Craft & DIY
Designer Blanaid Hennessy with the chair that she customised for the Oxfamhome DIY project in 2010. Photo by studioseventyseven photography.
Oxfamhome is a wonderful destination for the DIY and craft enthusiast. Crafting and repurposing old furniture is a great way to be creative and put your individual stamp on a piece. Many of the items that come our way are quirky and unusual and completely unlike anything that you’ll find in a standard furniture shop. And our prices are very good value indeed, making Oxfamhome the perfect place to pick up the raw materials for a craft project.
In Oxfamhome, you’ll find everything from a cupboard that you can paint and line with beautiful paper, to glasses and vases that you can paint with iridescent colours, to pieces of fabric that you can turn into art or gifts.
The internet is a rich source of both inspiration and pratical guides for projects that you can do at home. We love the following sites and have picked a few craft projects to get you started.
Drawer Art project from Design*Sponge
This interiors blog has the best ever makeover projects for furniture, ranging from the elaborate (re-upholstered sofas) to the simple but brilliant (art displays made from old drawers).
Look at their DIY and Before and After categories for loads of inspiring ideas.
Make contains hundreds of weird and wonderful ideas about ‘hacking’ items, from furniture to electronics. Check out this tutorial which shows you how to make a computer desk out of old cupboard doors.
Make’s sister site, Craft, collects great ideas for taking something simple and turning it into something beautiful. This painted mat project or this adorable upcycled suitcase seat are two great examples.
The online superstore Etsy has a useful tutorial section called The Storque, which often has clever ideas for customising basic pieces, such as this Greeting Card Lamp.
This site gathers tutorials, projects and products from all over the web – there are literally thousands of pieces of inspiration to be found here.
You could easily spend hours on this site just drooling over the gorgeous pictures of interiors from major American cities, but they also run projects for restoring and upcycling furniture. We love this clever chalkboard fridge.
This lovely interiors site focuses on design for children’s rooms, but its ideas will work in any environment. This idea for painting a simple white curtain shows how easy, quick and cheap it can be to transform a piece into something unique. Another tutorial for turning an old cabinet into a play kitchen shows how items can be given a completely new purpose.
