Living on a homestead often can mean trying to make something out of nothing. Everything is expensive, and creating a pintrest-worthy home doesn’t come cheap. I am definitely guilty of not wanting to throw things away, but we are working really hard right now to only have things on our homestead that are actually useful and beneficial. When I couple that with only wanting things that are also beautiful, it can be challenging to say the least. This often means I have to get creative.

We upgraded our girls’ beds right before our 5th baby was born, and part of that upgrade was new mattresses. Unfortunately, we had a very farm style accident (bunnies got out of their cage, knocked down the heat lamp we had set up for new chicks, and burned a hole in the new mattresses we hadn’t unboxed yet) and one of them were toast before we ever even got it out of the box.

We had two choices- we could toss it and call it a loss or we could turn that trash into usable treasure.

We started by grabbing my son’s machete and slicing the burned sections off, then cutting what was left into three big pieces.

Next, I needed something to use for a cover, and I had just been given a brand new king sized sheet my sister wasn’t using. Perfect. It turns out, a king sized sheet fits perfectly all the way around a twin sized mattress.

I cut the fabric in a way that meant I could make two seams down each side to create a cover. Because the sheet was a perfect fit, I didn’t need to hem the top and bottom. The side seams were all I needed to make a clean cover.

I maneuvered each cushion in and voila! We now have three of the most comfortable and beautiful floor cushions that can be used as extra seating when friends come over or laid on to star gaze or taken out into a field of wildflowers to get comfy and read a good book. Because they were meant to be a mattress, they are extremely comfortable, but because they are memory foam, they are fairly lightweight to carry around.

As we try to downsize and minimize the amount of stuff in our home, creating something beautiful and useful out of trash has been such a fun challenge!