Your Front Door Fall Floral Display Is Hiding in Your Thrift Store’s Purse Aisle

After seeing how someone used a bike basket to collect letters from their mail slot, I learned that it really pays to think outside the box when styling your front door and entryway. But a new front door idea has me convinced that baskets and purses make the best decor pieces. In fact, if you’re not already shopping the thrift store purse section for front porch decor, you’re missing out.

“Using thrift store items the wrong way, but it just feels so right,” Amy from Yours Truly Home on Instagram wrote over a recent video, adding in the caption, “How I actually use my thrift finds — everything is just much cuter with flowers if you ask me.”

Amy’s first “wrong” (as she calls it in the video) hack is to use a vintage leather satchel bag in lieu of a traditional front door basket to display flowers and greenery. Ingenious!

The antique style of this bag makes it aesthetically perfect for front door styling for fall. Picture it with branches of faux autumn leaves, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, or even cornstalks. 

As she explained in the comment section, Amy didn’t feel too bad about upcycling this vintage bag into something else because it was a bit too awkward to use as an actual handbag. “The bag is beautiful but the leather is a little stiff and also I am short so the bag hangs too low for me,” she said. However, if you keep it out of direct sunlight, the bag you choose should stay in good-enough shape to go back to being a bag at the end of the season.

If your local thrift store doesn’t have a vintage satchel available, consider this purse from Etsy. It looks large enough to hold several faux flowers, while also being spacious enough for your laptop, notebook, planner, or any other things you’d need to carry around once fall is over. 

Although something like this vintage satchel is the ideal bag to find for this front porch DIY, you can get creative with other styles of bags, too. A slouchy leather hobo bag could definitely work and give a more casual feel. But you could also experiment with structured tote bags (think: L.L. Bean-style totes) or basket bags, too. As long as you use faux flowers in your arrangement, your bags should stay fairly clean, and you won’t have to worry about adding water to the equation to keep the flowers fresh.

You’ll never look at the thrift store purse section the same way again. I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open for bags that might just look better on my front door than in my closet!