Entry Extraordinaire

I love Young House Love and Bower Power.  I really do.  They're a couple of the very few blogs I follow regularly.  Other than their general awesomeness, you know what I really like?  The fact that they give everyone a kick in the rear every few months to actually do a project we've pinned from Pinterest!  What a novel idea!  So without further ado, here's...

Woot!

YHL and Katie teamed up with Emily from Sparkle Meets Pop, and Renee from Red Bird Blue for this challenge, so be sure to go see what fantastic things they've all dreamed up.

Me?  Finally got around to a project that's been waiting in the wings for months years?  It's been a long time.  I pinned this picture ages ago.  It was one of the first things I pinned when Pinterest was a new and exciting, "I finally got my invitation, did you get yours?" kind of thing.

Unfortunately, the link no longer works, so I'm not sure who to give credit to.  But isn't it kind of darling?  Well, I like it.  Convincing Anthony was a slightly different matter, but a man's mind isn't cut out to accept empty frames hanging on the wall.  I suppose the same could be said for a lot of women.  Maybe I only love it because I'm scared of art...it makes me feel incompetent.  We have strayed.

So, I collected garage sale and thrift store frames and mirrors for quite a while, then spread them out on my garage floor and gave them the ol' flat white spray paint treatment.  And then left them there for so long that I had collected more frames and had to re-do the ones I'd already done.  I'm really on top of things.  This was a project that made Anthony sigh a lot.

I believe I can pinpoint the problem, though.   Fear of hanging all these frames.  Ugh.  Only a crazy person would enjoy it.  

So here's where we started.  This is the lovely sight that would have met you when we first moved in.  It's very...yellow.

 Apparently, after this day, I never took another picture of our entry again.  I searched through three years worth of pictures this morning trying to find one.  Elusive little entry.  Here's the best one I came across.  With a bewildered Darcy in the foreground.  Basically, the only upgrade for almost three years was a new light fixture and an IKEA table (that you can't see).

There's no mind-blowing tutorial for this process.  I envisioned laying everything out and measuring and coming up with a fantastic way to space everything...instead I started slapping things up on the wall.  I started with the bigger mirrors, then filled everything else in.

Here is the one in-progress shot I took.  Anthony (though not totally excited about the whole thing) very kindly hung most everything while I stood back and said, "A little to the left, dear!"  He's a keeper.

So here's the final result!  Finally...something on my wall.  And I think Anthony has come around a bit.  He said "I love it", although I'm not sure that love quite reached his eyes...

Aaaand one more.  Can't stop the picture taking.

 I'm super happy with it.  How have YOU filled up a giant wall?  With actual art?  I'm impressed.  And intimidated.

P.S.  If you're interested in Bertrand the Giraffe, I shared his story here.

It's Where We Live

The living room.  My...this house tour is taking a while.  I blame it on camera/computer/laziness issues.  Here is what we started with last year:

Talk about a clean(ish) slate.  When we moved in we had exactly two pieces of living room furniture...a couch and a bookshelf.  Oh, and a really terrible rug.  Slooowly we've saved up (and visited a LOT of yard sales and thrift stores...and Ikea) to start turning it into something we really love.

Everything in this space has meaning and some sort of story.  We don't have one single expensive or out-of-the-ordinary piece, but we have a lot of comfortable things...useful things...and things that make us smile.  After all, it is just stuff...why have anything too nice or irreplaceable to really use?  I guess we don't love it because of the actual things, we love it because it's home.

Moving Along....

Let's check out our bedroom next.  Here it is in all its glory when we moved in:

 Lovely, don't you think?  The first thing to go was the fan.  A very close second was, of course, that happy flowery border.

Fast forward several months, and we finally broke out the paint brushes!  We used the same color as we used in our kitchen - Sherwin William's "Rain".

This is our very dear friend JP.  Contrary to what you may think, he is not just our friend because of his very useful height.  Also, although it looks like the menfolk are the only ones slaving away on this room, what you can't see is Jamie and I painstakingly giving the kitchen cabinets yet another coat of paint while all this is going on...

Here's the final(ish) product!

The furniture we already had.  The light fixture was thirty-five whopping bucks at World Market (we put it together with a simple light kit from Home Depot), and the big mirror and shelves over the bed are from Ikea.  I can't wait to get at those lamps and put up some more art, but it's improving!

Again, I don't have very complete picture of the room since I currently don't have a camera.  Sigh.  That's what happens when you leave it outside in the rain for three days.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someday soon I will no longer have that excuse...

Where to Begin....

I suppose I should start taking you through the house!  We'll start with the kitchen.  Probably my favorite room...seeing as that's where the food is stored.  When we moved in, it looked like this:

What's not to love, right?  It was more like, "Well.  I mean...it could be worse!  I bet that wallpaper will just fall right off.  And we can afford all new counter tops and appliances and cabinets, right?  Sure!  This is our first house!  We'll be fine."  A year later, we're still working on some of that, but here's the "After" (we'll have to talk about the process on another day...)

I threw in that last picture of Darcy so perhaps you wouldn't notice I don't have a picture of the other side of the kitchen.  Let's not get caught up in the details, people!  Embrace the suspense.

Still some work to be done in there, but that's what we've got so far.  I feel like this is where the expert bloggers would throw in some thought-inducing questions, like "Anybody else over-hauling their kitchen these days?" or "Who else hates painting cabinets as much as I do?" something along those lines.  I guess I'll leave that to the real bloggers for now...