I have a soft spot for room decor, which my Pinterest boards show for, and I also have a soft spot for DIYing literally everything in my life which this blog shows for, so when I saw pictures of these gorgeous grid wall art installations nothing in my head clicked towards buying this in a store. They seemed like the easiest DIY in the world.

I’m sure you can imagine the look on my face when I looked them up and found them retailing on Urban Outfitters for $60.
Needless to say, I was not footing the bill for that and nobody else should, so here’s how I DIY’d my own dupe for 10 dollars. If you don’t want to spend the (well spent) time doing it yourself the Urban Outfitters link is here!

The beginning of this DIY will have to be a little story-esque because I did not document the grubbier part of this DIY, but here’s my description. This story started in a thrift shop like all good DIYs do. While spending a rainy, mucky day aimlessly pouring through a thrift store with my mom and I came across this little bin with these grids and I had my lightbulb moment. I had been thinking of the DIY only a few days prior so this felt pretty fated. The box had 30 grids, all or nothing, so we got the entire box and I split them with my best friend. The cost of all 30 grids? 5$
Then began the task of de-mucking these grids. I’m assuming they were some old shelving unit that had spent some time (a lot) in someone’s garage. I’ll save you the half hour spent with scalding water scrubbing these things off. I was going for was the rose-gold look so the next step was painting these grids. The easiest option would have been to spray-paint the grids, but since I cannot legally obtain spray paint (I’m only 17) I settled for painstakingly painting half of them rose-gold.
Now I had 15 grids to place up on my wall. There are several routes for how these can be hung. If you are ok with holes, pushpins are a fairly competent way of hanging them, especially when you get cute ones like this from Target. If you don’t want to put holes in your wall, clear mini command hooks do the job as well, which is what Julia did.

15 Grids - $2.50 

+ Target Rose-Gold Paint 2.49 

+Target Wood Push Pins 5.00

$10.00

Now, for the fun part: decorating. You can put literally anything up on these, but here are some of my suggestions. The cutest option for hanging things with would be binder clips like these, but you could use anything to hang things up such as paperclips or washi tape.

Things to Hang:

- photos/ polaroids

- sunglasses

- keys

-dried flowers

-notes

-jewelry

In total, I made 15 wall grids for the beautiful price of $10 which was much better than spending $900 at Urban Outfitters.

My seasonal playlists are everything to me. They are pretty much the only thing I listen to, so finding new music and having a playlist that is me is so important. My music taste can be described as eclectic, (sorry, I really love that word) I listen to just about everything. My playlists bounce between rap, to folk, to musical theater, to pop, to chill, and to throwbacks and back in a way that can be utterly confusing sometimes. This is why I've finally found it necessary to split my seasonal playlists in half: the hype and the chill. My general mood, emotional pulse tends to fluctuate with the season’s, so understandably, my ‘hype’ playlist is quite a bit longer than my ‘chill’ one.

Favorite ‘hype’ song: Make Daddy Proud - Blackbear

Favorite ‘chill’ song: Die Young - Sylvan Esso

Follow me on spotify: @mainlymaryam