thought it would be really fun to kind of do like a check board I must have that in my mind for some reason I'm not sure why but I kind of like a checkerboard pattern on this and so what I did is I went into Cricut design studio and found a tile pattern in their image section that I really like they have several to choose from and I really kind of liked the look of this one that I selected and then of course I sized it to where I needed and I put it on a square and and sliced it and removed it working in design space is super easy it's not difficult at all but if you're not familiar with it I have a video on how to do that so once we picked out our design and it was ready to cut we just sent it over to the explore air3 again cut it on that and then I went about weeding it so I did cut this out on permanent vinyl and it's going to be a little bit tricky to get it to stick but it does stick it you just have to help it a little bit massage it into the pap a little bit it's not meant to be a permanent fix we are using this as a stencil then I decided to get my off-white chalk paint and just chalk paint that onto the the tile I was pretty generous and I didn't do a clear coat to seal it because honestly the rough edges you'll see in a second work well in this circumstance and I just did a pretty good one coat of of it and let that dry and then I peeled back the stencil which is really easy to do because it didn't really want to stick to our cement piece in the first place it's all good but when I peeled it back it looked really pretty and then I took it out to the yard and I did a couple of matte clear coats on it just to give it some layer of protection but I think this looks really cute I haven't decided exactly where I'm going to be putting these at the moment but I think it would be a really cute porch like you could get a few more of them and do this on like a little porch if you need it or do a little pathway of it um but I think these turned out really cute and even though the edges are a little bit rough I think it kind of gives it kind of like that ECOT look and I just am really happy with how it turned out I found these metal Planters at a thrift store oh about a year ago and I've just been hanging on to them for the right project I think today is the day they were looking a little bit dirty so originally what I did is I sprayed them down with WD40 and like really wiped them down and they were looking really good but then I got looking close and noticed that somebody had previously spray painted one out of the three and it was looking a little worse for wear hubby thanks hone he still makes me giggle all right this one random one was spray painted and it was subtle but it just didn't look very good and so therefore it doesn't match these other ones that were bronze and I can't leave it like that so I went in and scrubbed off the WD40 with some soap and water and we're going to let it dry in the Sun and then we're going to spray paint them all black so that they match I could have left left it cuz it's really subtle but it would have bothered me okay so with our newly cleaned up brackets ready to go I just did two coats of matte black spray paint easy peasy and left that to dry but we needed a place to put these brackets so what I ended up doing is taking a piece kind of like a long skinny piece of wood from my scrap pile and then I stained it out in the same Brier smoke Gel Stain that we used on the chest table to kind of coordinate everything together and we left that to dry now while that was all drying I went into Cricut design studio and I found a kind of a skinnier damasque pattern that I really liked and I made two of them super easy it was like ready to go I just went into their image library and found it and then sized it out to where we wanted it and then hit cut I mean it was really really simple process and then I of course cut out on matless black permanent vinyl because we are going to be leaving the vinyl decal on the wood and it's going to be outdoors I went ahead and weeded that all out and then we put on our transfer tape don't use the strong grip it's a little bit much even for the permanent vinyls just stick with a regular transfer tape in this case the stains dried the paint dry we are ready to assemble and what I did is I kind of laid it all out on this piece of wood and made sure that everything was evenly spaced then I took some screws that I kind of spray painted black to match and screwed these down into the wood into their spots then we had these like little openings and I knew that that was going to happen and then that's where we applied our damask pattern and I kind of did it in Mirror Image so like one was One Direction one was the other direction and I thought that looked really really neat and we just simply rubbed it into place removed the trans tape and it was easy easy easy as far as active time this took like hardly any time to put together it was very simple using some scrap wood that I had on hand some inexpensive brackets that I found at a thrift store this turned into a really cute little planter display that I can put outside and on my front porch and that little awkward skinny spot and honestly it could go indoors or Outdoors but it's super cute I love it with the little pots and Planters in it and I hope that it opens up your mind and get your wheel spinning of how you could maybe take some unrelated things together and create a cute little decorative piece I thought it would be really cool to do like a part two of this DIY I removed our original chest table top that we made in that last episode and kind of centered it on top of the round and it really kind of came to the edges of this tabletop round and I traced it all around just so I knew that it was perfectly centered and nothing was going to be off kilter and then I decided well how are we going to make this sit cuz I'm not just going to put the tabletop round on it that would feel to me like it could easily be bumped off and and not just be a quality piece so my idea was to kind of wrap it in wood so that it was very sturly sturly is that a word it was on the either way I took some little strips of wood that I had cut off and they I think they were about 3/4 in by 1 and 1/2 in they were left over from another project and I kind of traced where I wanted them to be all the way around and then I took them to my miter saw I love my new miter saw it's awesome uh cut so smooth it's nice and then I proceeded to make those cuts now they were a little bit more than a 45° angle you could probably get away with a 45° angle having done it now but it was a little bit more than a 45° angle so I just kind of pulled it out a little bit lined it up with a line and made the cuts probably not the best way to do it but it worked for me and then once I had made all four pieces so all four sides of that underneath table then I took some wood glue and some finish nails and nailed that to the underside of the table leaving the chest table in place so that it I knew that it would fit on they're nice and snug you want to be able to move it out but you want it to be kind of nice and snug on that so it's not going anywhere and not being bumped around easily if you weren't doing this portion I would just refer you back to the original video where we made the chest table and all we did is took like a big wood round that I got at the craft store the Home Improvement store and I wood glued and attached that to the underside and you could forgo that like wrap section it's really easy so it's kind of the same concept as before just Sands the chest table so go back and watch that episode and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about so with our tabletop now sturdy and ready to go I proceeded to stain the entire thing in a Brier smoke Gel Stain which is kind of like a a warm gray tone and I really love Gel Stain because it's got such good coverage I tend to like um like a little bit more opaque stain and a little less translucent not all the time but generally speaking I do tend to go with a gel stain because I I just like it I don't know and then I let the gel stain fully dry but before we could leave it out we needed to seal it now you could go with like a polyacrylic but I really feel like the better way to go here was to use this Thompson's water sealer I do have to forewarn you it does take a little while to dry and maybe that's just CU I live in Florida and it's super humid and the humidity makes it dry slower and they do say one coat is sufficient um so I don't know about that I did go back in and touch up a few spots but I didn't want to overdo it but you put on a waterproofing seal and then let that dry and if you live in a drier climate maybe it will dry faster for you do not skip that step in my opinion because if you don't seal it very well this type of like Butcher Block type of table is not going to hold up and stand the test of the weather elements if you don't do that step it could break apart over time so with a tabletop done I'm going to ask you to hang on just a second with me before we do the reveal because there are some other working elements and we're going to kind of cover them all before we do that rev I started out with a 24x 24 in piece of plywood that I got from the hardware store that way we didn't not need to do any cuts on that but I wanted to trim it out with something a little bit nicer Beef It Up make it look a little bit more substantial so then I got to break in my new miter saw and cut some miter edges on our trim which was a simply a 1 by two and we cut those all out doing a miter cut is super easy it's not difficult it's a 45° angle cut all the way around so we need to make four more just like this so what I do is on the inside I'm going to write a little p we know this is our pattern and we're going to use it to make all of our marks line it up and then there we go we'll make that [Music] cut [Music] so I had this elaborate plan to do like an addition behind the pool and kind of make a pool house that was going to be my workshop but my HOA is mean and they said no anyways until that to try to prevent this from resting since I don't have an indoor Workshop or a place that I can do this this is what I'm going to do so until I get a better solution we are going to just cover it up and hope for the best because that's all I can do for [Music] [Music] now [Music] and then what I did which is kind of different and you might be wondering why I'm doing this is I took a wood round that was a 15-in round and I made sure I knew where Center is Drew a circle where that Center is making sure it's where we want it and then I put some wood glue on that wood round and attached it to the underside of our table and then I shot some finish nails into that and you'll see why this is all important in a second but with that all assembled and dried I went about staining it now I originally started with a like a grayish one and immediately I knew that it wasn't the right color of gray so I went to my trusty Brier smoke Gel Stain that I've used a lot on my my channel there's a couple of gel stains that I really like and I really do like Gel Stain because it has such good coverage and it's a little bit um more saturated and shows a little bit less of the grain I wished I'd been a little bit more careful about this piece of plywood that I picked out because it did end up having one of those fisheye pieces in it which I end up covering up a little bit but that kind of bothers me a little bit but we're going to go with it and it you probably won't notice it that much in the end the next morning after it had dried I measured out our 20x 20 in chest board and I taped that off with blue painters tape on the edges and then I kind of used a square Edge to really get those first couple of rows lined out and then all it is is simply making that checkerboard pattern all the way until you use up all 32 of those squares always keep on pouring down when it's gray outside now with that on I decided to seal all the edges so that the paint wouldn't bleed I used a clear varnish sealer that dries really quickly and once that was dry I did two coats of a black chalk paint that added a little brown into because of the other colors and tones that I had I really wanted to warm up that black just a touch and that's what we did is I kind of mixed that all together and did two coats of that they left behind once it was dry I peeled off all of those extra little squares and it revealed our chest board well I felt like it was a little bit unfinished around the edge so I took some tape and taped off a/4 in or very thin line all the way around and added two coats around the outer edge to just kind of finish it off and make it feel more like a game board and let that dry and then I peeled off all of that tape then I wanted to make sure it was waterproof for days like today that we wouldn't go through all this work and effort and then it looked really bad and a couple of months so I went ahead and took some Thompson's waterproofing sealer and did two coats of that now I will tell you it did take a full 24 hours to dry fully and not be tacky so just know that going into it that it does take a little bit of time to dry with it dry we are going to place our game board on this beautiful pot that I found I think it was at Home Depot it was either the Home Depot or Lowe's I can't recall but it was a beautiful pot and I thought that would make a really beautiful table and we can set that on it what's nice about it you can lift it up and you can put all of your game pieces inside this n when you're not using them and then put the top back on so they're safe and out of the elements and then you can pull them out when you are ready to play around so I really liked that even though I didn't play I Enlisted the help of my husband to come set up the game board and show me how to do that because guilty I don't know how to do that and so that was really nice of him to come help me out I think this is be a really fun activity for my husband and Sons to do this summer or year around here um and then also maybe I need to take it up and learn how to play it after all anyways as far as aesthetically which is what I care about I think it turned out really really cute I think it's beautiful I think it's going to be a fun activity for my family but it really looks cool we are going to upgrade some beastro chairs now I went back and forth and hemmed and haod for weeks over what kind of chairs to do until I went into Hobby Lobby recently L and saw these really cute chairs with a cool shape now the colors were a little wild for like what I've got going on on my patio one was a bright yellow and one was a red that wasn't going to work for me but the shape and the size and all of that really worked and I liked it the price was pretty good as well at $48.99 so I picked up two and brought them home and the first thing we did is give them a good spray painting on the bottom on the top in a flat black spray paint and you're going to have to flip it over put it in a lot of different angles and make sure that the the whole thing is covered I ended up using three cans of spray paint for the two chairs so about a can and a half per chair to get it really well covered and then with it fully dry I put on the little caps back on the feet of the chair and it was looking good now you could leave it like that but it was a wi seat and it feel like it would be like uber comfortable and I wasn't sure about doing a cushion on that because I felt like it would like push down through the graded thing and I thought it would be really cool to give it a wood seat that matched our wood top that we just created and it just so happened that the wood rounds that they sell at Hobby Lobby that I don't know the exact size I think it's 16 to 18 in I sat them down in the store while I was buying them and realized that that was a good fit so I just took those wood rounds and stained them in that same Brier smoke gel stain on the front and the back and let that fully dry and then of course we cannot skip the ceiling of these chairs as well um so what I did is I sealed one side let that dry and then I flipped it over and sealed the other side and so that it was fully protected top and bottom and then I was like how are we going to attach this we've got like a metal kind of interesting seat and this wood how are we going to attach them and then I'm like what about zip ties I'm like that could work and so what I did because the arms were kind of an interesting shape it wasn't really fitting on my table well so what I did is sat that wood right on top of where it needed to be and then I laid on the ground and then I kind of traced out where I wanted to attach that on the underside and once I got that all traced out I took it to my little work table and I stapled on about six zip ties that were already black and used a couple of them on each one and then I put it back where it was supposed to go kind of threaded through the zip tie so it would wrap around all of those little spots that I got and then I put the zip tie through the little device and pull it really tight and then it's a nice snug fit and it worked out really great then you cut off the excess and you would never know that these seats are attached with zip ties it's going to be great it's going to work out just fine for our purposes and if we ever wanted to remove the wood for whatever reason down the road that would be easy as well so we're done with the chairs and you're probably like show it to me show it to me but I'm going to ask you to hang with me just a second longer because I have one more project that's going to go in that little vignette and I want to reveal it all at one time so no reveal yet just yet hang on I promise it's coming and I hope you like it cuz I really [Music] do this next DIY is a really quick one I promise all I did is I found this ear and it kind of mimicked the base of our table and it kind of had some similar coloring and I'm like I really want to tie this all together it was pretty as is I'm going to just say that up front so when I do what I do you'll understand why I'm doing it I could have left it alone but I wanted to add in that black and really tie that whole look together so what I did is I kind of taped it off um protecting those little decorative arms and like around the base and then I mixed some black chalk paint with some baking soda cuz I really wanted to have kind of like a a little bit more rough texture and I mixed that all together and then I proceeded to like stipple it onto the pot so it would kind of increase that texture and not have any brush strokes but have like a a stippled effect which I really liked in this case then I took a small paintbrush and gotten all the little nooks and crannies and finished that out and then of course I did not want to forget the inside cuz I didn't know how much of that would be exposed when we planted up our pot and so I painted that out as well and let that fully dry and that's it it was a really quick makeover then I just threw some stones into the bottom of it to help with some of that drainage I got this really pretty kind of orangey colored plant I'm not even sure exactly what it is called at um Walmart for very inexpensive I just thought it was like a nice little pop of color it kind of matches the shirt that I'm wearing actually and that was it for that project and now it's time for the reveal that I promised you so the first thing I did is I got this area rug at Hobby Lobby it was round it was a really good size it kind of had some natural elements but with the black and the white that I already have going on with my color scheme and I rolled that out where we were going to be putting the table then I took our pot base and I don't think I mentioned this in the first one because it was in that Original Episode but it was literally just a big planter that I believe I picked up from Lowe's and it makes a beautiful base for a table in my opinion a little beastro set of course our little chest pieces are already inside and then I placed our chest table on top and then I placed Our Round Table on top of the chest table kind of making sure it was nice and snag and fit and then all of a sudden it looks like a really cute beastro set with that on and then I added the chairs and then of course I added some little Cabana striped pillows that kind of matches like the overall look of the patio now if you haven't seen like my whole patio makeover I'll link that Below in the description box because it I really love my patio it's really fun I know I use it sometimes to like build stuff but I do try to keep it clean because I really love my patio and then of course I placed our beautiful flowers and that's it and what do you think of this makeover I absolutely love it and I think all in all I'm in this under $200 for sure under $200 with everything and that's including the chest table part and for how cute this is I really feel like that's a really good price I priced out a lot of these little beastro sets that and I think I feel like most of them are over $300 so I feel like this is a really unique fun look and a good deal as well and it's functional and if we wanted to put something more than just chest pieces in the side of this little base ear it would work out great it's great additional storage for your patio I'm always looking for good storage ideas and I just love how this turned out I found a beautiful chandelier that was $529 and I really loved it but I I wanted to see if I can do it for a lot less I'm going to be using some really interesting items I think you might even actually question my sanity a little bit when I I pull out with some of the items but that's what you got to do is you got to get creative you got to think outside of the box but I promise you that they are going to work and it's going to be a lot of fun I'm going to show you three interesting things that I'm using the first is I'm going to be using some cookie sheets from the Dollar Tree I think they're going to really work for a part of our project and then I'm using three of these a 6t dog tieout cable so like a dog chain from the Dollar Tree again and then finally and this a little bit odd I am using eight tuna cans like empty tuna cans so we've had a lot of tuna sandwiches recently okay so we're going to start by building the frame of the chandelier first and I picked up three of these 36 in Long 1 and 1/2 by 1 and 1/2 in popler pieces of lumber from Home Depot we are going to keep two of them the original length and then we are going to take the third one and cut it directly in half we're going to just go ahead and Mark that and make that cut now so a couple quick safety tips normally I have some clear protective eyewear for my saw I couldn't find them so we're going to make do with my sunglasses but that's just to prevent any sawdust from getting in your eyes in between each juice I always unplug it because I have little people around and I just don't want them accidentally you know turning it on like that and hurting themselves even if I'm going to only be away from it for just a second we're going to be building the frame for the chandelier I didn't want anything exposed like in the way of nails or anything on the ends so what we're going to do is we are going to insert dowels inside the joint to keep it all nice and put together we're going to take the one of the long ones and we are going to take a nail and put it in about the center tap it into place make sure it's nice and level and then you take some wire clippers and you clip off the head of the nail so then it's kind of sharp and then we're going to line it up on this table then we take our hammer and tap it into place and what that's going to do is make a mark where your starting hole should be and then we can just take this nail and pull it out so now you've got a starting point for each joint drill nice and [Music] straight and then we do the same thing to this so roughly this is going to work we're probably going to need to do a little sanding around the joints but that's okay before we glue this together and finalize it then you're just going to add some wood glue in the holes and if a little bit gets through that's okay cuz then it will help strengthen that joint for a much tighter joint I highly recommend using a clamp so I've let my frame dry overnight so I'm going to take off the clamp now and then what we're going to do is we're going to sand the frame because we want a nice um smooth surface using a sander makes it so much [Music] faster so I decided to move the party inside um because I didn't know how the humidity and heat would work with the stains I'm doing it in our guest bathroom because this is an area that is not getting used right now and then I can also turn on the fans for circulation and all of that I'm going to put on some gloves to protect my fancy manicure that I still don't have no I'm just doing this because it's going to get messy and I don't want to have a stain all over my hands and then I got a castoff sock that its partner probably got eaten by my dryer like so many socks do just going to dunk my hand in the stain and I'm just using a gel stain cuz I thought it would work a little bit better and give us a nice thick coat and that is going on very dark which is kind of good because that's kind of what I wanted the next step in the process is creating the iron strapping that was on the wood frame and you're going to need protective gloves for this step because you're going to be exposed to some sharp edges and it's really important to protect your hand so you don't get Cuts they're not very expensive at all and definitely worth it then you're going to take your tin snips and cut off the lip of the cookie sheet leaving just the bottom part then you're going to take that part and cut 2 and 1/2 inch strips then you are ready to spray paint which we will just spray paint all of the tuna cans anything it's going to be metal we're going to use the leftover spray paint for my project last week and spray everything a nice flat iron looking black so I've let everything dry for several hours and hopefully it is all dry enough to do my next step we're going to start with the iron the iron the pretend iron um strapping that was made from cookie sheets and we've sprayed it in that um outdoor flashing that black is I'm going to start on the inside so the Rough Side is right underneath the tuna can tuna can oh my goodness and so we're going to just fold it around and get it on there and it should just bend really nicely and then we're going to put a little pressure and pull it up and bend it all the way around and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a little Mark here and then I'm going to grab my tin snips that I left inside so I'm going to go grab those and I'm going to take this off we are going to trim it to fit to kind of keep everything in place I'm going to take my tuna can and I've kind of punched a little hole in this set this on top so I'm going to drill pilot so that is set then I'm going to switch my tip to a traditional tip I'm just using drywall screws I had them on hand you could probably use whatever you want and then we are going to screw this right into place look at that so that is on there good that will help the fake iron strap to stay in place good and we'll do that all the way along so you can see right here I have a little bit of an issue and I did know that this was going to happen and what it is is it's just where this seam is meeting up and I've got some you know E6000 on there but it doesn't want to stay down because it wants to bend out so my solution for this and it's also kind of an aesthetic thing as well on the um original there's some nail heads and I just am going to I took these thumb tacks and I sprayed them the same color so I pressed those in and not only does that hold it into place but it adds kind of an aesthetic as well so and anywhere that I'm scratching on this iron work I'm planning on going back in and touching [Music] up next I drill pilot holes into the wooden round in a square shape for the hooks that will hold the chain [Music] supports then I place another thumb tack in the center for an added Decorative Touch so on the edges I come in 2 and 1/2 by 3/4 we're going to pre-drill the screws for the hooks where we're going to attach our cables all right so I'm getting ready to hang my light fixture and I had my husband come out earlier and helped me Mark where we were going to need to put it because it was kind of a two person job cuz we had to kind of Center in between the two light fixtures can see um and apparently he did not want me to miss where he marked so I need to determine whether or not there's a stud up there so I'm going to use a stud finder that would be most ideal because obviously that would be the most secure um if not I do have a toggle that I can put into the drywall which would support up to 50 lbs worth of weight which should be more than plenty because my light picture is nowhere near that um so let's go see if there's a stud there's a stud in my house see if there's a stud up there no stud all right so we're going to be using the toggle so I wanted to show you before I hung it that I attached the cables to the hooks right here and over here and so on all corners and then I connected it right there as [Music] well my project is done it's hung I am so thrilled with how it turned out I feel like it's a really good dupe and a really good knockoff of the Valor Design my version came in at around $60 there is a way to do it for about half the cost and that would include switching out the candles for some from the Dollar Tree this is the Dollar Tree version and this is my version now the reason I went with these candles is because the Dollar Tree one you have to manually turn on each and every time you use it you have to get up and and switch that out my version you actually can turn on with a remote and off with a remote so it's really cool they're a little bit beefier I'm really glad I spent the extra money but if you're looking for a little bit more B budget friendly solution switch out for the Dollar Tree candles I came up with an idea that I'm really excited about and I'm going to be working with a medium that I have never worked with before we're going to be using this lawn bag to create a cement planter I've never worked with cement in my life so this could get a little dicey we'll see I've had this kind of bucket floating around outside for a while if it gets totally trashed in this process I'm not going to lose any sleep over it I've had to actually duct tape it in a couple of spots because there was cracks and I didn't want concrete to leak through and I so I used some Gorilla tape and then of course we sewed down this bag so that there's only like a couple of inches all the way around we do not want like a 100 lb planter that just would not work and so hopefully we've got it the good size now I have no idea how this is going to go but I have high hopes all right so we're going to take this bucket and we're going to put on the ground below this bags I better put some cardboard down I'm also going to put on gloves because just just touching this cement mixture my fingers are a little irritated so we don't want that so I'm going to put gloves on and we're going to crack open the sand mix I'm really hoping this turns [Music] out and I just got this cheap shovel at Dollar Tree cuz I figure I could toss it when I'm done and I've got water and we're just supposed to mix until it kind of looks like oatmeal apparently and we're going to mix it and I can already tell this is not going to be nearly enough I think I need a whole lot [Music] more I feel like this is like grownup version of making mud pies adult mud pies mix mix mix this is a good workout okay that's a about as close to oatmeal as I think we can get I don't think that I fully explained what look I'm going for I saw this inspiration photo and I was like that is really cool looking I want to try to get that look but there was no instructions so I'm just blind by the seat of my pants now ideally I'd probably just get like a rice bag or a burlap sack and do this planter but this is what we're working with the mystery challenge I got my cooking spray here and we are going to spray the inside of the bag and the outside of this I hope that helps we'll just kind of rub it together and then we're also going to spray down this I'm hoping this helps kind of release it when we're done I'm going to put about 2 in on the bottom and I hope this is again the right consistency mud pies I don't know if this is going to work I really hope hope it does now we're going to set this in we're going to try to Center this just kind of trying to evenly distribute this this might be my first epic fail I don't [Music] [Applause] know there's those pesky screens they're cheering me on so I'm going to sacrifice this thing to the cause here because I feel like it might make our lives a little bit [Music] easier with one last Stitch effort I'm going to finish off the bag and one of the things on that was that there was a decorative rope and it was cinched in like a bag would be so I'm going to go ahead and just take my big rope here and tie it off and see if that helps hold it up a little bit and I can if I can shape it around that or not I believe this will be the front we will cinch the Rope oh I just got all over my [Music] face now that we've got that rope there I'm hoping that we can kind of shape it like the bag that we're trying to get I'm just kind of mass washing it up all right at this point I'm not feeling very confident to be honest with you but we're just going to let it dry and hope for a small miracle that it turns out and it looks amazing I've let this sit for like 36 hours and we are going to disassemble and see what it looks like I don't have High Hopes we'll see though [Music] I am so surprised it actually turned out and I think it's really really cute I think we're going to be okay so we've got a couple of loose fibers here that I've got some scissors and we're going to try to trim those off and then we're going to let it cure a little bit longer and then we'll get a fresh rope tie it around and plant it up with some cute flowers that I'm probably going to kill but we're going to try really hard to keep alive this time I am pleasantly surprised what comes to mind for me when I think of a fish I think of two things I think of sushi and I think of fishing and when I think of fishing I think of my cousin Alec Alec was seriously the most amazing little guy you've ever met in your life and he was diagnosed with cancer many years ago and he fought really really hard honestly he was seriously such an amazing kid because as much pain as he was in he never complained once he never asked why me he literally was probably too perfect for this life because he aced it at only 12 years old and and Alec loved to fish and his make a wish was even going fishing in Alaska which he did shortly before he passed away so my idea for this fish is to make a garden stepping stone in his honor and then send it to my aunt for mother's day which is not too far away so what we're going to do is I'm going to take you outside and we're going to make this out of concrete some more of that concrete so I start out by mixing up a little bit more concrete for our form I decided to use a planter liner I picked up in a three pack at Dollar Tree I sprayed it with some cooking spray again and I pour in a little bit of our [Music] concrete then I take a cooling cookie rack from the Dollar Tree and I take some tin snips and I cut it down to fit inside our form this just adds a little bit more stability to the stepping stone now I don't know if it's really necessary but I thought it couldn't hurt [Music] then I poured the rest of our concrete on top and smoothed it out and my plan for the fish is to do an impression with it and for that to work we need it to be a little bit more firm but still a little wet I let it set up for like 2 hours then I take our fish and push it to the bottom third of our Stone and let that set up for 24 hours then I remove it from our container to make it easier to stencil I first spray it with a clear coat and that will just help me to be able to put down my stencil and and not allow for any of the flaking of the cement and I took a stencil that I made on my Cricut Machine and then I also mixed up some black outdoor paint with a little bit of gray paint to kind of soften it just a little bit and then I fill in our [Music] stencil I decide after the fact to also add an additional three fish at the bottom and then when we're done painting it I add an additional clear coat now when I saw this little Fisher gun it immediately reminded me of Alex silhouette and this is definitely my favorite project from this episode because it means so much to me and I know it will mean a lot to my Aunt Teresa too Alec may have passed to the other side but he will never be forgotten here on Earth by those who loved him so I just really love this project and hope that you found inspiration in it what we've got to do here today and over the next few days is a little bit daunting a little bit overwhelming I'm not quite sure where to begin because it is such a disaster my neighbors have been really cool I know that they are probably going to be more excited than even me which is hard to believe that we get this makeover done nobody's reported me to the HOA which is pretty much a miracle all right so as I'm recording all of these before pictures for you I'm realizing just how embarrassing this is like super super dirty super groy I'm going to build like an outdoor armoa like storage unit to hold kind of some of the stuff that I'm going to need to keep somewhere and then we're going to need to do like a massive clearing out because there is so much [Music] stuff we are really earning our lunch today I am so sweaty it's humid it's miserable but we're working hard and getting a lot done now I want to take care of all like the small little wood scraps I just got this in the outdoor section at Target I think it was meant to be like a little end table upside down but we are going to flip it up and put our little smaller pieces of wood scrap in here and clean this up [Music] oh it's morning of day three of our makeover and we got a lot done and we have a lot to do today the first thing I did already is I hired an electrician to come and they installed some ceiling fans where our light fixtures used to be so we can get some air circulation when it's a little bit hot I just know that installing ceiling fans it's important that they're installed correctly so they don't wobble we are going to be installing a movie screen behind the pool and I was having a really hard time finding a black movie screen so I found one that's white and that's not going to work out here especially since we're going to be hanging it on my pool screen which is black so I'm going to go ahead and spray paint the exterior of that uh black color so it disappears into the pool cage Framing and we're going to do that we've got some other things to spray paint let's see lots of little projects [Music] today [Music] what happened Mommy I fell in the [Music] pool nothing like a fully clothed swim to wake you up for the day I just watched my handyman scale my pool with cat-like Precision to install my movie screen and and I just go back there to do a little cleaning and all in so I'm going to do the next big section kind of like the closing out stuff barefaced my hair's still wet from falling in the pool thank heavens for lash extensions if you remember from my mood board I had a boxwood privacy screen planned due to the location of my ceiling fans I decided to modify that plan and put it up against the wall I'm building this entirely for my scrap wood pile and I start by cutting down 2x3 that we will use as a frame and then I have two 2 x3s that are full length and don't need cut and then on our inspiration board there was also a black base so I just cut down some of these wher wood pieces from my pile for that and then I paint everything black and let that fully [Music] dry well it's been a long day and it doesn't look like I've got a lot done but I did because it's so hot and humid during the day I decided to take advantage of our new amazing ceiling fans out here and come out and build the furniture tonight and so we're going to assemble that now and then hopefully tomorrow we will be doing a lot of finishing details and finish it up so I'm getting excited it's still kind of chaotic out here just doesn't look like much has happened but we're in a good [Music] spot now it's time to finish constructing our boxwood wall and I start by bracing my plywood sheet up against the wall where I want it to be with two 2 x3s since I'm working alone then I just pre-drill some holes into the stucco and I'm going to use some tapcon screws which are screws meant for cement since our exterior of our home is built with cinder block we're going to screw it in with an impact driver with a hex top and it will just slide over the top of our screw and hopefully go right in I won't need many of these since I will be screwing into cement with those in I just take my boxwood sheets that I ordered off of Amazon and I will link them below and I staple them into place leaving some space at the bottom for our [Music] base next we hang the giant sea that we spray painted earlier I know people will probably ask me where I got this i got this from Hobby Lobby probably like 6 or seven years ago on clearance it's been kicking around my back patio forever and I decided that this might be a better use of it now it's time to staple in our frame I used my big framing nailer to do this and then I also staple on our base pieces that we already prepainted and then I touch up all of the nail heads with the same black paint with all of that installed I use some green twist ties to attach some twinkle lights to our wall and then I slide in place an old metal shelf that my husband was going to get rid of I thought that if I put some little bins in there I could store my spray paint my sandpaper and all of my other small items that I use a lot and wow we have finally made it to the most fun part of all time to [Music] decorate [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow did we work hard I've got scratches I've got cuts I've got bruises but it was all worth it in the end and now it's time to reveal my back patio let's go check it [Music] out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] as well as giving the front of my house a little bit of a makeover I wasn't really sure what to do with this door because I didn't know if like stripping it would even work if there's something wrong with the door if it we just repaint it and then it would look like this in a month or two what I've decided to do is we are getting a brand new door I decided to treat myself this time I called in a professional I pretty much DIY everything on this channel I've even Built My Own fireplace but it's an affordable price that I'm okay with we don't have to DIY absolutely everything all the time before he gets here we need to go in and paint it I want to paint it indoors so that we don't have a repeat of that I just wanted to play it safe I'm going to paint it indoors I've got everything taped off including the glass that will be in our brand new door isn't this going to be pretty though and I've decided to paint it in this modern Master's front door paint I read the reviews seems really good I've done a full tutorial on how to paint a door basically we're going to start with the inside and then we're going to roll it honestly I thought about spraying it but again I'm running into the humidity factor and I don't have a basement so I tried the modern Master's paint and it was just absolutely terrible this is what it looked like after two coats streaky blotchy and just absolutely horrific and it was giving me nightmares of a repeat of our current door situation I honestly don't know what all the fuss is about because this just might be the worst paint I've ever used so then I took a trip and got some Sherwin Williams paint at Lowe's one coat of this and we were absolutely back in business and the door is ready to be installed we are going to be making a stencl door mat I would recommend you doing this wherever you plan on spray painting it because sometimes when you transfer it it can get a little bit messed up I took my discarded transfer tape that I didn't end up using and I put that next to the stencil to kind of cover up some of the door mat and then I take out my blow dryer and you could also use a heat gun and this kind of helps shrink wrap it onto the door mat kind of creating a tighter seal so feel free to use your hand to kind of press it down into place while it's warm then we take some blue painters tape and tape off the edges or anything that you don't want spray paint to get on and then we take it outside or hopefully you've already had it outside and then spray it in truck bed liner spray paint I couldn't find the stuff that I normally use but my husband had this in the garage and so I gave it a whet and it seems to have a good outcome then once it's dry peel everything back and it's simple as that next we are going to be making a welcome sign for just left of the door once we have everything cut out Take It Outside and spray paint it in a glossy black spray paint and now it's time to build something to put it on and we are going to be using up some of the scraps for my scrap pile I'm going to be using up some of this faux bric paneling that I had left over I thought we could turn this into a cool sign now this is kind of made out of like an MDF type product and that's okay because it's going to be in the covered por ch area plus I'm going to frame it out in some real wood and I think it will be okay we'll see how it holds up over time we are going to cut this down to 24x 36 in since our brick is kind of thin and I want to put a frame around it we need to kind of lift it up and give it something to support a frame so I'm just going to use this 1x3 for my scrap pile I'm going to do butt joints because it's going to be hidden and then we're going to miter the [Music] frame for the frame I'm going to be just using this lightweight inexpensive 1X two and we're going to miter this before we install the frame I just take some white sprayon primer and do two coats with that my original intent was just to use it as a primer but it ended up looking so good that I just left it then I used some antiquing Wax By folk art on the frame and let that [Music] dry then we lay out our lettering as we did in design studio and when we're happy with the layout we go ahead and use gorilla clear gel glue or you could use E6000 as well I wouldn't recommend using hot glue in a hot humid environment as it probably won't withstand the elements after that dries we're going to add some wood glue to our frame and nail it into place finally we add a d-ring hook to hang it on and for our last DIY for our front porch is a wood round monogram for the middle of a wreath I take an 8 in embroidery hoop the part that doesn't have the clip on it and I attach that to our monogram using wood glue and this kind of acts as a frame and kind of finishes off the edges nicely then I add some clips all the way around to kind of hold it in place as it dries after after it's dried we're going to take some gel stain in the color Kona and give it a good coat and then let that thoroughly [Music] dry now how we are going to attach this to the wreath is I just took a couple of paper clips this is what I used you can use whatever you want and I glued them with hot glue on the top and the bottom of this monogram and then I took some twine and tied it to our wreath now I would advise against using the hot glue because as I mentioned before it did not withstand that long and it popped off pretty quickly and so I had to go back in and use something a little bit stronger so use something a little bit stronger and let it thoroughly dry before tying it to your reath now to address this window I love the light that's it's bringing into the inside and also the detail that it brings to the outside I love this door but even though we're putting up a wreath we like our privacy so up top I had Frosted that and I used like a spray on frosting but I'm not convinced that I want permanent frosting on this window but I've got a really fun hack that uses contact paper to kind of Disguise and filter the light but without the permanent feature to it and best part is it's going to cost us $1 because I picked up the contact paper from the Dollar Tree so very affordable I like that so to do this just cut out your $1 contact paper just a little bit larger in the window pane lightly misted with a water bottle and then stick your contact paper to the window and smooth it out using some kind of flat scraping tool then you're going to take a razor blade and cut off the excess as close to the edge as possible now my water bottle went a little overboard and was pretty blotchy with the way the water sprayed out and a few days later the water bubbles are still dissipating but should be gone really soon so don't be alarmed if this happens to you as well this might take a few days to fully look right but it does give a nice beautiful frosted look without the long-term commitment and the heavy price tag we had a little accident on our driveway how many of you have had this happen we just kind of thought that we're left with this and that we might need to rip out some of these pavers and replace them well before we do that I want to try degreasing it and try to see what we can do so I got this off of Amazon it's a deaser it had really good reviews so we're going to see if this works I also got this little brush so what we're going to do is we're going to pour this on our grease spots scrub it really good let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes and then I'm going to break out our power washer and power wash our [Music] driveway after two treatments I would say this process gave me about a 60 to 70% improvement over what it was before so I am really happy with these results but I think that if I give it a couple more treatments I can get it all the way removed because this has been sitting on a driveway for months now and it might take a little extra effort to get it all the way out I've got gardinas Jasmine and I did end up getting some lavender because I thought we needed a little something else and I thought it was like a nice soft pretty color that I'm going to just dig holes and then I've got some black mulch we're going to mulch all the beds [Music] there are no light fixtures here well it's wired for it I see the the electrical spots for it on either side we are going to add some new Lighting on either side of my garage door I am going to do this myself and I ordered these light fixtures off of Amazon really excited about that they're really cute you may want to call in a professional to do this this is something that I'm comfortable doing on my own and one of the cool things about these light fixtures are that they have a sensor that automatically turn them on at night and turn them off at dawn now after all of our hard work to make our house look really beautiful it would be a shame to leave something as unattractive as this yellow doorbell now we decided to upgrade to a Google Nest doorbell device but you don't have to spend that much on a doorbell to make it look much more finished there are some beautiful black ones that you could get for around $12 as for this one it's an easy install and the app walks you right through the process basically holding your hand all the way I can't vouch at this point for how much we will like the nest doorbell but so far so good plus it just looks pretty darn good don't you think now it's time for all of the finishing touches I'm so excited this is going to be great do you have a pot that looks a little like this black but it's kind of dull it's plastic well I've got a hack for you this is another use for WD40 this won't be a permanent fix but it should last you a good while what we're going to do is just spray this on and rub it all over and it will give us a nice like new shine how awesome is this seriously got to love WD40 after letting the WD40 dry we drill a couple of drainage holes into our pot I believe this is why the previous plants did not do well because of poor drainage a little potting soil some carefully selected perennials that should do well in full sun and an old DIY which I will link in the playlist complete this look next I add some solar powered LED spotlights for accent in the garden I also ordered some garden lights for by the pathway but they showed up the wrong color so I'll have to add those later and of of course we add all of our fun DIYs so one last touch for all of my longtime viewers you might recognize this I thought it would look cute at the end of my pathway here and now it's time to show you the final results and voila the finished look I can't believe we finally made it all the effort was well worth it in the [Music] end [Music] [Applause] he all right well it's the end of the day it's the end of the episode and I really hope you enjoyed it if so here's another one that I think you'll like as well as for me I am so insanely hot if only there was a way to cool [Music] [Music] off dead had to hurt

Channel: Designed to the Nines

Views: 457,237

Keywords: designed to the nines, design to the nines, natalee callahan, lone fox, xo macenna, how to, diy, decor, diy decor, home decor, kristen mcgowan, do it on a dime, high end decor, high end diy, outdoor diys, outdoor diy projects, summer decor, summer diy, best home decor, patio decor, patio diy decor, patio diy, outdoor diy decor, outdoor decor, patio decorating ideas, outdoor design, porch makeover, diy outdoor decor, diy patio makeover

Id: m6gPSKgEO20

Length: 198min 15sec (11895 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024