A few months ago I told you how The Man knocked my socks off with a scavenger hunt for our first anniversary.

One of the elements was this awesome giant letter ‘a’ that he’d made by the woodwork teacher from the school where he worked. I’d been umming and aahing about where to put it – it would look so cool as a wall feature but, well, we’re running out of walls!

Normally when I talk about giving something a quick coat of paint, I really mean painstaking preparation and several coats of paint. Happily, in this case I was able to just slap on a single coat of paint as I liked being able to still see the grain.

My cheerful oversized typography now adds a playful touch to the back of my office door (sorry for the dodgy photo, the room is so small it’s hard to get a wider shot that still captures the whole letter). It makes me smile every time I look up at it from my desk.

Today’s Rethink & Reuse is somewhat selfish. You see, I have a type drawer that I bought to display some family photos at our wedding. I absolutely love it, but apart from a brief stint as an advent calendar two Christmases ago, I’m actually at a bit of a loss as to what to do with it now.

Here are what some clever folks are repurposing theirs for:

Jewellery rack | Tonya Staab

Shadow box | Apartment Therapy

Shadow box | Design*Sponge

Craft supply storage | 26 Letters

Memento coffee table | Zween

These are all great ideas, but I already have jewellery storage and a coffee table, prefer my craft supplies to be kept out of sight and I don’t really have many tiny mementos for a memory box. I would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what I could do with my cool – but currently useless – type drawer.

I’ve wanted a shaggy white rug for the lounge for ages but, well, there was always something else that we needed to pay for (isn’t that always the way?). But when The Man spotted this baby online at an irresistable price (do I have him trained well or what?) we jumped at the chance.

Of course, you always worry whether online purchases will look as good in person but in this case we didn’t need to be concerned. It looks great and is sooo lovely when you’re sitting at the couch in bare feet. It really ties the room together as a nice cosy space and as an unexpected bonus it also works to make the coffee table stand out as a feature.

For some reason I don’t have a photo of the kitchen with the old light (oh yeah, could be because I didn’t like it so I always cropped it out).

But I do have a photo of the same fixture elsewhere in the house. Because when we moved in every. single. fitting. in the house was the same boring builder’s special that you see above.

Ah, I love how pendant lights work to define a space so much more than the ceiling-mounted variety. The industrial brushed metal finish of the Ikea light we chose ties in perfectly with the cabinet handles, and at just fifteen bucks it was a very cheap tweak to the room.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank The Man for installing it for me. x

I’d had these pink box files for some years and they’re really handy, but the colour had faded a lot in the sun and was looking a little drab. Besides, it was the only remnant of pink in the now yellow, grey and aqua office.

They were perfectly functional so I didn’t want to ditch them, instead I covered them with grey fabric for a neutral, classy look.

I used this technique for turning thin cotton fabric into sturdy cloth stuitable for gluing. Getting the flaps to stay put is the only tricky bit but with help from some pegs and rubber bands you’ll be fine. It would work better on a cardboard rather than plastic surface like this, but since I use these files for seldom-accessed items they didn’t need to be super durable.

Cutting out the finger-pulls was going to be a real headache, so I simply stuck on some metal rim tags in the same shape and size. I actually threw out the previous contents of the files and haven’t decided what will go back in them hence the blank tags.

I had the tags, as well as the rest of the materials, already on hand so it was a lovely zero dollar project – and you gotta love that.

I mentioned recently that my new printer doesn’t fit neatly inside my desk drawers like the old printer did. Sigh.

With no printer to accommodate, there was now a huge amount of wasted space in the drawer unit. I went to Ikea to find extra drawers but you can’t buy extras in this size (you can only buy the whole set with the door front like we originally purchased). I do need pull-out drawers for some items like the scanner, but I figured shelves would suffice for most things (bonus: at 20 bucks it was waaay cheaper than drawers).

Before & After:

I picked up a pack of two shelves and they were installed within minutes. Add another couple of minutes to neaten things up and hey presto I have a much more efficient space to organise my paper reams.

Can you believe it’s only three days until Christmas?! Sheesh.

The fact that I have no idea where this entire year went is my excuse for not having given you an update on this project since, um, April. Oops.

So, at long last, here is the famous blue buffet in situ in my office. (Sorry for the odd cropping, it was impossible to get the whole thing in without the filing cabinet creeping in the foreground. Note to self: get wide-angle lens.)

For the first few months it was looking great (so much decorating potential!)… until my printer died. Yes, the one that was hidden oh-so-neatly inside the desk cupboard had to be replaced by this absolute monster. It’s an awesome printer, but see how it’s so enormous it hangs over the edges? And that’s not even fully extended. Here is the beast in all its glory:

Ack! Anyway, ugly techno-stuff aside, let’s talk decorating. I decided to reuse the clipboards that held our wedding menus to display new designs while I mull them over. Thing is, I haven’t really been using them in that way so now they just look boring. I could easily find some cute pieces to pin up, but this is a very hardworking room and I can’t justify a whole wall of impractical prettiness!

The type drawer is another piece reused from our wedding (kindly ignore the awkwardly high hanging – I just used the existing hooks). This time last year I used it as an advent calendar but apart from that I’ve been struggling to find a use for it.

I’m still in love with the awesome colour pop and much-needed storage and workspace that the sideboard offers, but I’m not loving the overall look of that area. I have a few ideas in mind that I need to consider and I’ll let you know how I go!

We recently ticked off a project that’s been on our to-do list for the last four years. Namely, the closet in the study.

From looking at this photo, you could be forgiven for thinking that the problem was with the interior fit-out but that the doors could be kept, but it was actually the other way around. Those doors look innocent enough: neutral and perhaps even nice and modern. In reality, it had a huge pelmet meaning the top 40cm was unusable, the temporary paint job that we applied during the office makeover to cover up the shoddy doors was easily chipped, each door was two-thirds of the width of the closet making the centre third inaccessible and the doors had dropped so that every attempt to open them required a fair amount of upper body strength and was accompanied by a high-pitched ‘SCCRRRRRWWWWWWOOOOOOAAAAAAR’ noise.

Time to get rid of the chipboard shelving, contact paper and scuffed walls.

Tip of the day: Demolition is always a good way to get your fella interested in helping you with a home renovation project.

Here you can see the cream paint that originally featured in the rest of this room, as well as the same light blue that was in the kitchen and laundry when we moved in.

The back of the pelmet was a tad overengineered…

…or perhaps not.

The new robe didn’t require the panels of wood either side so out they came. Unfortunately half the wall came with it and it was right back to the brick so that, plus all the holes and removing the corner round, meant we went through a serious amount of putty.

Ah, what a difference a bit of a tidy up and a fresh coat of paint can do.

The new interior fit-out and doors are done, but I have done zero organising so far, so I’ll be back with part 2 next time!

Light fittings are often overlooked but they really can take a good room and make it look a lot more resolved. We have been sloooooowwwwly replacing these shoddy light fittings in our joint. We’ve just done the lounge and dining and here’s what it looks like now:

Cool huh? I love the texture and warmth they add.

I love low-hanging lights but because of our low ceilings, this is actually as low as we could hang the pendant in the lounge area without The Man’s head banging into it. But if we hung the one in the dining area at the same height it would sit awkwardly between the laundry door the ceiling beam. I wanted to hang it low and centred over the table, but it wasn’t worth the expense of moving the socket, so we looped the cords and hung it from the beam instead.

We were wracking our brains for weeks trying to figure out a way to loop it through so that it would stay there. The guy at the hardware store suggested adhesive cord managers but that was complete fail. I don’t know why it took me so long but I finally I worked out that we could use fishing line to attach the pendant’s inner metal frame to the cup hook in the beam. Success!

Here are the before and afters, starting with the dining area:

And the lounge…

I’d had my eye on these babies for the longest time but never quite had the budget for them, then I spotted them for like 60% off at Beacon so I quickly snapped them up. You’ve gotta love a project like that!

I love spaghetti but not the black kind that spills out of electronics, like our TV in the above picture after we mounted it.

Ideally, of course, we would hard-wire the TV into the wall cavity. But realistically, we are not going to be living here forever so it wasn’t worth the investment.

Instead, I picked up a steel cable cover (I can’t remember exactly where from but it might have been here), cut it to length, painted it the same colour as the wall and attached it using removable mounting squares. Too easy!

Placing decorative objects in front of the area obscures it even further.

I’d love to know: have you mounted your flatscreen telly and if so, how did you deal with the cables?