Thrifting, DIY Decor Projects & How I Style Them in My Old Home: French Country Vintage Decorating!

Join me in today's video. We're going to be going thrifting. We're also going to be doing some makeovers and some transformations on some fun pieces and we're going to be doing some styling in my home with the decor that you'll be seeing in this video. So I hope that you enjoy. Okay, so let's start out at the thrift store and I always like to look in the linen section first. Sadly I don't usually find a lot of that type of stuff here at the Salvation Army near me but I do like to just look. And then I spotted this shelf and I do love shelving right now. Oops, knocked it over. But as you can see this was only $3.99 and it was a solid wood shelf so you'll have to see if I bring it home or not. And of course I'm always looking at the baskets. It's really hard to resist a basket. I thought this one was quite nice and it was a good price. Okay, so here's what I ended up picking up on that quick little trip to Salvation Army. And it's this really nice solid wood long shelf. This thing is like five feet tall or something. It's really a nice size and I only paid $3.99 for it. Here we go. It doesn't need cleaned up, probably painted. I have a couple ideas where this could go either above my TV where I currently have a shelf. We'll see if it'll fit or I thought it could go above a bed. Yeah, I just couldn't leave it behind for $3 or $4 I mean. So we brought this home. Kind of get back and show you. It's got some nice detailing to it. It almost looks like a fireplace mantel, you guys. It's so big. So I grabbed this enormous Bible. I could not believe how thick this thing is and it was only $0.75. So for $0.75, there's no way I was leaving this Bible behind. But I love the, you know, tattered looking pages on the end. It's just, it's huge. It's like over four inches thick, I think. So this will be a really cool decor piece. I was thinking because it's maroon, I don't use maroon in any of my decor. What if I painted it but left this beautiful script here, just painted around it and still made it look tattered and aged. But if I painted it like a creamy color, I don't think that would be taboo. Would you do? I mean, somebody got rid of it and I brought it home. So I want to use it and I want to display it and enjoy it and give it its moment. So I might be doing that and I'll show you guys if I do end up doing that. So I decided that I am going to paint that Bible and I'm going to use this beautiful buttercream color from Dixie Bell. I will try and link it in the description for you guys. I did kind of wonder if I should paint the Bible. I wasn't sure if that was like a taboo thing or not. But I asked you on Instagram and overwhelmingly you all said that I should just do it. And then I got to thinking that it would be really no different than if you had to recover the Bible if it got damaged or something. And like I said, I really just wanted to enjoy it in my home and have it out and display it. And I knew I just wouldn't do that if it was the red. So I knew that painting it this color, I would really love it. And wait till you see how beautiful it turns out. And here is how beautiful the Bible turned out. I think that it just added so much beauty to it. I don't think it took away from anything. And I absolutely love having this gorgeous big Bible displayed out in my house. It makes me smile every time I walk by it. Okay, so I also stopped in at Hobby Lobby and their greenery was all 50% off today. So here's what I picked up. I absolutely loved this. I think this is like a thyme topiary or thyme plant I mean. And I thought that looked just so realistic. See if I can take it over this way. Yeah, I thought it looked just really realistic. I loved the colors. What I didn't like about this plant was the pot. I wasn't a big fan of the lime green with the orange and the streaks of black. So what are we going to do? We'll just get out some paint and paint it really quick. And it's a quick and easy fix to get it to fit in with my other decor. So that's all I'm doing right here. I just grabbed some chalk paint and a chip brush and I just quickly painted it. Okay, now that my base coat of white is all applied, I want to now add some dimension and some texture to this pot. So I'm just going to use some like gray-toned, taupe-toned chalk paint and kind of just stipple that on and that should do the trick. So for the next project, I decided that I wanted to add some rusting effects to this metal piece that my aunt gifted to me. It's already been spray painted. I'll insert a picture here of what it looked like before I painted it. I used, I believe it was heirloom white by Rust-Oleum. It's a beautiful creamy off-white color. And so I'm just using some antiquing wax to give it the effect of rust. The way that I like to approach this technique to make it look authentic is to kind of go in with a chip brush and tap and dab. And then as you can see, I'm using a rag just to kind of soften that a little bit and wipe some away so that it doesn't so much look like a paint brush was tapped onto it, but so it just looks like, you know, little spots where it might have rusted. I try and focus on areas where things naturally tend to rust, which seems like it's in corners and the joints of pieces. So that's where I like to focus kind of the most pigment of this antiquing wax. And I find that it really comes out looking authentic. So here I'm more so kind of giving these shelves a little bit of age. I'm not really trying so much to make it look like rust, but I just don't want them to look so clean and perfect like they do now. These shelves were actually just glass and I spray painted them and I really like the way that that looks. But I wanted to kind of, you know, grunge them up a little bit and give them that old world look that I really like in my French country decor. Here's a close-up look at all of the patina that I was able to achieve using that antiquing wax. And I really like the way that this was transformed. I think it looks so much more my style. It fits in with my French country old world vintage decor and I'm excited to show you it all styled. And here is our last project for this video. So I wanted to create some like book ends. I've been having hard time finding ones that I really like at the thrift store. So I thought that maybe I could just go ahead and DIY some in my style. So I actually went out to our property just outside here and I found some bricks and what I'm doing now is I am painting them white with some chalk paint and then I'm going to use an IOD transfer over top of these to give them a really pretty twall pattern. And here is that Iron Orchid Designs English twall print. I absolutely love the way that this looks. So this is actually my first time ever using one of these IOD transfers. It really wasn't hard at all. It was pretty self-explanatory. You just line up your IOD transfer with whatever you want to transfer it onto. And so that's all I did. And then I took the little plastic tool that came in with the IOD packet itself and I'm just using that to transfer the image onto my brick here. You do have to push kind of hard and that may have just been because of the very uneven surface that I was working on of the brick. But other than that it was super easy and kind of fail-proof really. And if you guys are interested in these I will make sure to put a link in the description box to help you find them easily because I do know that a lot of times they're sold out or they're just kind of hard to find. So I'll do my best to find you a good source for these.