Refurbished Window

The homes in my neighborhood were built in the late 50's early 60's and all of them had these 1 pane windows and fortunately for me, a friend of ours who lives in one of these homes redid their windows and I benefited from it!  I have seen these windows go for $30 in some stores and online and I was blessed to receive a few of them for FREE!!!

 

The wall in my kitchen has been pretty bare for the past 7 years, so I thought it would be a great place to hang an idea I saw on Pinterest.

 

Here is the original idea...

Cute, right?!

 

Step 1 was to clean up the window; rinse off the cobwebs, cut the wire off and clean up the paint flaking off. That's pretty much all I did! I liked the way it looked without additional paint or distress touch ups.

 

Step 2 was to distress the wood I was going to use for the shelf. My mother had told me about a mixture that would distress redwood and cedar using water and baking soda. You can find that resource here. The instructions said to add 1 cup of baking soda a gallon of water, but since I didn't need that much solution, my intelligent husband figured the ratio I would need is 1 tbsp. of baking soda and 1 cup of water.

Step 3 is to paint the baking soda solution onto the board and let dry. You can repeat this step until you get the distressed look you want.

 

Step 4 is to add the brackets. Initially, we drilled on 1" brackets, as seen in this picture, but after the window was hung, we felt 2" brackets were safer since I wanted to put things on this shelf.

 

Step 5 was to hang it on the wall! That's where my handy husband came into play, again! As mentioned already, our house is old!!! So old that all the walls are plaster, which makes it tricky when hanging things, especially heavy things. We have invested in a lot of wall anchors!

Step 6, and the final step, was to decorate the window! I only had to buy a few things to decorate this window. The blue Ball jars were given to my by my mother-in-law, the decanter was handed down to me from my husband's grandmother, and the pictures I had already printed, which are of my family. So all I purchased was chalkboard contact paper and chalkboard pen. I found those items on Amazon.com.

For the water pitcher, I used my Cricut to cut out the letters. This was an idea I saw in one of my favorite restaurants Brooklyn Girl Eatery.

So far, this is one of my favorite creations, and what's better is that it didn't cost me much! One piece of advice I was given by my mother was to "use what you have" and on this project, I pretty much did!

 

 ~ Kerri