if you're going to do it cheaply...at least do it well.

When we bought our house, our kitchen wasn't in terrible shape. I mean, sure I did need to move the dishwasher from one side of the kitchen to the other, plug it into the tap and block all access to the back of the house. The pantries and cabinets were filled with fake birds, santa clauses and mismatched mugs. There were blinds on the windows, a ceiling fan and lamp that hung too low and a washing machine that sat in the corner.
It only took some removal of junk, a couple renovations of what is now the dining room + laundry closet and adding a permanent place for the tiny dish washer to make things look a lot better.  Not too long after did we install a second counter/breakfast nook, a real pantry and over-the-fridge storage and replace the blinds with cute curtains. Later Fritz and I would replace the linoleum tiled floor with a faux marble laminate, which we found on sale.

Funny related story: we measured out exactly how many boxes of laminate we would need for our tiny kitchen, and realized we only needed 3 extra boards. so we went to different home depots and acted interested in the product so that they would let us take a sample board home.

The past couple of months, I was really bothered by our back splash. It was a white glossy tile, probably from 1992 ish, poorly installed and uneven. it had a pinkish brown strip of tiles that ran along the counters edge. I'm sure in 1992 it looked great, but I wanted to update. Fritz and I went to several builder stores and others to find back splashes, and each time we calculated out about $100 to $200 dollars to redo our back splash. Not to mention the pain-in-the-butt of removing the existing one.

I eventually gave up on the back splash as being a near-future reno project. However, and this is where the cheapness part comes in, I was in the Dollarama the other day, and they have rather nice looking tiles there. Sure they were linoleum and they were also self adhesive, but they matched our colours and our faux marble floor.
I brought home a pack of tiles and my husband I I started cutting tiles and sticking them onto the wall, right on top of the existing back splash. It looked fantastic even though it is linoleum! Then at night, we heard thumping in our house and of course I immediately assume we are being robbed or that there is a raccoon in our house (same difference). It turns out that because our house is so cold at night ( and because I'm cheap) the tiles were all dropping off the wall one by one!

I really disliked the old backsplash so I went to Rona, and had to explain to the builder people there, how cheap I am and what I had done. They shook their heads in shame at me and then offered me a tube of construction adhesive for $5.

End of the story is that our Dollarama back splash is now secured to our wall and the total cost was about $20.

notice the old back splash

complete

If you are going to do it cheaply...at least do it well. 

ALSO...

Last Friday, I was asked by a co worker of my husbands, if I could make a shirt ugly. I guess she was given a shirt last year and now she is returning it as a re-gift. However she wanted it to be ugly.

"Sure" I said.  I got out my sewing machine, scissors, scrap fabric, buttons and of course...the glue gun. 

Voila: