TURNING MY HOUSE INTO A SNOW GLOBE! 🎄 DIY Christmas Outdoor Decor & Lights

hey everyone welcome back to my channel it is Drew and I am very very excited to be rolling into holiday content today I am very much in the Christmas mood this year Justin is right over here and I've been telling him how much I am ready for Christmas decor that Halloween has passed I figured we can go ahead and get started on it and I'm sure some of you are wondering where I'm at at the moment I'm actually downstairs in the lobby room this room's actually kind of turned into a few different things since getting Winston because we're not downstairs as much anymore so this room's sort of turned into a showroom in a sense for my online store um but today we're going to be focusing on turning my home into a snow globe and the whole inspiration and idea for this actually stems from the architecture of the house itself there is a large picture window in the front of my home it's a 1929 Spanish house a lot of older Spanish style houses actually have large picture windows whether they be an arch I kind of consider mine to be almost in egg shape but I feel like this almost looks like the shape of a snow globe and I feel like for Christmas time why don't we turn this into a snow globe I've had the idea since moving into this home but for the past 2 years I just haven't executed it and I figured this year we are going to do that one of the main DIYs that I want to do is actually one that you might have seen in the past and that is using plywood to create these large cutout shapes which I'm going to actually illuminate from the backside to make them look silhouetted and this is sort of just going to enhance the snow globe effect of this space so stay tuned until the end because you guys need to see how this turns out I think it's going to be so great and I've never actually decorated before in my entire life the outside of a house for Christmas like even when I was younger I feel like my dad was the one that kind of hung up the Christmas lights and ever since moving out I've lived in apartments and I actually have a home so we are going to go all out this year so the first thing I want to do is prep the downstairs Lobby room a little bit and like I had mentioned this used to be like a functional living room/ enertainment base that we had for all of our friends um but since I started selling vintage furniture on my website which is a lot of what you see here I actually needed a place to start storing it and then my downstairs kind of ended up getting taken over by all of my pieces I was Finding which I was not sad about or mad about because I love vintage furniture so much and it has been such a fun journey to buy and reupholster and just reimagine the look of pieces and have them for sale over on my website so if you see anything in this video that you find interesting definitely check out the website even this throw blanket here is from my online store our entire holiday collection is out I have yet to really talk about that on the channel but if you are curious it is out now I was almost going to rent an additional space in order to start selling vintage furniture and having it available on my website but honestly I just couldn't even fathom it with my mortgage at my house like it is just unreasonable so I was like you know what I'm converting a space downstairs into a room for me to have and it's just constantly being restaged and restyled which is so much fun and it's just always reimagined which is quite fun as well so this is what this room ended up looking like prepping it for our snow globe space actually purchased a template on Etsy for $12 so I want to go ahead and purchase this template because I think it's going to make the process of doing the DIY a lot easier since they already have them cut out um and I'll link this for you guys below but basically you print them out cut them out Trace them onto the plywood and then cut out the plywood so I don't know exactly how this is going to go but I think we can do it it doesn't seem too [Music] hard it ain't looking so hot I'm not going to lie like look at how this looks at the moment um it's massive too the only thing is that I now have to cut this entire thing out and the other half is actually going to be flipped and inverted on the plywood so that you can get like a really large tree on one standard piece of plywood this is not fun to cut out at all I honestly think oh my gosh and if you do not have it taped like you lose pieces of it I just feel like if we projected it it would be so much easier we are shifting gears entirely and we are not going to be doing this on plywood anymore because the tool we were going to use was this Dremel here and I brought it outside and like tested it on the plywood and it was not easy whatsoever and I was like if this is not easy for me I feel like it's not going to be easy to recreate and I want this to be like somewhat easy but you guys all of the Etsy reviews on this item are like it's so easy I love making this and I'm like how is everyone just whipping out their tools and cutting this out of plywood it just seems so hard um we picked up some foam which I'll let you guys get a little look at cut this with a hot wire so that could be a good option for us because it might be a lot easier to get the shape that we want I also think this I mean it it seems fine like it doesn't seem like it's going to break or anything um and it's just leaning up against my house in Los Angeles I don't know if I would recommend putting this in like a very snowy area or like you get like a ton of water or something I don't know like I live in LA but I'm going to try this and see how it goes we're actually just going to use the silhouette of the tree that she designed and project it onto our foam boards trace it on with a sharpie and then use a hot wire to cut it out of the foam before boring you anymore let's just see if this works first and then I'll give you a little bit more insight we have projected it this is going to be probably our largest tree now as you can see I'm 6 ft tall so this is going to be about 7 once we cut off the bottom as well this with a sharpie and then we're going to use our hot wire to cut it [Music] out the nice thing is is if you run it out of the lines it's really not that big of a deal because oh just went out sometimes you don't really know where you're going next [Music] so all done with tracing one and now we're going to cut it out and see how it works wow it's it sizzles look at that all right update for you guys so I am probably like what would you say Justin a third third a third of the way done um I've been spending like 20 minutes on this so far but it's really not bad with this tool it's smoking cuz it has some of the little like foam on there it just goes slowly so like you can see I insert it here and this is how quick I can cut it's like a very slow process but it's not bad like it's kind of ASMR in a sense like I'm just sitting here and tracing the line we have one tree how long did this take do you think like an hour and a half probably like yeah probably an hour and a half it took to cut but we also think that the tool we're using because it was like a $10 little wire cutter from Michaels is probably not the best but yeah this looks so good so far I love it I think it looks great really like the thickness of this because it kind of gives like the appearance of almost like snowfall I feel like on top of it cuz it's kind of jagged so once we paint it I think it's going to be really [Music] nice last night I tried to finish more and I broke my tool essentially only gets to 400° and so I ordered one on Amazon overnight this one gets to 850° let's see what's in here oh look how much longer this one is too so it's just going to make the process I think way easier if I had this yesterday we could have got them all done this is like a little foam from a vase that I bought but look you like cut out like the corner oh my gosh you guys this one works so much better it is crazy [Music] I'm on my last little section [Music] all right it is time to paint and we broke out the paint sprayer because I think this will be the quickest way to actually paint all of our cutouts over here and I've had this one for a while now and we've used it for many different things I actually have another paint sprayer as well that's like a more professional one that I use for indoor projects and this is like my craft paint sprayer I'll link this for you guys if you're curious I actually ended up getting a outdoor paint that was a paint and primer in one so hopefully this can also help with the durability of our pieces I matched it to the same color as my house which is soft shammy by Benjamin Moore and let's get to spraying these I basically want to give them like a solid coat so hopefully it's just like two coats on each and we should be good for my paint I opted for a outdoor weather protected paint that's a paint and primer in one but the outdoor paints are typically a little bit thicker so I did go ahead and mix in some water just to thin it down for my paint sprayer and I also matched it I believe I mentioned this earlier in the same exact color as my house so during the daytime it kind of has like a tone onone look you could definitely still see the trees against the wall color of the house or like the house color but then at night it really creates that beautiful kind of silhouetted simplistic clean [Music] look P apply with that we were going to cut out the trees from I'm actually going to use to create like a snow globe base for the window and that's just going to kind of create this like shelf cover that's just going to make it look a little bit more like a snow globe per se the great thing is that I need it to be 96 in long and this board is 96 in long so I'm just going to do my cut quickly we're going to screw it together slide it into place and of course there's a someone blowing some leaves right now at 5:00 p.m. now traditionally a snow globe does sit on a base with the globe on top so I want to create somewhat of a base to go underneath the window but it's also going to act as the support system for our trees to attach to it's just a shelf we're making a shelf look at the sunset tonight all of our trees have been painted and they look so good I actually brought one in because I'm going to start putting lights on the back side of this one this is the backs side the back side is going to be against the house so it's not going to show at all so I'm not going to even paintt this I actually ended up using the entire gallon of paint on these and I think it might be because just the thickness of the Ed I had to hit every spot so it took a little bit um other than that it looks incredible I love the shapes and I'm going to share with you how I'm going to be applying the lights on this and I actually picked up these lights this is what the box looks like I got these at Lowe's and they were only like $5 a pack I got four of these 100 light strands for our trees and then I got two two of the 50 light strands which were only like $3.50 a pack for our deer the kind of nice thing about these ones is it come split 50 and 50 which is great because we're going to start right at the center point here believe it or not I'm going to be using a duct tape to apply these and the reason is is that the duct tape sticks super super well to this kind of foam surface and I feel like nails will come out of this I do feel like screws would stay in however I don't want to screw these in I just feel like it's this is going to just as good and I genuinely feel like this will hold up and last you can undo one side this goes really quick just kind of like stretch them actually quite nicely fit just like that and then every so often I'll just place a piece of tape that will hold that strand in place and remember this is all going to be hidden so it does not matter how messy the backside looks [Music] so in order to give our trees some additional stability and also Mount them to our area that we are going to be adding them because I actually have a home completely stuck outed I can't really drill into the exterior of my home and a lot of people that recreate this project or that I've seen do this have wood siding on their house so they're able to drill right into their home however I wanted to go ahead and put these on 2x4s and we are going to be creating a base for it so I actually used some liquid nails to go ahead and adhere these 2x4s on the back and these were adhered down strong you guys as long as you get the adhesive across the entire board you are totally good to go let these sit overnight this here is the little kind of platform we made for the snow globe which is going to be the window here and I did this last night it was probably kind of hard to see the sun was setting but it actually was super simple I essentially cut four pieces of wood to cover the section I have just a little strip underneath at the bottom so that I don't get any stain on the concrete because we're actually going to stain this dark I think it's going to look really pretty against the White House the green trim and then we could bring our trees over we cut down some wood I have four pieces that are 24 in and then I have six pieces that are 36 in and these are just 2x4s same wood that we used on the back of the trees and so we are going to create like a little base and it's just going to be like three strips and then two along the side use some heavy duty screws to attach all together attach that then to the snow globe base over there this base is super easy to create I basically cut three 36in pieces in two 24in pieces the 24in pieces are going on the end here and the 36in pieces are going in the center just kind of spaced out evenly just like this to create our base and then we're going to going to screw our trees in dear to this section and I created two of these that way I can go ahead and attach them into our snow globe base on either side and I secured them in with about six screws [Music] each I use 3 and 1/2 in Long screws to secure the tree 2x4s that we added to the back of the trees to their base section there and the reason that I have three layers is so that I have three different areas to attach the three components to so we have a tree that's going to go in the far back as you can see here I'm attaching it with two screws on the front side and then also one on the right side there our second tree is going to go in the middle section and then our deer is going to pop against the front section [Music] there I actually ended up adding the 2x4 later on the back side of my deers to figure out where I wanted it to go added the adhesive attached it on the back side let it sit for about an hour and a half and then I went back through and screwed this piece into the snow glob base and that's what's going to hold up the deer because I wanted these to kind of pop out a bit more than they were the palm tree is currently shadowed because the sun set's on this side but we have everything mounted and it looks pretty good so far I also decided to emphasize the shape of the base that we created with some Christmas lights so I just ran two strands across all of the edges just to kind of show off the shape especially at night time when it's lit up finally feel like we're at a point where I can share with you guys without it being super Sunny look how good this looks I love the monochromatic Vibe I just think it looks so cool going to add a strip of Lights just around here to kind of like emphasize the window shape [Music] I want to go ahead and get the tree up before the sunsets as you can see it basically is but I'm not going to decorate the tree in this video I don't think because I have spent like 2 and 1/2 full days on this and I think I want to save some of the decorating for my Christmas decorating video this is just taking me a little longer than I thought I was planning on decorating the tree but I think you're going to get the effect anyways with just the tree in the window so I have like a little tree collar here and I love taking these actually and inverting them so they normally always are like this shape I flip them like this so that way when you put your tree in it it kind of looks like it's in a basket which I think looks a little cuter and my tree is from terrain it is uh the same tree I've had for many years I love this tree no billis no bis look how Gorge [Music] okay here is the tree that took me like 5 minutes to set up and it's currently I think in like a little flashing state which isn't I don't hate it okay I have this crazy super old antique rocking horse I got this at an estate sale years ago and I used in my last year's Christmas decor um it's probably from like the 1800s it is so cool this is literal horse hair on the rocking horse but I want this to kind of live in front almost as if it's in our snow globe large chunk of her hair just got ripped out not the horse snatching a WG we're going to need to repurpose that vintage horse hair and guys I think that that should conclude this I think I'm going to do a quick trip to Lowe's and see if I could find like any last minute like outdoor autra and then I think I can do the reveal for you so why don't I reveal this snow globe transformation indoor outdoor kind of vibe to you guys in 3 2 1 [Music] w I am just so happy with how this turned out and I hope that you guys like it as well this is the first time I've decorated the outside of my house for Christmas time and I just really love it like look at how that looks I think it looks so cool it's supposed to emulate a snow globe I just love the silhouetted trees the deer the elk over here we added little snowflakes up top and it looks so good so also do not forget to go check out my Instagram because I'm going to be sharing some really fun reveals over there transitions closeups like lots of additional content around this over there so definitely check it out and make sure to subscribe for more holiday content because there is so much more coming this is the first holiday video of many so I'll catch you my next one bye guys [Music]