DIY Wood Bead Garland

Easy Homemade Wood Bead Garland

I’ve been seeing these really cool wood bead garlands all over lately. But I also noticed how expensive they are. I wasn’t willing to pay $40 for a wood bead garland. They’re sometimes on sale at Michael’s or Hobby Lobby, but you have to catch it at the right time and they’re still about $20 or $25 each.

I was thinking “OMG they’re so pretty and they will look so good with all my holiday and seasonal decorations.”

So I decided to do a little research on supplies and make one myself!It was super easy to make and took me about 20 minutes.

DIY Wood Bead Garland Supplies

I went straight to Amazon, because we all know thats the best place to shop, and I started gathering my supplies. I knew I wanted the garland to have different sized beads so I went on my search.

I chose 30mm, 20mm and 16mm beads. I also purchased some jute twine to string my beads.

Of course no craft project comes without unexpected supplies, and thats why you see a tape dispenser in the picture below, but I’ll get into that later in this post.

Creating the Wood Bead Garland

I know I wanted to make a 7ft garland so that I can use it on my console table. So I measured my Jute Twine at 90 inches. That’s a little bit over 7ft, but it gives me room for error.

After measuring my twine, I established a pattern that I like. I did two 16mm bead, one 20mm, two 16mm and one 30mm.

This pattern gives the garland different dimension and it makes it looks “professionally made.”

Now that I had my pattern, I went on to make my tassels for the ends of the garland. I grabbed a trusty coaster that I had on my coffee table and wrapped my twine around it about 15 or 20 times. How many times you wrap your twine is up to you, the more your wrap the fluffier your tassel will be. I took my twine loops off of my coaster and cut both looped ends. That left me with a bunch of little strips of twine, I then folded them over to make my tassel shape, I ties a small piece of twine around to make a small head, and voila a tassel.

So to start my garland, I tied one end of the 90 inch piece of string to the head of my tassel. That way my beads wouldn’t fall right out. Then comes the easy part, well after some adjustments it became the easy part.

In order to get my twine through my beads I had to tape the end to make a hard end, like if it was a needle. Thats why my supplies had a tape dispenser, I totally should have added the coaster too!

After I taped the end of my twine, I started to put my beads through in the patter I had chosen. It took me all of 10 minutes to bead everything through. After I reached the end of my string with my beads, leaving a few inches without beads, I tied my second tassel to that end, making sure to tighten all the way to the last bead.

And that was it! My super easy wood bead garland that looks store bought, and it only cost me $12 worth of supplies!

Look at that pattern! Doesn’t that look amazing? I can’t wait to work on some other garlands for holidays. This one would look so good layered.

Check out my social media to see me creating.

See you next time!

D.I.Y. Renovations Before and After

We Thought It Was Move-In Ready

As I mentioned before, home buying and homeownership are very new to me. I didn’t know what the final walk through really meant. In my eyes, this was when we get our house keys and the house is finally ours; thats not what it was at all.

The final walkthrough is when you walk around and see if everything is how you saw it when you put in the offer (from my understanding, this may not be correct). Again, Thats not how I saw it. I saw it as “OMG they hid so much with their furniture” and “wow there’s so much cleaning I have to do.”

There was no turning back now! The next morning we went in to the title agency office and we signed our lives away. It was so exciting to finally own a home.

When we got to OUR house for the first time we walked through again. This time analyzing and taking notes of what had to get done in order for us to move in. We have a friend that works in construction, so we called him over to help us out and guide us on certain things.

Our biggest issue was that the flooring didn’t reach the baseboards. We had about an eighth of an inch gap between the flooring and the baseboard, it looked terrible.

We also had an area of the house, which in the 80’s was probably a formal dining room, that was closed off to become a bedroom. This “room” made the house extremely dark because it was blocking the natural light that came in from one set of french doors. Luckily the previous owner had built the enclosure with the current flooring underneath, which made it easy to make the decision of taking the wall down.

We then notice the lighting problem in the house. There was none, the house was lit by ceiling fans in EVERY room, even the kitchen. THE KITCHEN! Since we had some minor electrical panel issues, we decided to change the lighting issue in the house as well.

What a Difference!

The next day we went right into it and started removing baseboard and door moldings. The “construction” had started and there was no turning back. We had a few days before our baseboards were being delivered so we began painting the interior of the house as well. We changed the interior color from a dark beige to a light grey/white color. It made the house so bright and look so big.

Our baseboards finally arrived and we began cutting and installing. We decided on modern flat baseboards that were 3/4″ by 5,” the thickness of the baseboard helped us hide the fact that the flooring didn’t reach all the way.

We contracted an electrician to install new lighting throughout the house and fix the minor issues in our panel. We ended up installing 43 LED can lights throughout the house. It feels like daylight ALL THE TIME, and I love it.

It took us about a month to get all the little things done ourselves. We were working full time (like 12 hour days) and coming to the house after work. It was a lot, but we finally got most of it done. We didn’t want to move in unless the majority of the projects were finished. Because we’ve both watched HGTV and everyone knows you don’t finish a project you start when you’re living in the house.

We Are Finally Moved In

We decided to not take on any projects the first year of living in the house. Our main focus was living in the house and buying furniture. Because living in a house furnished like a tailgate was not very attractive.

After the first year, we plan to tackle one major project annually. There are a lot of things we want to change is this house, that felt original to 1980, but one project a year is our plan.

I hope you continue to read and watch as our homeownership circus continues!

I CAN’T BELIEVE WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

I CAN'T BELIEVE WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

I never thought I would own a house. My entire life I dreamt about being a homeowner, but I didn’t know how to obtain that. My family always rented apartments or townhomes growing up, I actually lived in the same place for almost 20 years, not knowing it wasn’t “ours. “Growing up I thought that people that lived in single family homes were extremely wealthy and that it wasn’t meant to be for me.

Clearly, I was misinformed.

I am also the child of immigrant parents, who fled their countries to come to the land of opportunity. But that’s beside the point.

I started watching HGTV shows and seeing young people with bizarre jobs buying homes. I said to myself, well I can totally do that. So I began doing some research and learned that it is possible and I was being completely ridiculous and oblivious to the world. So I sat down with my significant other and told him my dreams and wishes of owning a house. He said, LET’S DO IT! So I sat down and I did a whole bunch of calculations, spreadsheets and put us on a budget so that we could reach our dreams of owning a home.

Fast forward a few years and we were on our house hunting journey. We spent months looking for homes and going to open houses. But if you’ve ever lived in Miami, you would know that every house has been modified in the worst way possible. I saw closets turned into bathrooms, shed into tiny homes; I even saw an electrical panel behind kitchen cabinets. It was exhausting.

We gave up on our search for a few months; there was nothing worth looking at anymore. But I decided to go onto one of those real estate apps and came across a house that was too good to be true. It was late in the evening, I’m sure our realtor was sleeping, but I sent him the listing anyway. It was a house that was not on the market for another 24 hours, we would be the first people to see it in person if we could get an appointment. Since my realtor was sleeping I decided to email everyone I found tied to the listing and got us four appointments, clearly I had gone crazy or something.

We were the first people to see the house. We fell in love, the house was so nice, there weren’t any closets turned into bathroom, I was in shock! We had other houses we were going to look at that day, but as soon as we reached the next one we told our realtor “nope, we don’t want to see any more houses.” Within the hour we had put in an offer on our dream house.

Fast forward through the heart palpitations and nervous cocktails and we got ourselves a house. We still had no clue what we were doing and everything was moving so fast. Finally when we got our keys and get inside our new house we realized how much furniture hides imperfections. Needless to say our dream home had a lot of updating it needed in order for us to move in.

And that my friend is where our journey in homeownership begins.