Living Room Pillows

Our living room is our most finished room but there are still some details that the room needs to consider it completely finished. Then again what makes a room complete after all? Finishing touches definitely make a difference, rugs, pillows, both of which we are still working on. The other day I went out to look for throw pillows. I am by no means a designer so I had no clue what would work in our living room. All I know is that since our colored paint efforts always fail, our color would have to come in accessories. So, I purchased all of these just to see what would work:

I honestly had no idea how to decide. I didn't exactly love each pillow, nor did I know what I would love. After discussing it with Chris, what did we decide on?

These, though I would have preferred more white than cream. After a while the crazed weeds started to annoy me, but we kept them.

We only purchased two because we just weren't feeling them completely. We'll either eventually put them in another room, or find a way to add additional pillows that make them look better. Maybe I'll even try my hand at making my own pillows! I'm sure that would be cheaper. Who knows, either way, what you're seeing here is more of our living room in progress. We're looking into tables but I think we have to get rid of that bulky television stand for tables to work. We could mount our television but it seems to be a bit small for our tall walls.  We'll also need a television for our family room once we are able to make it family friendly. So until Best Buy or HHGregg start giving out televisions, we're working with what we have. Not to mention, I really don't like the idea of a television being the focal point of a room. I know there are ways to disguise a television such as a faux fireplace mantel, or using a frame to make it blend better.

Progress is progress though! We love this room as it presently is and look forward to making it even better!

Tatum

9 Frames Finished!

Remember way back when we were trying to decide what to do with our tall wall and decided to go with the 9 frames? Well initially the frames were too large so we decided to do a little homework to get it right the next time.

So we taped, measured and leveled to make sure our spacing would work.

It was important that the frames were not too close to the television so not to cause a distraction.  We then purchased a few of these frames as they were on sale at Joann's Fabrics:

Here is a comparison of the first frame that we purchased versus the second.

 

Though both frame sizes are 16x20 the one on the right has a much larger outer frame which is why it was enormous. So even though we now had the correct size frames unfortunately the matting was cream instead of white. As we priced matting we knew that we would have to improvise because we were not about to pay $8.00 plus per piece for matting! That is paper extortion and we are ballers on a budget! So we eventually hung up all nine frames:

and the little stock image girl stared at us daily for the longest time because we had no idea what we were going to put in the frames.  We thought, maybe some type of fabric but the idea of trying to roam through Joann's to find 9 frames worth of different patterns that worked together seemed impossible. Then we thought that we'd print out random shapes but again finding and choosing the right shapes and colors proved to be yet another challenge. Finally after many Google searches we finally found images that we were able to put together quite nicely! Once we sized them appropriately we took them to Kinkos and had them printed out on 11x17. While there we cut them down to the 11x14 size that we needed and we were in business! What do you think?

Getting the images into the frames perfectly was a bit of a challenge. First there was the matting issue. What we decided to do was utilize the little stock girl! I simply turned her photo around which gave us a solid white background. I then put the printout on the center of the matting to measure the spacing and marked the 4 corners with a pen. After which I sprayed the back of the printout with spray adhesive and very carefully laid the printout on the white paper within the 4 marks. I did this for all nine printouts and surprisingly they all ended up being rather even. I'd show photos of this process but it was late, Chris was asleep and I wanted to get them finished! After each printout was affixed to the white paper, I put the cream matting on back to fill space and viola I have my "white matting". What do you think?

We love it! Now we just have to figure out the tiny television and the space on the left and right of the wall.

We have a lot of wall but at least we have a start!

Tatum

9 Frames It Is

Remember our tall wall dilemma that I spoke about here? Well we picked a winner and our many many commenters (all 2 of them) concurred! We went with the 9 frames!

 

Now for purchasing them, soon thereafter we went to Michaels and found this beauty:

We really liked this frame and it was on sale! From $60 to $30! What a deal right? Yeah not really when we are buying 9. Even though our budget minds were going to purchase the frames incrementally, we convinced ourselves that they were worth it because we wanted our walls to look good! So we left the store with 2. Once we got home we soon realized that though we have tall walls, we don't have mansion sized walls and though the picture window was 16x20 the outer frame itself measured a whopping 20 x 24 which looked WAY too big.

So, we decided to do some rudimentary measurements to get an idea of what we think we actually need. You'd think that we would have done this first but since I was involved, my motto was MUST BUY FRAMES, there was no additional logic that went into that decision.

Enter painters tape:

 Tape measure:

 leveler:

  And ladder:

 

And it was game on! Stay tuned to see how we got it right the second time around!

Tatum

Tall Wall, Very Tall Wall

Remember when we first put some decor in our living room, causing me great satisfaction?

 

Well I don't think I mentioned it then but this particular wall is 10 feet tall. Pretty high huh? Well that was just the far side of one wall. Starting there, our wall begins to vault, up to about 20 feet:

This wall, presently looking rather blank is a rather tall order in our book. What to do what to do. Maybe we should fill the space with a large clock:

 

Now that is a ginormous clock. It's bigger than the TV stand (which is another cluttered eyesore that I must rectify). Do they actually make clocks this large? Or is this a shoddy attempt at photoshop on my end lol?

O.k. so much for the clock. How about some artwork:

 

Now this is rather pretty. Lets see how it would look on the tall wall:

 

Much better than the clock don't you think? However it still doesn't quite do it for me. And this photo is only showing a section of the wall. Remember, the vault started at 10 feet so there is quite a bit of space to the right that is not captured on this photo. I think we need to fill the space a bit more. How about some snazzy frames! Frames that look a little like this:

Only minus the random strangers in it, and times 9

 

Ahh I'm liking this much better. Thoughts? And I now admit, that I am a photoshop novice as clearly noticeable in the equally flawed 9 frames. But hey, practice makes perfect right?

Tatum

I'm also linking to Make It 4 Monday at Cottage Instincts! And Inspiration Friday at Southern In My Heart

Decor Needed, Any Decor!

If you've been following this blog then you know that we have been tackling a lot of tasks and the one thing that we've finished are the living room and dining room floors. We still have an incomplete kitchen; and a dining room that initially had multiple personalities but now just needs some flare. So considering that we have so much to do I needed to work with what we had and look for a deal!

After rummaging through our unpacked boxes I pulled out these two pieces of artwork that used to hang in one of our bathrooms at our condo. But they fit perfectly right here, what do you think?

 

This artwork made me VERY happy! Considering that all of the walls were blank. There was much more that we needed however. So I went to Target and purchased these:

So we measured and leveled:

 

We hung the curtain rods:

 

And Tada!!

Now we noticed immediately that the rods I chose looked a bit skimpy but WHO CARES?!! The room is coming to life! (one day I'll replace them because deep down they bother me...just a little bit...and my impatient self preferred to hang them instead of taking them back for something bigger)

You might have even noticed the lights. Initially we were using mismatched lamps because since we had so much more room in our new home we needed more lighting and had to place lights from other rooms in the living room. After going to Bed Bath and Beyond, I came home with these beauties:

 

That adorable little light at the bottom is a night light! I was so tickled by it.  

Those skinny little curtain rods hung there on the wall for a good two weeks before we finally put something on them, so after another day at Bed Bath and Beyond we purchased a set of red drapes.... Well it wasn't that easy. We needed 95" drapes because our walls are rather high. The particular store we were at only had one panel, so what did we do? Buy that one panel and drive to another store to get their only 95" panel of the same curtain.  We needed two more after that and the very last two that existed were out of driving range so they shipped them to us.  You might be wondering why we didn't just purchase an entirely new set that was in stock, well as previously mentioned I was looking for a deal and these particular drapes were being discontinued which meant MAJOR DISCOUNT! So we went home and hung a panel on each rod and waited for the other two. Once they arrived we immediately put them up and for the first time in a long time we had one partial completed room that felt like someone lived in it.

Since we don't have a foyer we dusted off a mirror and table that was still packed away waiting for a permanent home, and created a little foyer table area to the right of the door:

Ahh, if only the rest of the house felt this pleasant. It's getting there though! 

Tatum

I am linking to the Trendy Treehouse! Check her out!

Lets Speed This Up

Because honestly, how many days can you talk about installing hardwoods?

There goes that shirtless handyman again :-)

And......Done!

Well almost done. There are several random things that we still have to do, like put in the baseboards, sand and paint the dining room walls and get rid of that hideous wall paper trim:

But for the most part, the floors are finished:

Whew!! That was a lot of work. But well worth it, we love our new floors!!

Tatum

Tool Time!

When we finally got around to laying the floors, the first thing that we did was lay them down to see what they would look like.

We were also not sure if we wanted to leave a section hardwood free for the non-existent foyer:

Not having a real foyer, we considered laying tile in the area but later thought that it would look a bit weird so we decided to take the floors all the way across.

Chris was entirely psyched to jump right in using his new snazzy power tools like this miter saw:

And this wonderful table saw that I got him for his birthday:

Actually I don't really know how wonderful it is. But I do know that he was so excited to open the big box. He had no clue what it was.

So needless to say, when the floors came in, it was time to cut...saw...whatever. No preparations needed...literally:

Yep, I know. Obviously I was nowhere to be found because this would not have been acceptable. Take a closer look...at the sawdust FLYING TOWARD HIS EYES!!

No, shoes, no mask, no protective goggles and from the looks of it almost no fingers! Gotta love this man, Mr. Invincible. I do understand his enthusiasm and as previously mentioned, we're good at showing you what not to do when you're DIY-ing.

However, this is unacceptable! We may not know all the rules but we know to use protection!! Most of us learned that in high school...he he he...(my apologies, sometimes I think I'm a comedian) Not funny huh? Ooookay, moving on!

When I got home I took care of things:

And trust me, he's wearing shoes this time. I know he isn't wearing a shirt but when you think about it, just how much protection would a bit of cotton provide him anyway? I was perfectly fine with him being shirtless with a power saw lol!

Tatum