We have officially lived in our house for 9 months.

9 MONTHS!

I can hardly believe it. Some moments it feels like 9 days; others like 9 years.

We love it. I pinch myself sometimes to think about how perfectly everything came together. This house literally had everything we were looking for (the only house that did) and we got such a good deal on it.

Are we totally settled in? Mostly. I say that because while all the rooms have the essentials in them – furniture and items to live on – there are still some finishing touches to be done.

At this point, I’m not pushing myself to have the house “Better Homes and Gardens” ready by any certain date. I find it goes better if I tackle a little bit here and there. Sometimes I need to have a moment of inspiration before I decide how to fill a space. Also, as I unpack boxes from the basement (yes, there are still quite a few) I find new homes for things (possibly different than where I had those same things in our old house).

All that to say, I’ve made some more progress in the last few weeks that I wanted to share.

Let’s start with the dining room. The last time we saw this tray, that I made using leftover fabric, it looked like this:

Since then, I’ve changed it up a bit by adding a vase of fresh flowers and a candle that my sister gave me for Mother’s Day (it’s actually yellow inside so sometimes I leave the lid off for an added punch of color and extra fragrance).

I like the grouping of 3 MUCH better and love the touch of organic and color added by having the flowers (also ties in nicely with the plant next to it).

Moving on to the kitchen….

So one of the things I found when digging through boxes was a bag full of magnets. See, we have a tradition that we buy a magnet from every new place we visit. However, our refrigerator is stainless steel so the front is not magnetized but the sides are. I decided to make a “wall of magnets” on the side with our travel ones.

I think it looks pretty cool and it’s a fun thing to see when you walk in from the garage! Isabella likes checking out all the different places and finding them on the map we have downstairs.

The kitchen in our old house was done in a coffee theme so I have a lot of wall hangings and decorations related to coffee. The new kitchen doesn’t have much room for that kind of stuff as we have a ton of cabinets and no real ‘free’ wall space.

I was able to find a sliver of wall wide enough for these little guys though.

They add that little extra something that the kitchen needed in that corner.

I also put some stuff up on top of the cabinets (pretend the counters are perfectly clean and that you don’t see the pile of dirty dishes).

Here’s the close-up.

I’d like to keep adding to the top of the cabinets as I think it provides additional interest and color without being too obvious, but I want to be careful not to overcrowd them.

While I was sorting through kitchen boxes, I came across my stack of cookbooks. I don’t use all of them (a couple I’ve never used), but they’re a natural item to display in the kitchen so I put them on the bottom of this accent table.

If you look back here, you’ll notice that originally I had some coffee trinkets on that bottom shelf. Those got put up on top of the cabinets to make room for the books!

Now let’s wander in to the living room, shall we?

So let’s start with my FABULOUS clearance find. I was shopping at Kohl’s and wandered over to the clearance bin in the home goods section. Nothing caught my eye until I glanced down at the bottom shelf and saw a beautiful orange/grey/tan/white rug. I noticed it because those are the colors in our living room, along with turquoise and the occasional splash of green. I picked it up and didn’t see any tags on it so I put it back and walked away. But I didn’t get far. I turned around and looked at it again, unsure. Do we really need a rug in there? What if it was a lot of money?

Then I remembered the Goodwill Incident of last week. See, I had spotted a really nice standalone full length mirror in one of the stores that would have been perfect in our bedroom. I didn’t get it because I didn’t feel like messing with hauling it to the car, blah blah. Well after a few days it was nagging at me so I went back and the mirror was gone.

Lesson learned: trust your gut!

So I took that rug up front and it was marked down 80% to $15!! Plus I had a 20% off coupon! Done and done!

And it looks awesome…

While we’re here, I’ll show you the rest of the living room, which is the one room in the house that is the most done.

By the way, those orange tub chairs were a garage sale find by CJ. He got both for $30. We had them in the basement of the old house, just to stage it, figuring we might get rid of them once we moved. The movers plopped them in the living room and we loved how it looked and ended up building the rest of the room around them!

I really like the unexpectedness of the round ottoman/coffee table. Ties in the curves of the tub chairs with the leather of the couch.

We bought that rocker when Isabella was born, to use for nursing at night and such. Since we’re way past all that, it got placed in here for extra seating. That’s pretty much where you’ll find CJ any night of the week that we’re home.

And of course the fireplace.

By the way, that back wall with the black and white pics is where we want to put built-in shelves. I think it would look awesome to have white built-ins with a space in the middle for a TV and picture. We will hopefully get going on that project soon…

All in all, I love how the room has come together. It’s very eclectic and unique (you won’t really find anything in our house that’s too matchy-matchy).

Couple more little things to point out.

This tray was born out of necessity.

See, I was painting my nails one night and put a polish remover soaked cotton ball on the table without thinking….and it ate away at the finish. Oops. What’s a girl to do but cover it up?

I made this tray using a picture we got in Ireland and a frame with the stand torn off (and some felt ‘feet’ tacked to it so as not to scratch up the table). Works like a charm!

I found this tray at Goodwill for $3.

That little ottoman was getting stained up from CJ putting his drinks on it so now he has a tray to put them in!

Finally, some additions to the gallery wall.

Here’s the before:

And the after:

Can you spot the additoins?

Yep, this collage I did of all the photo booth pics we’ve taken over the years.

We sort of have a thing about photo booths. If we see one while out on a date or traveling or something, we stop and get some pics taken. What can I say, it’s cheap fun!

I also added these 2 little prints that I found in the basement. Both of them are original prints I did in college.

So that’s the latest on the house! I have a lot of fun digging up new stuff and finding “homes” for them all. More updates to come as we continue to progress!

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Ever since we moved in to our house, I’ve wanted to create a “gallery wall” along the stairs to showcase family photos and fun prints.

(source)

It only took me 7 months to get it done!

Part of the reason it’s taken so long is because I wasn’t sure what images I wanted to use. We have so much more wall space in the new house that I’ve had to slowly get a feel for a room before deciding what to hang in it. What worked on say the living room wall in the old house doesn’t quite fit in the new one.

That and my perfectionism. I mean, what if I hang up a picture and it looks bad? Eeh gads! The world might end!

(source)

At any rate, on Sunday I was playing in the basement with Isabella and started going through boxes to see what was in them. I came across a framed piece of art that we had in the kitchen of the old house, and which I had not been able to find since moving. I immediately knew it would be perfect as part of the gallery wall and suddenly I was inspired.

I started pulling together family photos and other small pieces of art that would work with it.

My 2 rules:

1. Each piece had to have either a black or white frame. This would keep the wall unified despite the images themselves being different, and
2. Nothing larger than an 11 x 14” frame because I wanted each piece to be medium to small size so they’d be more of a collection.

I also didn’t want TOO many pics – I didn’t want to cover the wall completely.

OK so that’s 3 rules.

Once I had the pics, I had to determine the best way to lay them all out together. You can’t just randomly start hanging them up; you have to put a little thought in to it first. What I did was trace each picture frame on a piece of white paper and wrote on it what the picture was and what color of frame it had. Then I laid out all the pieces of paper on the floor and moved them around until I had an arrangement I liked. From there, I used a small piece of tape to put them up on the wall to see if the arrangement translated vertically.

I left the paper up on the wall for half the day in order to “live with it” for a bit. Seeing them from different angles and walking by them several times helped cement the arrangement.

I used this “break” to bake up some Peanut Butter Truffle Brownies.

OMG. These are so good. Even CJ, who normally doesn’t like peanut butter in desserts, raved about them.

But I digress.

Also during my “picture hanging marinating period” I had to run to the store and buy a couple replacement frames as some of the ones I had were a little beaten up or not made for hanging on the wall. Turned out Target had all their frames on sale, plus I had a coupon for buy 2 frames get one free (I needed 5 frames) AND I had a gift card. So the frames were practically free! Ok maybe not but still darn cheap none-the-less ($28 for all 5 frames).

Now it was time to hang!

This would normally be the part of a DIY blog where a person talks about some really cool tool they used to mark holes on the walls so that everything was nice and even and aligned. And how they used a level to get it all straight.

That person would not be me.

I pretty much just eye-balled it. If I were doing a gallery wall where all the frames were the same size and I wanted them squared off and even, I would have taken more time. But since I had some variance and the point was to be purposely misaligned, I just went for it.

And it turned out pretty darn good.

I had to get CJ to help me with the picture in the upper left-hand corner because it was too high for me to reach (and needed a screw and a drill), but otherwise it was all me.

The Chrysler Building print was a Goodwill find for $2.99. I like it because it represents my previous life in NYC (I lived there on and off for about a year) and it’s an architectural type drawing (CJ and I are architecture geeks).

The white “You Make Me Smile” print was also a Goodwill find for $2.99. I liked the simplicity of it and the message. I kept it down low so that when Isabella can read, she’ll see it every day and know I was thinking of her when I bought it.

The “Don’t Be Afraid of Tomorrow, God is Already There” piece was the one from our old kitchen that got this whole project kicked off. It was a gift from a friend many moons ago.

And the rest are pics of family. For now I’m happy with these 9 pieces. Obviously there’s room to expand if we decide to add more but I also don’t want to take over the whole wall either.

Not yet anyway.

Oh and Isabella was a big help in taking this project over the finish line…

After doing all this work, CJ and Isabella decided some yoga was in order, to stretch out their muscles.

Plow anyone?

And don’t forget downward dog!

And it all made her so tired, that she slept part of the night half in and half out of her bed.

So there you have it! The start of the gallery wall. I see this as a fluid space that will change and grow over time. For now, it makes me really happy. Every time I walk by the stairs and see it, I smile.

With each project that gets completed, the house feels more and more like ours.

Have a great evening! I’m off to scarf down a PB truffle brownie!

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