Trash to Treasure...a Tutorial...and a Repurposed Post for Hooked on Houses Readers

My current favorite thing is repurposing- household items and blog posts apparently....

So I stole the Trash to Treasure thing from Decorating Cents with Joan Steffend but it fits in nicely here. A couple of weeks ago I bought 3 mums at Costco for a really great price and needed something to plant the third mum in. Three is such a weird number to sell things in, isn't it? I bought two really pretty red plants and was drawn to a purple-ish pink one as well, which is very out of character for me. The two red ones are in the front planters and look very autumnal with the other decor I've got going on out there (pictures *after* I trim the hedges) but the pink one not so much. Anyway, Travis and I actually went to some garage sales a couple of weeks ago looking for a kitchen table and chairs since the one we have neither fits all the Button's (4 chairs, 5 people) nor the style of the new floors. We didn't find that and really resisted the urge to buy just a bunch of cheap stuff that we would have to find a place for. But we did find a few useful things and one of those was this trash can....



which I bought for a buck. It's not quite square and is a bit rusty but it fit my purposes perfectly. The lady selling it even threw in a wall sconce in the same style for free. I'll show you that one in a bit. When I saw it I immediately said "it's a planter" and the owner said "oh, I never thought of that" but I wasn't going to offer to relenquish it. I hadn't been fond of the idea of spending $15 dollars or so on a new planter.



Since this isn't an actual planter you need to put in holes for drainage which you can do with a regular old hammer and nail. I'm not actually left handed like it looks in the picture, but I can fake hammer with my left hand better than I can take a picture with my left hand. I put in 5 drainage holes in the bottom.Then I filled the bottom with a bit of gravel. If you're not as lucky as I am to have a gravel driveway then any rocks you have on hand will do. Pea gravel in a flower bed? Perfect. You get the idea. You just don't want the roots to sit in a bunch of water and rot. And we get *lots* of rain here in the fall.Next, fill the pot with potting soil. You can even let the little ones help out. Then plant your plant a little bit lower than the soil level that it was in from the original pot. If the roots are bound you need to break that up before you plant. I was going to show that to you but as luck would have it this one wasn't root bound. That's never actually happened to me before. This plant looks a little puny and that's because it was surrounded by plastic and probably too much water which caused two sides of it to grow a wonderfully powdery mold. I could have taken it back to Costco but that would have required another trip, they sold out of these like hotcakes, and they would have just trashed it. But I think that she'll recover just fine with a little bit of care so it wasn't worth it to me to take it back.And here's the freebie that's now hanging in my bathroom with free weeds from the front yard. The girls get excited when they look at it because they picked every single one for me.

So all in all the garage sale experience was totally worth it. Travis and I have never done that before and getting up early-ish was hard on a Saturday but I think we'll probably do it again sometime.