Flea Market Finds with Matthew Mead is a new title that revels in the glories of a day spent sifting through vintage cast-offs. It proves once again that trash becomes treasure in the hands of those with fertile imagination, a sack full of DIY tricks and a gift for arrangement.

Mead is a style guru who applies his talents to rehabbing a multitude of unlikely finds into attractive home furnishings. For example, a coil of baling wire found at a farm sale is snipped and twisted into whimsical picture frames.

Unbreakable vintage melamine, enamelware dishes and a daisy-covered teapot create a play set for little girls. The lively colours make a pretty mix with the sugar cookies and candy of the tea party.

Inspired by an art book of black-and-white doodles, he applies marker pen to a spool of craft paper hung high on the wall and unrolled to the floor. This quick-change art installation is surprisingly chic and who woulda thunk it? Well, apparently, Matthew Mead.

He does some clever things with mid-century modern finds to create a stylish room setting.

In a section titled, Frond Moments, he makes a case for the friendly fern found on collectibles or plucked from the garden to decorate walls and table settings. With a stencil he applies a fern design to an old chest of drawers with a drop-down desk.

The book is a fun browse just for the level of ingenuity invested into reclaiming these old objects of his affection.

- Jane

If you’re looking for quick ways to add a little pizzazz to your palace, check out the new title from Sunset: Make it Your Own Paint & Color: 50 easy weekend projects. For the most part, they mine familiar DIY veins; but some of their projects are eye catchers. All of them are well illustrated with step-by-step instructions. These are some of the things I liked the best:

• A painted stair runner pops some colour to the climb and coordinates with the area rug at the foot of the stairs.
• A pretty, girlie room has a floor painted with broad pink, rose and mauve stripes.
• The blackboard wall is a staple that is more or less attractive depending on what has been chalked onto the surface. Here they offer a formula for creating a chalkboard with any colour of paint and show a lively chalkboard wall in soft green-gray.
• A simple leafy branch is stenciled onto a plain white roller blind.
• Maps cover a wall like wallpaper in a patchwork pattern. (I’m always attracted to projects featuring maps.)

I’ve said it before and I still believe it: happiness is a can of paint and a brush.

- Jane

A dear friend recently celebrated a significant birthday which called for a gift up a notch or two from the usual cheesy trinkets I toss her way. She had often admired the home-made water fountain on my balcony; so I settled on the idea of making one for her.

She can’t manage storage for a large heavy pot like the one that forms the base of mine. Hence, I decided to look for smaller pots that would fit together and then disassemble for winter storage.

I gathered up parts from many places. The pump, two of the dish containers, flower pot and bamboo came from Golden Acre. I found the heavier vase-shaped pottery piece at the Crossroads market and a sack of polished black stones at Canadian Tire.

I cut the bamboo into suitable lengths with a handsaw and mitre box and lashed them together with garden twine that I had on hand. The piece of bamboo with the largest diameter became the spout which fit snuggly onto the plastic tubing (left over from building my own fountain).

You can find step-by-step instructions for fountain making in my earlier blog. From the picture, you can see that some of the parts function simply to make the fountain taller. The upper part, which is the heart of the fountain, could sit on a table top.

The Sunset book pictured above - our newest on the topic - includes a lovely container fountain on page 118 with a bamboo spout and a miniature umbrella water plant.

Recently, my friend told me that she has been rearranging the parts to give it more splashes, setting stones on the bamboo to prop up the spout. I like that. The best part about home-made fountains is you get to play with them.

- Jane

Have you heard the one about living in a place so small that you have to step outside to change your mind? Well Janet Lee has. She is the author of a new book, Living in a Nutshell: Posh and Portable Decorating Ideas for Small Spaces. Lee is an expert at finding or developing unusual DIY projects that make the most of little homes.

“In a nutshell, my mantra for small space design is to delight, dazzle and divert,” says Lee who describes herself as a serial small space nester. Her concept is to turn the quirky demands of small space living into appealing decorative features.

Got a refrigerator that lives in the hallway because there’s not enough room in the kitchen? Cover it with a pattern of vintage bottle caps and clover decals and drape a bold curtain that can make it disappear completely.

She wraps a file cabinet with adhesive plastic that mimics the pattern of expensive designer luggage. A folding screen wears a graphic stripe on one side and is hung with shoe bags on the other; it becomes an instant closet. Snappy orange industrial C-clamps are mounted on the edge of a shelf to hold coats, bags and umbrellas. A refurbished chair stores books; the ends of its legs are painted bright red to dance on top of a boldly patterned rug.

Where colour ends, whimsy begins. The heads of stuffed animals are mounted to make “faux taxidermy” and poetry peeks from mirrors.

These fun-filled projects are sure to bring joie de vivre to tiny rooms.

- Jane

You’ve probably heard the expression, “If you can’t go big, go home.” Well Jay Shafer took it to heart. For Shafer, the big picture is a tiny little living space that provides for just the essentials and not much more. Tumblewee DIY Book of Backyard Sheds & Tiny Houses is his latest offering.

According to the cover, he “is internationally recognized as an expert in small living”. He has been building and living in tiny little homes for 15 years and when he says little, he means it.

In the land of McMansions, Shafer is an ardent supporter of a tiny revolution to create living spaces that are less taxing on ecosystems and economies. The bonus for him has been a mortgage-free existence and more time to pursue other interests, like designing little places for the rest of us.

Shafer is also a realist. While many people may not embrace the extreme, small-space lifestyle, there are lots of other purposes for these wee structures, whether guest house, studio, workshop or retreat.

The book includes plans for tiny houses and box bungalows. You see elevations and floor plans. Amateur builders can order a complete set of drawings from his website.

The portfolio section provides pictures of finished interiors that are carefully crafted to maximize every inch. In fact, one of the most attractive fittings is the Dickinson Marine stainless steel heater which is manufactured for boats.

Part Four shows the building process and covers clearing the building site (including how to fell a tree), establishing a foundation and construction of the exterior shell.

If you want further inspiration for small-scale living, check out Tiny Houses by Mimi Zeiger. It explores “the microgreen side of sustainable architecture” with projects like the House in a Suitcase on page 121. Located on a roof in Barcelona, trunk-like compartments unpack for use.

The April issue of Dwell features a funky and wonderful house built from three 10-by-12-foot modules. You can also see it online. It’s a DIY project that was supervised by architects and is set on 20 lush acres on Kauai.

Now, I want to live small like that.

-Jane

Earlier this year, with the help of a contractor, I updated the bathrooms in my condo with new sinks, taps, countertops and (low-flush) toilets. Although I considered changing the towel bars, I decided that I liked the existing ones well enough. What I really wanted was an additional bar for a hand towel mounted on the side of the sink cabinet.

I could have chosen a fashionable towel ring, but that would have hung the towel below comfortable arm's reach.

Although Totem still carries the older style of towel bar in my bathroom, the smallest size (18 inches) was too long for the hand towels I wanted to hang there. In addition, the position of the toilet would have made it very difficult to install without removing the tank. I soon figured out that it would be fairly easy to cut the longer one down to the perfect size.

You need a hacksaw and a file to do this. Here’s how.

1. Determine the perfect length and mark it on the bar.
2. Wrap a piece of masking tape around the bar, centered over top of your mark.
3. Remark the cut line on top of the tape.
4. Notch the bar with a hacksaw on this mark and then saw through the bar. The tape will prevent damage to the bar if the saw slips.
5. When the bar is cut, remove the tape and file off the rough edges. (Be careful; they can be very sharp.) The end supports will cover slight imperfections in the cut.
6. When you mount the bar according to the package instructions, wrap a thin bead of plumber’s putty inside the end supports (see it in the picture above) to keep the bar from rattling.

The library has some terrific books specifically geared to women who want to learn how to use tools and tackle home improvement projects. (Good for the guys, too.)

Marie’s Home Improvement Guide and Chix Can Fix both describe the use of a hacksaw. A mini-model like mine is an inexpensive and easy tool to master – useful for cutting down curtain rods as well.

Google “using a hacksaw” for helpful sites and YouTube demos like this one.

When I bought my condo, I acquired a kitchen that was built almost 30 years ago – 70s-style cupboards and all original appliances. Within the first year the stove began to act up. The timing buzzer would go off randomly, any time, day or night. If you overlooked this very annoying glitch, the stove worked quite well. I investigated repair, but ultimately concluded that it was not money well spent.

A shiny new stove arrived, all slick stainless steel and black glass, and moved into this very 70s kitchen. It positively glows in contrast; hence I call it The Shrine. Above The Shrine hangs a builder’s grade hood fan which had an almond finish with a brown plastic trim strip. Although pulling off the trim strip improved it a bit, I decided to paint the hood with stripes.

Here is what I did:

• Cleaned the hood thoroughly to remove grease spatters and sanded the almond finish.
• Blocked off stripes with masking tape.
• Painted several background coats with my favourite milk paint, colour brick red.
• Painted stripes with colours mixed from tubes of acrylic paint.
• Painted 3 topcoats (recommended by the manufacturer) of urethane finish.

Here is what I learned along the way:

• I f I were doing it again, I would paint the red background colour over the entire surface before masking out the stripes.
• When you paint stripes with acrylic paints, you need to pull off the masking tape while the paint is still wet. If you wait for it to dry, you will pull off part of the stripe with the masking tape.

I am happy with the result. The effect is a colourful awning with a finish which I hope will last until I update the rest of the kitchen. And it makes me think twice about renovating the kitchen. I'm still having fun with the old one and feel a lot less inhibited about experimenting with old surfaces.

If you want to see what an expert can do, check out Annie Sloan's Painted Kitchen. She tackles walls, cupboards and furniture.

No hood fans.

Today, I was flipping through a new House Beautiful title: 1000 Sensational Makeovers. It offers a fairly predictable collection of lovely rooms from the pages of the magazine. If you enjoy the magazine, you will like the book.

It offers a lot of good ideas in a condensed format; they are numbered and organized by six basic design elements. However, if you are expecting to see transformations demonstrated by before/after photos or a description of the process, you will be disappointed.

I am often intrigued by the quirky things I notice and enjoy in new design books. Two ideas that impressed me here involve the clever use of maps. In an attic study, a map of the world was used to paper a canted wall in an alcove. Framed maps on an adjoining wall reinforce the idea. (#445 on p. 439).

Another designer used a framed series of maps – sand-coloured plats of Miami Beach in 1943 – to cover a large wall from baseboard to ceiling. (#480 on p. 470).

These ideas made me think of the map-covered boxes in Design Sponge at Home and sent me out to see what else I could find with a Google search.

A lot, it turns out.

Freelance writer, Kit Pollard, gathered some nifty ideas into a story about decorating with maps and globes.

Nate Berkus offers a video that shows an attractive chest of drawers with a map applied to its surface, while Martha Stewart decorates a fireplace screen and roller blinds with maps.

At home, one of my favourite accessories is a reproduction of an old planning map of Calgary bought at the Glenbow Museum shop many years ago.

Apparently I am not alone in my fondness for maps.

useless lamp to useful table

I've always been curious, endowed with an active imagination. I remember, as a kid walking home from school, coming across a section of pipe with a switch on it, perhaps from a vacuum cleaner. It became, in my mind, something more interesting: a SPACE WEAPON.

The bad habit persists. I still sift through flotsam and jetsam relegated to the black bin; but now I call it repurposing.

As well as working for the Library, I belong to the militia, spending time in Mewata Armoury.

I was there one weekday when the old light fixtures were being replaced. Aha, I thought, something useful, in British racing green!

I really wasn't sure of a use, but their shape intrigued me. I asked for one and tucked the new treasure safely in my hatchback (very useful for a scavenger). Soon, the fixture liner became a lampshade, but the outer shell stayed longer in storage. Eventually, something inspired me to cobble together a table from the outer shell.

I cut a circle of mdf for the bottom and added plastic feet. The glass top was connected to the base using 3/4" pipe, chrome tubing, two pipe flanges and a wooden collar. Some of these parts were discards previously scavenged.

If you are like me, you prefer to find new possibilities for cast offs rather than add to your garbage footprint.

At the Library, there are many books to inspire you to unique green endeavours.

Decorating junkmarket style : [repurposed junk to suit any decor], Salvage style for the garden, and Making rustic originals are just three examples in the collection. And, speaking of unique tables, check out 500 tables : inspiring interpretations of function and style.

Dave, Central Library

If you are a fan of the Design Sponge blog, the new book by Grace Bonney, Design Sponge at Home, is a must read. Bonney profiles blog favourites, including her own New York apartment shared with her husband and two cats.

The book has captured the spirit of the blog with lots of lively and lived-in rooms put together by people who love design and love their homes. A lot of the homes are space-challenged New York apartments that provide many ideas for living large in small quarters.

Most exhibit vintage style influences; homeowners embrace vintage furnishings sourced from family, flea markets and EBay. Then, they make them their own with a little paint, carpentry, fabric and staple gun.

Bonney shows the peg-board rack in her kitchen painted a bright tomato-soup red and hung with stainless-steel pots. I love the map-covered boxes on p. 188.

Indeed, half of the book is devoted to DIY projects, basics and makeovers. There are instructions for stripping and painting furniture, rewiring a lamp, staple-gun upholstery, sewing basics – and much else.

Although information on these topics tends to be sketchy, her can-do approach is enough to inspire the reader to pick up tools and strive for greater domestic glory. And hey, that’s what the Library is all about. There are hundreds of books here to help you develop those skills and become the handy person you were meant to be.