The bin out the back of my flat last spring contained: one mason jar I’d “definitely use for a candle holder,” three pallets I’d “definitely sand down,” and an old window frame I’d “definitely make into something.” I was the problem.
By subscribing, you acknowledge and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Join Our Home Decor Community
Get fresh decor tips, DIY hacks, and styling inspiration straight to your inbox. Join thousands of home lovers making their space beautiful.
I’ve since done some genuinely useful upcycling, and skipped the projects that look great on Pinterest and lousy in real life. Here are fifteen DIY projects with recycled materials that actually survive the trip from saved-board to finished thing. Some are tiny weekend projects. A couple are genuinely satisfying builds. One or two I’m telling you to skip even though every craft blog says otherwise.
1. Tin can planters, painted properly
The smallest, easiest project on the list. Empty tomato cans, soup cans, anything bigger than tuna size. Strip the label, wash them out, and here’s the bit most tutorials skip: prime them before painting. Tin rusts. A quick coat of metal primer means your painted can lasts more than one summer outside. Then drill drainage holes in the bottom, paint whatever color matches your kitchen, and you’ve got herb planters for almost nothing.
2. Mason jars as actual kitchen storage
Not as candle holders. Not as drinking glasses with twee handles. As storage. Pasta, rice, dried beans, flour, coffee. Stack them on an open shelf, label them with a chinagraph pencil or a chalk-pen sticker, and you’ve got a pantry that looks like it cost a lot of money for the price of washing out a few jars.
3. The pallet coffee table, with a warning
Yes, you can make a coffee table out of two pallets stacked together with castors on the bottom and a sheet of glass on top. People do. It looks great in photos.
Reality: pallets are heavy, often the wrong dimensions, sometimes treated with chemicals you don’t want indoors (look for HT stamped on the side, that means heat treated, which is fine; MB means methyl bromide, which is not), and the sanding alone takes a whole afternoon. By the time you’ve bought the castors, the glass, the sandpaper, and the stain, you’ve spent forty pounds and a Saturday on a piece of furniture that still looks like pallets. If you love the look, go for it. If you’re chasing cheap, IKEA’s basic coffee tables start at thirty quid and assemble in fifteen minutes.
4. Wine bottle hurricane lanterns
Cut the bottom off a wine bottle with a glass cutter (a kit costs about ten pounds), sand the edge smooth, and you’ve got a hurricane lantern that fits over a candle on a saucer. Green glass casts beautiful light. Clear ones look like proper bar glassware. Better than any jar candle holder you’ve ever seen, and it costs the price of one candle.
5. T-shirt yarn braided rug
Cut old t-shirts into long strips, braid them, coil the braid into a rug, and hand-stitch the coils together. Genuinely works as a small bathroom or doormat rug.
Heads up. It takes about fifteen t-shirts to make even a small rug. The first time I tried this I ran out of fabric halfway through and ended up doing a slightly insulting raid on the donation bag. Save up your old shirts ahead of time, or check a charity shop’s textile recycling bin if they have one.
6. The old window frame as a picture frame
Charity-shop window frames, the kind with multiple small panes, are everywhere, and almost nobody knows what to do with them. Hang one as-is on a feature wall and it reads as expensive vintage decor. Tape a different photograph behind each pane and it becomes a multi-photo display that looks like something from a design magazine. Twenty-pound investment, hundred-pound outcome. Easily my favorite recycled home decor project on this list.
7. The cardboard cat scratcher
If you’ve got a cat, save your cardboard boxes. Cut the cardboard into strips the height of the scratcher you want, stack them on their edges glued together with PVA inside a shallow wooden box, or bound tight with duct tape, and you’ve made the exact thing pet shops sell for forty quid. My cat ignored the expensive scratcher and shredded this one within two days. Free.
8. Wine cork trivet
Cute idea. Honest version: you need about thirty corks for a decent-sized trivet. If you drink a glass of wine a week, that’s seven months of saving. If you have friends who drink wine and you can recruit them to save corks for you, you’ll get there faster. Or you can buy a bag of recycled corks online for about a tenner, which slightly defeats the spirit of the project. Worth doing for the look. Just know what you’re committing to.
9. The plastic bottle vertical herb garden
This is the one I’m telling you to skip.
Every DIY upcycling list features this project. Cut two-liter bottles in half, hang them on a wall in rows, plant basil and mint and parsley in each one. The photos look spectacular.
Reality: plastic bottles have terrible drainage, dry out in hours in any kind of sun, and the herbs that survive look stressed because they are. The bottles themselves degrade in UV light and start cracking within a season. You’re also left with a wall of plastic bottles in your garden, which doesn’t actually look as charming as the photos suggested. Plant herbs in proper pots. Use the bottles for something else.
10. Book stack side table
This isn’t even DIY, it’s stacking. Pile up about fifteen hardback books to the height you want, put a circular wooden chopping board or a small piece of glass on top, and you have a side table. It looks intentional. It looks bookish. It cost you nothing. Great in the corner of a reading nook next to an armchair.
11. Punched tin can lanterns
Now this one is genuinely beautiful. Fill an empty tin can with water and freeze it solid. Once frozen, you can hammer a nail through the sides in any pattern you like without the can crushing, because the ice holds it firm. Let the ice melt, paint the outside or leave bare, drop a tea light inside, and you’ve got a lantern that throws a patterned glow onto whatever surface is near it. Christmas markets sell these for fifteen pounds each. Yours cost a tin of beans.
12. Bicycle wheel garden trellis
Skip the bicycle-wheel-as-wall-clock version, which is the most common DIY upcycling suggestion and almost always ends up looking like a bicycle wheel with clock hands taped to it. The much better use is to mount an old bike wheel on a fence as a trellis for climbing plants like sweet peas or beans. The spokes give the plants something to grab, the wheel itself is decorative, and the whole thing looks intentional in a way the clock version never does.
13. Old wooden ladder as blanket display or shelving
A weathered wooden ladder leaned against a wall works as a blanket display (drape throws over the rungs), as a shelving unit (set boards across the rungs), or as a plant ladder (set pots on each level). The trick is finding a ladder that already looks lived-in. A brand-new ladder looks like a ladder. An old wooden one with a bit of paint splatter and patina looks like decor.
14. Glass jar pendant lights
Big jars, mason or otherwise, with a hole drilled or cut in the lid for a light cord, can become hanging pendant lights over a kitchen island or breakfast nook. The honest caveat: this involves electrical wiring, and if you’re not comfortable with that, get an electrician to install the cord-and-bulb assembly. The lamp kits themselves are about fifteen pounds. The finished look is the kind of thing restaurants charge a couple of hundred for per fixture.
15. Drawer into a shadow box
Final one. Small, but it always works. A single drawer from an unloved chest of drawers, mounted on its side on a wall, becomes a shadow box for small objects. Shells from a trip. Vintage cameras. Any collection of small things you’d otherwise hide in a cupboard. If the drawer had internal dividers, even better, the space is pre-subdivided for you. The smallest upcycling project on this list and one of the most satisfying.
The pattern across the projects that work: they go from saved-material to finished thing in a single afternoon, look intentional rather than crafty, and use stuff you actually had lying around. The ones that fail tend to be ambitious in the wrong direction, more sanding and stripping and engineering than the finished result deserves.
My current favorites in active rotation: the window frame photo display, two punched tin lanterns on the windowsill, and the book stack side table I’ve owned for four years and never bothered to replace.
The pallet table I will admit I still might build one of these days. The pallets are out there. They’re waiting.
I’m Sumayya and I love turning ordinary spaces into ones you’ll never want to leave. Whether it’s cozy cottagecore corners, bold maximalist magic, or sleek modern minimalism, I’m here to help you discover your style and bring it to life without spending a fortune. Ready to refresh your space? Let’s make it happen!
