Turning Recycled Car Parts Into Home Decor
Your car can have a new life as home decor or furniture!
Photo: Debs (ò‿ó)♪ via CC
You don’t need to be an interior decorating wizard to turn some recognizable automotive parts into your newest home decor. With a little bit of soldering, electrical wiring, and imagination, you can practically recycle your entire car into part of your home.
What a Mess! Don’t mis these tips on effectively and easily washing your car
Ideas for Repurposing an Old Car into New Home Decor
For interior lighting, you have a couple clear options. Every car comes with two fashionable headlights that can be used as spotlights. Just be sure to swap out the high-powered bulbs with ones more suited to your home. For a more colorful approach, use the brake lights to line the room with soft red tones. If you’re looking for mood lighting, suspension coil springs make excellent candlesticks.
You can turn seat belts into covers for pillows!
Photo: alamodestuff via CC
If you have a cherished vehicle you have to part with, you can still retain keepsakes from it in other forms. Pry off your car’s badge (here’s how to de-badge it) and turn it into a sleek necklace pendant or hair clip. Other small parts like spark plugs or gears make great jewelry pieces or key chains.
Furniture, while a sizable undertaking, can also come from a car. Apart from the obvious back seat being used as a couch, the front seats can be used as individual chairs. If your vehicle was a truck, a little sawing and finishing can turn your truck bed into an actual bed—a great addition to your themed bedroom.
Tires have a multitude of other uses, so many that you’re bound to find an option suitable to your vision. Our favorites are typically outdoor swings (which could also be mounted indoors), chairs, flower bed lining, end table frames, mirror frames, and artwork.
Small touches can also enhance your man cave or themed room’s ambiance. An old-fashioned door handle makes a great hand towel rack. Use side or rear view mirrors as mini-mirrors around your vanity mirror. And, pretty much any car part, like a muffler, can be fashioned into a desk lamp stand.
Making a Change: How Hyundai Hope on Wheels got started and what it’s doing for our children
Don’t forget about the birds outside your kitchen window! Suspend your old hubcaps (the ones without holes) using cables as bird baths or bird feeding trays. If your bird house needs a roof or extra siding, use those outdated license plates!
Speaking of license plates—cut out those old metal rectangles and spell out anything you want, from your family name to the numbers on your new homemade clock.
You can make your decor pieces as rustic or polished as you want. With options so limitless, it’s time to get decorative!
Aaron is unashamed to be a native Clevelander and the proud driver of a Hyundai Veloster Turbo (which recently replaced his 1995 Saturn SC-2). He gleefully utilizes his background in theater, literature, and communication to dramatically recite his own articles to nearby youth. Mr. Widmar happily resides in Dayton, Ohio with his magnificent wife, Vicki, but is often on the road with her exploring new destinations. Aaron has high aspirations for his writing career but often gets distracted pondering the profound nature of the human condition and forgets what he was writing… See more articles by Aaron.