"Carpet" Diem

I love this rug so much! It's pretty much the most awesome thing I've ever bought. It almost makes it look like we have a normal living room! If you look at it from the hall it even looks like we're finished painting because the door wall and mirror wall are totally DONE as far as painting goes. Unfortunately this gives us even less of a reason to move everything back out of here to grout the tile. Perhaps I even subconsciously bought the rug so I would notice less of the un-grouted tile... Either way, pretty new rug!

I also started unpacking the few boxes we still have left of picture frames, posters, artwork, etc. that we haven't put up because we haven't had finished walls until now! These are some reproductions of old (20s-60s) Texas Tech football program covers that came from a calendar we got as a gift a few years ago. I love them and they just so happen to have a lot of similar colors to the rug! They definitely belong in here. Now I just have to figure out how I want them to look on the wall. Check back in about a month and maybe they'll be hanging by then!

FYI, I got my rug on sale at Fab.com which I have recently become totally addicted to! The site sells so many cool things and I want them alllllllll! They shipped my rug to me for free since it was over $75 (all 53 pounds of it!) and I am definitely seeing myself trying to convince Nick to let my buy more stuff from the site in the near future. After all, we need new towels, a new summer blanket, new plates, more art, new light fixtures... I could go on forever.

Barking Up the Right Tree

Stenciling is hard, you guys. I guess it's not so much difficult to do as it is SUPER time-consuming and slow. Despite that, I am going to stencil this entire hallway, even if it takes me all year! I first saw this stencil ages ago (probably on Pinterest) and I have always loved it, so when we bought the house I knew I would finally have a chance to use it in my own house! I'm only three repeats in, but I love it sooooo much so far. We intend to add crown molding at the ceiling, so I won't need to do anything with the top few inches, and new baseboards will take care of the bottom few inches, but there are still about four inches at the bottom that I'll need to do to finish out the pattern.

These pictures also show our fancy shmancy thermostat that we can control from our phones and the internets! It's like the coolest piece of technology we have in the house so far, but will certainly not be the last. We are aiming for the smart house of the future here. That colorful canvas is just a little painting that I did a few months ago that I'm using to cover the hole in the wall where we removed the old doorbell cover that was dirty, yellowing, and probably a bajillion years old. It was ugly, and now it's not.

I was a little worried at first that since we have such randomly textured walls (thanks, former owners) the stenciling would not go very smoothly (ha) but we both really like the way it adds a little more interest to the trees so each one is a bit more unique and actually more branch-like. I wouldn't try to do a super-precise geometric pattern on these walls, but for this organic pattern it worked perfectly. I'm very pleased with it!

I hope someone will tell me if my punny titles are super lame so I'll know I should stop it.