recycled home Archives - Lulastic and the Hippyshake

Goodbye little home!

24 July, 2013

We are outies! Vamos! We made like Tom and crui- YEAH, you get it, I know.

We have officially left our little Camberwell home. Firstly, a little bit more south to stay with my folks while we get the Campervan all ship-shape. Then to Camp Bestival and then straight over the seas to begin our European bombaround.

It’s not farewell to our friends and family, as we will still be seeing them over the next 6 months. But it is Adios to our little recycled home here in Camberwell. Here are some of my favourite snaps of the space we worked so hard to create.

HAHAHA Sorry, enormous photo frenzy. I couldn’t choose my favourites. Hope you enjoyed them.

Goodbye, little home.

PS What a bummer it’d be if you missed a post of mine, eh? Follow through Facebook or Bloglovin or even just enter your email to get them pinged into your inbox. I won’t be spamalot, promise!

PPS Photos mostly by the clever Jenny Hardy.

Our recycled home

Recycled home- Big Bedroom Makeover

22 July, 2013

Ah, this great big room! It is so beautiful! Well, the 30% of the time that there aren’t piles of clothes and junk we are hiding from visitors all over the floor, it is so beautiful!

When doing this bedroom makeover I wanted to keep it pretty simple and calm, to create a peaceful sleeping environment. It is peaceful, the 30% of the time we are asleep in there, the times we are not diving in and out of the curtains playing hide and seek or raccously bouncing on the bed. (I say “we” out of solidarity for one of my kids.)

Come on in…

Some of my favourite creations are in this room. This art I did in an old window frame for Tim’s birthday of a native New Zealand bird, the Tui.

And this suitcase shelf

and book- shelf.

There is a huge framed print we hung after finding it in Oxfam.

Both the curtains and the bed came from a house clearance. It is our family bed and we love its gargantuan size to fit us all in. We got the headboard from Gumtree, it is equally huge and Tim had to wrangle it home on THREE different buses. The things we do for a bargain, eh? I flung some vintage fabric over it and made some bunting by painting letters onto the pages of an old book.

We found all these cupboards and drawers in one junk shop after months of searching for the perfect ones to fit in those spaces. We were SO stoked with them all!

We are leaving all of this furniture for the people moving into our home. I’m going to miss it badly, especially our giant bed.

I wanted to squeeze this post in before we move out, so I can look back and nostalgically reflect on how we transformed our whole house through 100% secondhand shenanigans.

So, future-Lucy, these pictures look nice, yeah? But remember it DID NOT look this nice for 70% of the time, okay? This room was basically rubbish nearly always. Stop crying.

PS What a bummer it’d be if you missed a post of mine, eh? Follow through Facebook or Bloglovin or even just enter your email to get them pinged into your inbox. I won’t be spamalot, promise!

Our recycled home, Thrifty

Recycled Home: Thrifty Spare Room Makeover

11 July, 2013

We have just 2 weeks left before we leave this little house of ours. Before we go I want to blog a few of the last thrifty makeovers we have done. We didn’t really have any budget for proper overhauls but I HAD to find a way to make each room intriguing and quirky. Enter the whole thrifty universe of second hand – it is amazing what you can do with a few Saturdays spent charity shopping and car booting!

For me, it is all about first making a canvas by painting the walls plain and then creating little tableaus with objects you have found. I do sometimes get a bit distracted picking up tins and vases up and shifting them by centimetres or from room to room, especially if someone is coming to stay.

Our other spare room has mostly had lodgers in it while this box room has been for short visits from people. We’ve had some lovely guests stay – friends from New Zealand, Canada and the US, people that we’d stay up late talking with, who would inspire us with their creative, soulful living. A couple of friends stayed with us for a few months in there before they headed off to sail the sevens seas for a year. Pip was in a band and would fill the house with her beautiful ukelele melodies.

I made this old desk we found a little bit more interesting by painting lines on it with homemade chalkboard paint. The vintage Singer sewing machine on the right came from Oxfam while the one next to it was found in the street. The case was locked and we had a grand old time breaking in to it – would there be an actual machine in it? Or maybe just a mummified Victorian corpse? Both these machines date from the 1800’s – it was well exciting discovering how old they were on this website.

Time gave me this old washing board for my birthday one year – I know! Ha, I’d have been gobsmacked if he didn’t do ALL the laundry. I don’t even know how to use the washing machine. The C came from our local bakers in the greatest street find EVER.

And this is just a little collection of gifts and jumble finds. (Most of which I don’t get to bring to New Zealand with us *cries into pillow singing Titanic to my vintage tins* Near… Far… Wherever you are…)

We haven’t done much to it but it has definitely been a transformation:

all for about twenty of your English pounds. It helps being okay with waiting for MONTHS to find the perfect wardrobe in a junk shop and feeling thrilled by coming across beds on the side of the road. (All our beds were streetfinds.) Secondhand life is the only life for us!

DIY, Finding things, Thrifty

Extreme (budget) Makeover – the recycled lounge

3 November, 2011

“Apart from a handful of things given to us, our entire house is created from stuff we have found on the side of the road, or in charity shops” I explained to a friend. He scanned the lounge where we were sitting and said “Yup… I can beleive it”.

Bahaha.

So maybe the random array of furniture and funny little odds and ends (and the smell of cat wee) (just kidding) gives it away a little. But we love it, and that is what counts, eh?

Here are some horrendoes befores:

We had carpet put in on Monday, and Tim scored some amazing bits of furniture from a skip the day after which just completed it all for us. So here is the Big Reveal of the lounge, a year after we began!

The big soldier was £5 from Oxfam in Streatham (I have raved about this shop before. It is amazing!)

The little soldiers were £5 from the Fara kids shop in Pimlico

The curtains were £70 from the Mind shop in East Dulwich. Yep. 7 0. But they are lovely and thick and long and we had been searching for some time. Plus, it all goes to charity innit.

Then we have a big deep drawer next to the sofa which is great for holding all of Ramona’s toys. We found it round the corner, minus the desk!

This sofa is also from Streatham Oxfam, it was £35 and is so huge it is possible to sleep on it. Love. The cushions are from various charity shops, or made for us by our lovely friend.

Here is the other end of the lounge, and apologies for the even worse photos these puppies will make you feel dizzy. It is so dark down there and my camera hates on it.

This sofa/bench and the bureau were the bits Tim found in the skip. The school bench was £8 from a junk shop in Peckham. The old school pull along duck was £1 from a little school car boot (those are the BEST for kids stuff, unbelieveably cheap.)

This white book case was once pine and in the bin of a neighbours house, we pulled it out and painted it white. It’s not flash but it does a job! One of these sewing machines was found on the street, the other given to me for my birthday, but originated from Oxfam in West Wickham. The abacus was 50p from a charity shop – Ramona loves it! And the various frames were picked up from charity shops.

The desk lamp was £1 from another school car boot. I love finding glass things and putting stuff in them- jars full of pegs or scrabble letters.

So there it is, the recycled lounge- a mixture of charity shopping obsession and pure – finding – things – on – the- street- luck.