How I Repurposed and Reinvented My Thrift Store and Flea Market Finds

What if I told you that you didn’t need to spend a lot of money to update your home decor? I’ll share a few of my favorite thrift store and flea market finds, and ideas on how to repurpose and reinvent them without breaking the bank.

Do you have home decor items or furniture that are doing nothing but taking up space? If there is no longer a purpose for them in your house, what’s your next step?

Before getting rid of something that no longer has value, I first think of ways that I may be able to give it new life.

Repurposing or reinventing your flea market and thrift store finds is the perfect way to update a piece without having to spend a considerable amount of money. You can basically spend a fraction of what it would cost to replace an older item with something brand new.

I mean, really, where’s the sense of adventure in buying a new piece of furniture when you can have fun and use your creativity updating an old one?

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cottage kitchen with butcher block island

Updating My Antique and Vintage Finds for a New Purpose

Here’s a look at how I took my favorite pieces of furniture and decor and gave them new life.

Repurposing a Flea Market Dresser As a Kitchen Island

This is the old drab dresser we bought on Craigslist about 11 years ago.

Trust me when I say that we never imagined we would be using this vintage piece as a kitchen island years later. But it fits perfectly in our small kitchen space.

cottage kitchen and a butcher block island created from a dresser

Our contractor found a butcher block slab at a Dunkin Donuts that was going out of business. It was pretty beat up but he brought it back to life with a lot of sanding and oiling. And we got a great deal on the slab so that was definitely the icing on the cake.

Putting a piece of butcher block on an old dresser and a few coats of paint made this vintage piece function in a completely different way. It also has some great kitchen storage inside the deep drawers which was a welcome solution to our ongoing storage issues.

cottage bedroom with antique built-in cabinet

Reinventing an Antique Stand-Alone Cabinet Into a Built-In

One of my favorite furniture pieces in our 1920 cottage is this built-in.

Do you know what’s even more amazing about this antique? The fact that this was a stand-alone cabinet built at the same time as the rest of the house 102 years ago.

Here’s the piece from when we first moved in. Every owner before we bought the house left this special cabinet behind so a piece of history stayed throughout the years.

We were in desperate need of bedroom storage space and this was a perfect piece to use as a dresser for our clothing and other essentials.

vintage French door and antique chippy built-in

When we started renovating the bathroom on the other side of the bedroom wall, we knew it would be a perfect time to build the antique cabinet into it.

Glass cabinet doors, beadboard, and white paint were added to complete this inspired makeover. Now it’s such a beautiful addition to my small but quaint bedroom and adds a lot of charm to this space.

I love that this amazing antique will stay with the house forever, just as the original owners intended.

You can see the entire blog post on this project HERE.

Christmas cottage kitchen with vintage columns and corbels

Reimagining Thrift Store Columns as the Perfect Room Dividers

Every time I go shopping for vintage finds, I always seem to find a variety of old, chippy, beautiful wooden columns. I’ve just always had a problem trying to figure out what to do with them so they usually ended up leaning in a corner somewhere, lacking purpose.

One day a fabulous idea came to me. I wanted to cut the column in half and place each underneath the already existing corbels.

view of unfinished corbel and vintage column

Unfortunately, the corbels were painted white and newer. So we ended up staining, waxing, painting, and adding glue to create a chippy, old finish that looked similar to the columns.

You can read this great way to age wood and give it a layered chippy finish HERE.

cottage living room with vintage columns and corbels

You can see each half-column attached to the sides of the entryway between the living room and kitchen.

seafoam green coffee table with vintage door on top

Recreating a Run-Down Coffee Table With a Vintage Door

This thrift store furniture makeover was a pretty easy project.

Before view of the black original coffee table

I know the “before” picture of the coffee table is hard to see but I’m showing it so you can see the size.

The goal was to create a larger coffee table and hide some major flaws on the top of the table. My husband found a vintage door at an antique mall that we attached to the top to create a bigger piece.