Living Room Changes

 I really love the way our living room is turning out. Here are a few things we've added lately...

A snake plant in a pretty new pot from The Natural Gardener

A cool metal "h" that my future cousin found on the side of the road (??) that I painted bright shiny red!

The most exciting thing we've done in here recently is add a GIANT decal to our GIANT mirror that's right smack-dab in the middle of the wall (which makes it very hard to decide where the TV should go, by the way).

Before: No decal, just the most humongous mirror anyone's ever seen.

Half up... And it stayed this way for a good three weeks because we were so reluctant to do the other half.

But finally... it's done!

The decal was delivered in two pieces, one for the city-scape and one for the tree-scape. This is not a re-positionable decal, so we basically had one shot to get it right. The first (top) half was a disaster. It started going on wonky really fast and before we could do anything it was stuck and there was really nothing we could do about it except smooth out as much as possible and cry over some really bad wrinkles. Nick was so upset that he wanted to repurchase the darn thing and start all over!! We got it on sale the first time, but I was definitely not game for spending another $50 only to have the same thing happen again and also have to deal with removing the first bit we put down. Mr. Perfectionist had to just deal with it.

Then we waited until we could work up the motivation to do the other half. We knew the top half was all kinds of crooked in the middle so there was no way the bottom half was going to line up perfectly, so we cut that sucker into three pieces and put them each up individually, which really helped save our sanity this time. We ended up with two extra seams this way, but the benefit was not wanting to strangle each other the whole time. Nobody got strangled and we got all the trees up pretty smoothly, so everything turned out OK in the end. Nick just has to stand really far back when he looks at it so he doesn't get angry every time. :P

Nick finally got the crown molding removed from the beam in the middle of the living room (yes, you read that right, crown molding on a solid wood beam) so my next project will be painting it brown so we can pretend it's pretty stained wood instead of a potentially gorgeous beam that someone painted BEIGE of all things.

From Grandma's House

Three months after falling off the blog train I'm back with a post I actually wrote in June but never posted! 

My parents were up in Ohio about a month three months ago clearing out tons of stuff from her basement, closets, cupboards, etc. No storage area was left untouched! When my mom came to visit me last weekend, she brought several of these things with her, and now we have all of these lovely reminders of my grandma around the house, which makes me really happy.

My grandma collected these chickens in every color!

This plant stand was in a box in her basement. It was clearly assembled at some point but I don't know if I ever saw it. Somehow every last little piece except a single screw end cap was still in the box.

We don't know who crocheted this afghan, but I love it! (We actually have moved this bed upstairs and now have a borrowed full-size in here.)

I'm somewhat concerned that this may be the beginning of a map collection. We already have an Austin city map hanging in the guest room and a world map that has yet to be hung up anywhere so if Nick isn't careful I might just sand down the walls and wallpaper them with maps when he isn't looking!

The globe is old enough that it still has Egypt shown as UAR and has a bunch of other interesting differences from how the world looks now.

I promise I won't disappear for another three months this time. Summer is ending and we've already taken our annual overseas trip, so we are gone for fewer weekends and there's finally time to work on house things again. Plus, I've started painting the kitchen!