Old Window Craft Ideas

Old windows can be building blocks for furniture, room dividers and home décor items. Embrace the charm of an old wooden window and recycle it into artistic craft and design elements for your home. Leave the window as it is, spruce it up with decorative paint or stain it so that it fits your sense of style.

Tables

Transform an old window into a coffee table or an occasional table to complement a sunroom, living room or outdoor living space. Making a table from an old window is as simple as gluing four legs onto the backside. The legs can be made from wood or decorative metal, depending on your personal style. Add mosaic tiles around the wood perimeter to add color and to protect the frame during outdoor use.

Another way to make tables from old windows is to build a shallow box and attach the window to the top with a piano hinge. The coffee table is now a shadow box table where you can safely store collectibles or enhance it with decorative elements.

Paint the panes of an old window with stained glass paint to create a stained glass sun catcher. Stained glass paint and self-adhesive leading strips are available at craft stores. Outline any design on the panes with the leading strips, and then fill in between the strips with stained glass paint.

Stained glass paint has translucent qualities similar to real stained glass, but you can tell a difference when they're side by side. An alternative to painting the panes in the old window is replacing them with real panes of different colored stained glass. Stained glass artists can also use the glass panes as a backdrop for stained glass designs.

Hang the stained glass sun catchers against the screen of a sun porch, in front of a bay window or from a tree branch in the garden.

Old windows of the same or varying sizes can become room dividers. Hang a row of windows at different levels from the ceiling to create an artistic room divider. Paint the window panes or leave them clear according to your preference.

You can also create a free-standing room divider with six to eight same-size windows. Join them together in three vertical rows with metal brackets, and then join one row to the next with hinges.