Outdoor Fall Decor on a Budget!

Oct 1, 2013 | Blog

I’m am lazy. Really lazy. I love decorating and organizing, but I’ll cut every. single. corner. to get my projects done fast.

I had an extra copy of fall subway art that I printed out for my dining room, so I decided to make something for my fireplace mantel with it.  I thought it would be cool to modge podge it on a piece of wood, so off to the garage I went to find wood. The only piece I could find was too big and I was way too lazy to get the saw out and cut it! I decided to print some family photos out on card stock and glue them on too!

Here is where everything went wrong…or maybe right.  The papers were too big to fit horizontal, so I put the wood vertical, but all three papers still wouldn’t fit! Argh. I was about to abandon this last minute project, but then I thought I’d tear the photos with rough edges so they fit!  I covered the wood in old stain I had left over and then modge podged the subway art and photos on the wood (I was way to impatient to wait for the stain to dry so I just stuck them on wet stain…lol).  Guess what? Sigh.  I didn’t use photo friendly modge podge and the colours on the photos and subway art smeared like crazy!

O.K, so a normal person would probably just peel the papers off and reprint new ones. I am WAY too lazy for that! Instead I used some stain and “distressed” the photos and subway art by rubbing stain over top for a worn, old look (I was just covering the pink smears but it turned out cute).  I decided to use it for my porch, so a quick coat of outdoor clear lacquer made it nice and water proof!

SONY DSC

The whole project was free and took me less than 20 minutes! I actually like the results and it took a lot of mistakes to get there!