DIY :: Under the Sea Room

 Last week I showed the inspiration that I gathered (seen here ) while beginning a project for an "under the sea" themed room. Today, I wanted to show you some of the simple projects that we did to really make this room great.

Here's a reminder of what our inspiration board looked like:

The first thing we did was to tackle our inspiration dresser. I WISH that we had taken a before image, but you're really just going to have to use you imagination here! Think: ugly, old, and wooden dresser. Nothing special.....until we added a little bit of yellow paint:

We opted to go more of a calm yellow rather than the brighter version in our inspiration. Then we added on our new hardware, which instantly transformed this beauty:

Surprisingly, I was able to find hardware that we loved at a local store (I believe it was Home Depot) from the Martha Stewart collection.

Take a look at her now:

Next up, we tackled some of the art that went into the space. This was one of the areas that we really had to pinch pennies in, so I came up with the idea to create a collection of work that featured a school of fish:

The frames were from the dollar store (!) and spray painted white.

The fish were were hand cut from textured scrapbook paper. I just found an image I liked online, printed and used that as a template to trace all my other images from. After cutting out all my fish, I arranged them to cross over 4 sheets of the blue background paper (scrapbook, also), and then glued them into place. (We fixed that last frame after the photo was taken...ooops!) For a project that only cost us around $6, I was pretty pleased with the results.

The next thing we did was recreate the coral we fell in love with. We loved the punch of color it brought to a room that was all blue. Since I couldn't find pieces that were in our color scheme (or budget....it seemed to be one or the other!), I decided to find cheap, white versions and just spray paint them. I have even seen real coral at our fleamarket that goes for pretty cheap and would be great for this project. Here's a look at the process:

And the beautiful results!

(ps. I loved this project so much I ended up doing the same thing in our living room!)

Hope you found some of these easy projects inspiring!

xo,

Rachel