Nautical Home Decor on a Dime

One of my favorite "things" in the past few years has been home decor. I could spend hours looking at home decor on Pinterest. But, my favorite home decor ideas and styles are those that don't cost an arm and a leg. I've recently "completed" (I don't think any room is ever really "complete") my sunroom in our house, and I thought it would be fun to share how it came together.

We are fortunate to rent a lovely older house close to a lake. The house has a lot of white, which is great for a nautical/coastal feel. In this sunroom, the ceiling is blue and the floor is painted a brick red. Since we're renting, we're not repainting, but I think sometimes it's a fun challenge to work with what you got.

So let's have a look around, shall we?

• First, what everything rests on: my coffee table that I've had since college. Even though all of the other wicker in here is white, the room needed a pop of brown and I think it works well in here. It was a Pier 1 Imports item that we got a garage sale for $10.
• My seagull. Mama LOC and I were garage saling (you'll find this is a recurring theme) and she saw this bird and wanted to get it for me... and I LOVE it. It's one of my favorite pieces, both because my mom picked it out for me and because it fits so perfectly. He was $2.
• My English ivy and white pot. The pot was from T.J. Maxx, $4.99 (I got a few cents off for a small chip, though), and the English ivy is a champ from last summer... I kept him alive all winter in the sunroom, he started outside!
• My lantern. Another one of my favorite finds, I've had this for a few years too. It's an LED candle in a metal and glass lantern. I got it at a thrift store for $4, and it works great and has for years.

This is probably my favorite wall in this room because I took a leap of faith by placing the items so close to each other, but I think it works really well.

• The wooden Americana flag was a garage sale find, I think it was .50 cents. Americana is not really my favorite decorating look, but the red and blue tie the room together well, and I think the size is really neat, it's about 11"x15". The roughed up look keeps the vintage vibe, too.
• Speaking of vintage, how cool is this birds in color print? It's an old scientific type knowledge card. The colors are amazing and it fits really well in here, with the blues working with the blues of my bird. The frame is vintage, it was a $1.00, the card was - get this - .10 cents at a garage sale.

These are some of my most thrifty big impact art pieces, and you won't believe the story behind these. I remade these before the LOC blog was even a thought, so unfortunately I don't have any before pictures of these frames. I always check the art at thrift shops, because you just never know. I was actually looking for big art for my living room to flank two sides of the main window, when I stumbled across these frames. They were 17"x21" each, the wood frame was a nice shade of pukey sage green with a crackle effect (that's how you know they were amazing) and they held two different scenes of watercolor-y type garden scenes. The art was not awful, but not my cup of tea either. They were just posters, and the glass is actually plexi, so they aren't ultra high quality expensive frames, but I guarantee someone paid more than $2 each for them... which is all I paid! 

So how did I get the art? The stripes is a vintage piece of fabric with navy ticking, and the shells are literally a piece of paper printed with a color printer. The shells are from The Graphics Fairy. You can actually see just a hint of the blueish purple border the original print had around the fabric. I used some black acrylic paint I already had for the frame. So for less than $5, I have two big impact pieces!

The wicker couch is a neat piece. The couch and rocking chair are both antique, and from my Grandma, so I am blessed to have them. They have always been white (for as long as I can remember them... some flecks indicate they may have red and green at one point), but the cushions had a purple floral, and all of the pillows were purple. They actually were a very lovely fabric, but it wasn't quite the feel I wanted for the room.

• I purchased a complete King size duvet cover set from eBay to get all of the fabric I would need to completely cover these cushions, and the rocking chair cushion too. I paid $26 incl. shipping, and had WAY more than enough fabric to do everything I needed in here. It's a neat textured linen feel - it's the Thomas O' Brien "Navy Awning Stripe" set from Target, which retails for originally around $129 bucks.
• I patch-worked the blue square pillow cover with fabric scraps in my stash.
• The navy and white stripe pillow was a vintage silk shirt that got washed (whoops) that never really fit perfectly anyway, so I had exactly enough fabric for this pillow.
• The graphic burlap pillow cover is from Pottery Barn - I got it new in package from eBay for $10 including shipping, and it retails anywhere from $49 to $79 (choke)

One of the cool vintage touches is this fishing pole across the top of a window - I like to think of it like a curtain rod - how cool would that be? It has a neat cork handle and an old school "lure". It was Mr. LOC's idea and I really like it.

This was a project before the blog too, but my friends were getting rid of these chairs that were covered in a grey fabric, and I covered them in a gorgeous Nautica sheet that I got brand new at a thrift store for $1.99. Of course, the Heaven is a Little Closer in a Home by the Lake pillow was made a little while back here on the blog - check it out :) I used scrap fabric for that too!

Not exactly easy to take a picture of a whole room in one shot, but here is the whole sunroom. Note our little LOC mascot, Sophie... :)

Hope you enjoyed this little trip around our sunroom! For easily less than $100, the room has a completely different feel and look! It took a bit of time (over 2 years to get to this point) but I feel like it's a great lesson in "good things come to those who wait!"