Tonight I wanted to share a project I finished last weekend. My focus right now is on our foyer/dining room, and I wanted something to fill this wall behind our front door *without* sticking out too much where the door swings back. I kinda came up with the idea randomly both for aesthetic and sentimental reasons. 

I found the picture frames at Kirkland's, and the letters are from Hobby Lobby. I went with oil rubbed bronze, with hints of weathered gold. Gold is becoming an accent in the foyer/dining room area so I wanted touches here too. I spray painted the "O" gold just to jazz it up a little bit. For that I used Design Master spray paint in Gold Medal from Michael's. IMO it's the BEST gold spray paint out there. Let's take a closer look...

I filled the frames with pictures of places we have called home over the years. The top row is filled with our grandparents' houses, the second row our parents', and the third row is our townhome where we started out. In the beginning I wanted to hang two rows of 3, but ended up changing things up in order to not crowd the light switch and use more of the wall. It was a happy accident because things trickled down in chronological order.

I printed the photos off at Costco, and had them all edited to a sepia tone to look more cohesive. I love how they look all grouped together in the frames.

I have to say this is one of my favorite things in the house. Walking by and seeing all the places that have been home to us over the years just gives me the warm fuzzies everytime.

P.S. Yes we finally hung Goldie the ram over the office doors AND that's a new rug for the front door. More updates to come!

Seeing Stripes

The big, empty wall in the back of our dining room had been bugging me since we moved in...so today we did something about it! I'd been inspired by several blogs using basic stripes in neutral colors and decided to give a try. It was hard to pass up considering we had the extra trim/ceiling paint left over from our builder sitting in the basement. All we needed was a 4" roller and some Frog Tape. Honestly, the hardest part of the whole thing was taping off the stripes and getting them level. 

B was in charge of lightly tracing the lines across the wall with a pencil, while checking the level the whole way. This would be a LOT easier if you have a laser level, but we worked with what we had!

Here it is after all the taping. Keep in mind that your taped contrast color stripes will look bigger than your taped wall color stripes.The stripes showing our original wall color needed to have the tape INSIDE the marked line. In contrast, the white stripe needs to be however many inches you need OUTSIDE the tape. Does that make sense? For us, we had 5 lines that were 18.5 inches wide each.

Once taping was done, I got to paint! It took two coats to get the coverage we needed.

After 2 coats of paint, it was time to peel the tape. You want to peel the tape off in a downward motion, while the paint is still wet. I can't say enough about Frog Tape...totally worth the extra $$ for clean lines!

Here it is all finished! It's amazing the difference just a few bold stripes made in this room. I have some ideas for some simple art to bring color to that wall too...guess that will be my next project!

Have a fab night!