An introduction to our project

Mr Frugal Witch and I have been married for four and a half years in the six years that we have been together we've lived in places that our hearts weren't really into. Our tastes are somewhat "out there" and we've struggled to decorate our numerous homes in a style that we loved. When we got our first flat we went to B&Q and bought a deep red paint with plans to make our home delightfully gothic.

In our fledgling marriage we acquired a lot of mismatching furniture and our place sucked. We envisioned a gothic feel and we went out and bought a deep red paint. As soon as it was dry, we immediately regretted it. It was far too dark for a pokey little flat. And we left it. We eventually moved to another flat and didn't bother to decorate mainly because we couldn't be bothered to spend money on a flat in which we were never really there except to eat and sleep.

Fast forward two years and we are in our current home, a cute little cottage overlooking Dartmoor National Park.  We love our little home and we wanted to decorate it according to our tastes. But there was a problem a big one.

Mr Frugal Witch and I spent our Saturday's in search of pieces for our home with no success. The major flaw in our home improvement project was that stores carried 3 or 4 themes that everybody in our part of England had and we wanted pieces none of our friends had.

Mr Frugal Witch and I had drawn up plans for each room and googled around extensively looking for inspiration. We found nothing. We googled "Gothic living rooms" and got stuff like this:

Now, I'm not saying this is an ugly room, far from it. But it's red, as most gothic rooms are and red makes me depressed! I wanted a grown up Gothic look that wouldn't look like a dungeon and suited our house perfectly.  So we wondered around folornly for months in home improvement stores coming across generic stuff that makes a home look like an art gallery and in our Victorian cottage, cold art gallery style decor would not a marriage make. And then I found it, in Wilkinson's of  all places, a gorgeous canvas for £10!!
 
And that's when we decided to decorate as frugally as we could with one of a kind items or at least, items we wouldn't find in our friends houses. Okay, so I didn't get this from Etsy but it did give me an idea to have purple accented throughout the living room which made things a whole lot easier

I've been an Etsyer on and off since 2007 and way back then, Etsy was really a bazaar of crochet hats and gloves. I returned in 2010 with a photography shop and was pleasantly surprised by all the homewares on offer at a very reasonable price. What if we could decorate our home almost completely with pieces from Etsy.com on a budget? That's how our project came to be. As it's a month to month project, we'll be posting the items in individual blog posts followed by a blog post with before Etsy and After Etsy. 

We've been meaning to start our blog for sometime and now we are having a little bit of a decorating hiatus, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity. We'll also offer alternatives and how to guides when handicrafts are the cheapest solution for unique homes.