Quite a few years ago, in a life far, far away from my current one, I was sitting in a TV executives office desperately trying to sell a reality television show. The executive we were pitching, now a millionaire several times over for creating hit programs you probably have watched at one point, with a deadpan stare, looked at us and said, "there's no such thing as a new idea, just different ways of doing the same thing to make it more appealing." After leaving that meeting, my friend and co-worker (a graduate of NYU film school) looked at me in disgust and said, "I didn't come to Hollywood to produce shows about fake-boobed, bubble gum chewing social climbers with no substance." The reality was, however, in a depressed economy television companies were shifting from expensive scripted series and paying their stars inflated salaries (the Friends cast at one point made $1 million dollars each per episode and actors like Kelsey Grammar pocketed well over that, eventually forcing the expensive shows off-air) to inexpensive reality shows featuring regular people desperate to become stars. In today's economy, as an interior designer, the reality has also shifted, with lower budgets but high demands, I'm constantly trying to create appealing designs as inexpensively as possible. Take, for example, the coveted frosted glass door (seen in modern home designs everywhere). What looks like a simple glass door with frosted glass (
well, it IS a simple glass door with frosted glass) is often three times the cost of a regular door. The cheapo-designo here, though, has a solution. Last week I faced a dilemma when a client with 26 regular glass doors wanted to update them with a modern look by installing frosted glass. The cost for new doors would have tripled my budget for designing the entire home, so I headed to the Home Depot where I purchased cans of frosted spray by Krylar for $9/can. By painting the door frames in a glossy black and spraying this brilliance in a can I was able to change the entire look of the house for under $100 proving, yes, you can make lemonade from lemons!
FROSTY COLD:
A few other great ideas for the frost in a can is to make fun designs on jars or instead of paying a fortune for lettering on a window, simply cutout letters, tape them to a window or glass door and spray over them.
