On the Cheap!

March likes to tease us and awaken our desire for spring. The taste of sunshine and fresh air has inspired some cleaning and organizing in my house and office – my desk and floor have become visible! Because we also own the campground and canoe livery, the warm weather gets our family excited about preparing for summer.

Part of getting ready involves scouring catalogs for new ideas. For outside things, I’ve been looking through gardening catalogs (thanks for the tips this week, Naomi), and for inside the camp store, I’ve been dreaming about building new displays. I’m cheap, so I can only get ideas, not actual merchandise, from the catalogs. I look at pictures and then see what I can create on my own.

A few years back I really wanted a hat tree for our raccoon-skin caps – yes, we actually sell a ton of them every summer – but the tree cost a couple hundred dollars. I showed my daughter and she said, “Let’s make one!” We went into the woods, found a candidate, trimmed it up a bit and nailed a platform board to the bottom… voila… a half hour, little work, scrap wood (for the platform base) and we have our tree. Hopefully, you can see it under all the hats (and aren’t too distracted by the Sasquatch that was visiting that weekend).

 

The other pictures are of a keychain tree (same concept as the hats, just smaller), a pole of canoe paddles (with our rates & other info on them), a checkerboard table and stools that my husband’s eighty-year-old uncle made for us (for way cheaper than the one in the catalog), and a sign for Hawthorn Creek that we made for under a hundred bucks - after the estimates for a ‘professionally-made' similar sign came in at over a thousand big dollars.

I love to steal ideas and either make things cheaply or repurpose an existing item into something new. How about you?