Trash To Treasure

Good evening fellow DIYers! I was over at my in-laws this past weekend, and my mother-in-law asked my husband to help her return all their empties. My husband being the great son that he is, was only too happy to help out his mom. I got a good one ladies! 🙂

As they were packing up the Jeep, I wandered over to take a gander at what they were packing up. My father-in-law is quite the collector of fine liqueurs, and fine liqueurs tend to come in some pretty cool looking bottles. I swiped some bottles out of the box they were packing up. Don’t worry I gave my mother-in-law the 50 cents she would have got for returning them… wink, wink.

Anyways, there is a DIY that I have been wanting to do for a while now, and these bottles were perfect.

Keep reading to see how I turned old liquor bottles into chic liquor decanters.

Materials

• Old liquor bottles
• Wine corks
• Fancy drawer pulls
• Paint (color of your choosing)
• E6000 glue (not pictured here)

** Just a little side note – I bought two clear glass drawer pulls from Home Depot. They were a little pricey. They were $5.88 each! But they were well worth it. The other three tops I had were crystal picks from the store that my mother and I own. We got these from a wholesale supplier. If you do this DIY, try and get really creative and see what you come up with for the decanter topper.

So this was probably the most annoying part of the whole project — trying to get the labels off. Sooooo annoying. They really stick those things on there. I soaked the bottles in super hot water with Blue Dawn dish soap. I let them soak for quite a while. I was busy doing other projects, so I am not sure exactly how long, but for at least an hour the bottles were soaking. By the time I got back to them, I was able to scrub off the labels with a scrub brush.

 

I set the bottles out to dry and then started working on the corks. I got these corks from Dollarama. The corks were too wide to fit in the mouth of the bottles.

I cut the corks down the side, starting at about a quarter of the way from the top. I used just a regular army knife. You could use an Exacto knife, too.

 

I used my favorite glue in the whole wide world, E6000, to glue the drawer pulls to the tops of the corks.

 

Time for the fun part — spray paint! I love this stuff!

The key to a good spray paint job is to first read the can to see how far to hold the can away, and spray nice light and even coats.

 

I roughed up the edges on some of the bottles with a little bit of 80 grit sandpaper.

 

And viola!

I haven’t fully decided, but I may use my Cricut to cut something to put on the fronts of the bottles. I will think on that, though.

Let me know what you think, and if you have done this before please feel free to share your pics with me!