Upcycling Ideas to Freshen Up Your Home

The compulsion to spruce up your home will come at least once a year, and often with great and quickening pace too. As the days start to get longer and warmer, the home in which you’ve been hibernating can start to feel a little stale. Rather than spending shedloads on a big refurb, you could use the power of upcycling to freshen up your home just in time for Easter. But what DIY upcycling projects could you undertake to achieve this?

Furniture Reupholstery

One of the most common ways in which we engage with upcycling projects is through furniture. There is a great abundance of vintage, weathered and otherwise dilapidated furniture items, practically all of which represent potential and can be purchased through a variety of second-hand buying platforms. Upcycling hobbyists will restore these items to their former glory – or, more aptly, improve them beyond their initial state – by reupholstering with new materials and giving them a new lease of life. In some cases this can even be done as a side project, flipping tired looking furniture purchased inexpensively second-hand, then given some care, attention and a new design, to then be sold for a higher price.

There are lessons to be learned here, perhaps even with regard to your own furniture items. Replacing hefty items like sofas and chaise lounges can be not only costly, but also difficult; why invite such costs, when you can instead refresh your furniture with little more than a Milwaukee staple gun and a roll of fabric? An afternoon’s reupholstering could give you a ‘new’ sofa for infinitely less than the cost of a brand-new one.

Repainting

Of course, reupholstery is not the only option when it comes to revitalising old and tired furniture. The same basic principles apply to all furniture as reupholstery does to fabric furnishings, where a fresh ‘skin’ can completely recontextualise an otherwise tired item.

This is particularly useful for wood furnishings such as side tables, coffee tables, bookcases and bureaus. Varnished wood furnishings can be stripped back to raw wood via sanding, paint stripper or simply application of a heat gun. Sealing, priming and then repainting the item can be done in stages and coats, over a period of days, before you are left with an utterly bespoke finished design.

Creative Use of Wallpaper

Creating character via upcycling doesn’t require you to completely overhaul a given item of furniture. Splashes of creativity here and there can make powerful differences to older and less desirable things. For instance, you might find some cheap second-hand rolls of wallpaper for cheap, which you could easily apply to the surface of a coffee table for a unique printed design.

Item Repurposing

The logical conclusion of upcycling is the complete recontextualization of a given item, literally giving it a new lease of life as something with an entirely different aesthetic – or even functional – purpose. With a small amount of soldering know-how, an old-school wall-hanging telephone could become a chic doorbell; leftover house bricks in your garden could become vibrant planters for succulents and more!