DIY cottage design: bringing a fairy tale to life. What can be done to decorate a country house and the adjacent area so that passers-by will wring their necks, and arriving guests will instantly get excited about the idea of purchasing a hacienda and organizing on it the same corner of paradise, peace and quiet as yours? To design a dacha with your own hands means to tell your life story using natural materials, to carry out a project with a strong personality, colored by amazing impressions, favorite stories and a joyful attitude towards country life.
DIY tables and shelves
You can make simple furniture for your dacha yourself; you don’t need to be a carpenter or buy valuable wood. Anyone with a hammer, nails and determination can put together an original shelf from old boxes disassembled into boards or a coffee table from pallets.
If you add real furniture fittings to your craft, carefully paint and decorate it, you will get a stylish and unusual piece of furniture.
Country decor made of treated wood
Boards and bars covered with stain or paints for external woodwork are used on benches, small garden forms - gazebos, arches, pergolas, canopies for grapes.
Special skill will require the creation of a slightly inclined cart for plants and decorative pumpkins, from which blooming petunias or pumpkin lanterns pour onto the ground like a bright waterfall.
A hand-made bridge spanning a small stream, as an interesting accent to a romantic corner of the garden, makes it possible to stand and look at the running water - one of the three phenomena that, according to the sages, can be observed endlessly.
Beginning DIYers can start making garden decor items with items that require less effort, time and woodworking skills.
- The board framing of containers for flowers, made from any plastic, tin or enamel containers, will allow you to remove inconsistency from the garden and bring all the decor to the same style denominator.
- Using wooden pallets left over from a large construction project as a starting material will clear the area of construction waste and turn it into garden tables, benches, stools, compost boxes or a seedling table next to the house for gardening equipment, on which it will be convenient for the gardener to pick and replant plants.
- The simplest option for decorating garden elements with wood is to create ties from textured ropes and wood planks (cuts of door frames of the required length work well), making plastic barrels for collecting rainwater not a foreign object that you want to put out of sight, but a full-fledged participant in the decorative show.
Replacing home textiles
Large fabric products - curtains, carpets, bedspreads - greatly change the perception of the interior, and are relatively inexpensive. To quickly transform your dacha, order a new set of home textiles from the salon or sew it yourself.
To save money, you can remember patchwork and cut blankets and pillows in this style from existing scraps or old things.
Paths made of stone and concrete
High-strength materials - stone and concrete, capable of taking any shape, are suitable for creating decorative elements of a suburban area of various sizes.
Horizontal planar decoration occurs by delineating the area with pedestrian paths, platforms and driveway alleys. If you look at the hacienda from above, the regular lines of the paths should be woven into a simple but harmonious pattern. In small dachas, it is not recommended to make the routes straight or with sharp turns.
Track options available for DIY production:
- concrete (solid pouring, creation of individual blocks by mold pouring);
- stone with a gravel frame (stones are laid on a dense base, gravel is poured into the gaps with compaction);
- stone with a lawn frame (lawn grass is planted around the main flat stones on a layer of earth, which is trimmed along with lawns);
- gravel (gravel is poured into the bed of the path);
- paving stones (granite blocks or a concrete analogue of ancient street masonry are used);
- pebble (large pebbles placed on edge are pressed into the cement mixture in a dotted pattern).
By selecting materials according to color and shape, mixing different techniques, changing the direction of laying, a true master can create paths that cannot be repeated. A chain of routes laid at the request of the owners, connecting different corners of the garden, will organize the space, delimit it into zones and make it different from neighboring dachas.
Advice. When excavating soil to prepare the bed of a garden path, after placing curb stones, place high-density geotextiles (used for making road surfaces) on the bottom with the plant on the walls of the groove. It will not allow the base (sand and gravel layers) to go into the ground and will prevent weeds from germinating. Only then backfill and lay the facing material of the path.
Knitted decor
Craftswomen are lucky - they can knit or crochet stunning decorations for their dacha:
- tablecloths;
- ottomans;
- napkins;
- pillows;
- covers;
- panel;
- rugs;
- lampshades.
Such items give the interior of the dacha extraordinary warmth, sincerity and comfort. By choosing the right pattern and color combination, you can create a complete set of knitted decor for your room or kitchen.
Flowerbeds from various old objects
Almost any unnecessary items can become part of the landscape design of the site if you approach their decoration with imagination. Flowerbeds are even made from broken electrical equipment. The TV can be freed from internal devices and your favorite flowers can be planted there. Broadleaf specimens may grow in an old gas or electric stove.
Flower beds are also created from basins and troughs. For example, a trough is turned into a flowerbed in the shape of a sailboat, for which a mast is placed in its center, the effect of sails is created, and white and blue flowers are planted, imitating sea foam.
Gardeners create real masterpieces even from simple umbrellas. The umbrella is inserted into the ground in a half-open state and flowers are planted inside, having first filled it with earth. Decorative flowers are also planted around the umbrella.
Old teapots, rubber boots and shoes are also used as flower beds. A beautiful solution would be to imitate a fire made of flowers. For this purpose, a circle of small diameter is marked on the ground, on the sides of which bricks are dug into the ground. The resulting space is filled with soil, and firewood is placed in the center of the circle, near which marigolds are planted - they will create the illusion of a fire. You can hang an old saucepan over such a flame and plant any flowers in it.
Wall decorations
In modest country interiors, art installations made of wood, rope, burlap, dry plants, wicker baskets, painted plates, household utensils, antique dishes and family photographs look good.
It will be easy and inexpensive to get something like this and decorate the walls of your estate; at the same time, you can show your imagination.
Decoration from lids for the garden
As promised, we present to you a couple of very cute garden products.
First of all, we have a very cute and bright snail, for the production of which you do not need to be specially distracted for a long time or use a complex tool. It’s enough to set aside some time for yourself during lunch or in the late afternoon, cut out the outline of a snail from plywood or plastic, take a couple of hundred caps from plastic bottles, and get down to business.
To make your work easier, make yourself a small layout of the lids directly according to the snail layout. Draw the course of the caps, some kind of pattern, roughly indicate the colors. As a result, you will get a garden figure that can be installed anywhere - in the garden, at the entrance to a house or yard, at the foot of an old tree, in a new flowerbed made from car tires, and so on.
Country crafts continue to delight us, and next up is a funny bird - a cap penguin. Everything here is already traditional - a model made of a piece of plastic, plywood, fiberboard, thin OSB or even the remains of polycarbonate from a canopy or greenhouse, as well as a couple of dozen lids.
You cut out a shape, place lids on it, decorate it with colors and the direction of the lids, create a new garden figure and install it on your summer cottage in any convenient place.
Using the same method, figurines of hares, foxes, parrots, wolves, turtles... and anyone else you like, even cartoon characters from your favorite children's animation, can be made.
Living plants
The greenery of foliage and the aroma of flowers will breathe life and bring freshness to even the most dull home. You will have to take care of indoor plants, but if you choose unpretentious crops, you are unlikely to regret this decision.
It is not necessary to create a whole greenhouse at the dacha; you can limit yourself to a few copies, although the more there are and the more original they are placed, the more expressive the eco-friendly interior looks.
Small concrete forms
Plastic concrete can be used to create small-scale decorative elements that can add intrigue to the calm flow of country life and enliven the monotony of remote green corners.
The main thing in the process: selection of a high-quality mixture, accuracy when pouring, removal of internal air bubbles and careful subsequent processing, including decoration with various materials, if the concrete color does not suit the master.
You can make original decorations for your summer cottage from concrete:
- the base of a fountain or small waterfall;
- garden table and “eternal” chairs, decorated with stone, tile, faience mosaics;
- sundial on a stand;
- bird baths;
- man-made stones with moss and sedum grown in the depressions.
A bird drinker cast from concrete, where the shape is a burdock or rhubarb leaf, looks very interesting. The combination of the natural pattern of leaf veins with technological material will successfully decorate the cottage in a modern style.
The main task of any owner is to make his suburban area attractive and comfortable for living. Even in nature, not everything is perfect, and when humans interfere, carrying out construction work and disturbing the harmony, then decoration is required.
Some area of the local area must be hidden, and the most successful perspective or cozy corner must be emphasized and presented to the viewer so that he will never pass by. With diligence, patience, and some effort, you can turn an ordinary dacha into a fairy-tale world with your own hands.
Painting the facade of a country house with paints
It is not easy to work with lids, but it is even more difficult to use paint to decorate the facade and walls of a country house. Here you need not just to be able to use paints, but to draw, have talent or at least the desire to create.
In general, we recommend that only those people who have already held a brush or pencil in their hands, and successfully, undertake such work. If not, but you still want to decorate the walls of your house with such masterpieces, look for talents among your relatives or friends, and trust them with your dacha buildings for painting.
The process of decorating with paints requires some preparation, since painting a country house must be on a flat surface. If the site is a mud hut, it will be necessary to plaster, putty, grout and prime the surface. If the surface is brick, then the walls also need to be plastered and leveled as much as possible. In general, any surface will have to be leveled, so we recommend that you think carefully about decorating the facade in this way (a few more original ideas).
As you can see, there are two problems here at once - the urgent need for a skilled artist and a “canvas” for his creations. If painting is not possible under such conditions, it is better to abandon the option and consider others!
Complex decoration of the facade of a country house
If the previous options do not suit you, you can always make things simpler. You don’t need to prepare surfaces, spend money on materials, look for unearthly talents and special paints, because all you need to do is dream a little and collect all your positive emotions to decorate the facade.
Look at the image below. Agree, bright colors look very harmonious even on a brick wall surface. And how well the blue and pink colors are complemented by flower pots on the wall, flowerpots in the palisade, a green fence and an intricate bright figure... we think it’s very beautiful, and most importantly, such a design really costs pennies.
Simple drawings on the walls of a country house
If you don’t want complications and don’t worry about how the walls of your house will look, draw on the walls yourself or even entrust the creativity to your children! In our next photo, everything is very simple, but at the same time, cute and pretty - a painting on the wall, without preparation and expensive paints, but also the actual design of the territory - crafts from bottles, crafts from logs, a light lawn, and so on.
If you like this kind of design, please don’t stop anyone, because the most important thing is that you update the area brightly and beautifully, while making yourself and your family happy!
Simple and inexpensive decoration of the facade of the house
But we have an even simpler method. It is suitable for people who need to decorate their walls, but do not have enough time and finances for expensive repairs or painting. Let's tell the truth, there are tens of thousands of us, and we are only glad that we can find a way out of any situation. Today the solution is to paint the walls of a wooden house with leftover paints, simple brushes, different colors - the main thing is to refresh, add color and mood. And, you see, it turns out very well!!! This material will also be useful before the New Year holidays.
