House Updates

 It's taken us a while, but slowly we have been working on making our house feel more like a home, more like our home. After six months-ish of living with no curtain on our back sliding glass door I finally got my act together and finished picking up the supplies for the curtain project I'd been planning for months. David sometimes teases me about my tendency to put something off and then one day just decide that it has to be done right then and then spend the next 24 hours working on it. This project was no different. Once I decided that I was really going to do it - Lydia and I went to the store that day, finished getting the supplies and started working on it before David got home from work. David watched Lydia for me while I was working on it and then I finished painting the curtain panel around eleven that night. After hanging the panel we realized that we were going to need a second panel so the next day I bought a second panel and completed that one during Lydia's nap time. 

I really love the way that they turned out. The panels were $10 each (canvas drop cloths from Walmart) and the paint was another $20. I got the curtain rod at Ross for $12 and the curtain clip/rings on clearance at Walmart for $2 a package. All in all, it ended up being more expensive than I'd hoped (If I had just bought a gallon of the yellow paint originally it would have been less expensive but I bought two quarts, one for the first panel and then one when I realized I needed a second panel.) 

It's not perfect, and it took me a couple of days of chanting "It just adds character" every time I saw the few paint drips that were on the tan part for me to be okay with the imperfections - but now I just smile when I see the happy yellow color in my kitchen. I love yellow. 

The next project to tackle was the long wall in our main room. We've been brainstorming what to do there since we moved in, but it's kind of a hard space because the couch is not centered on the wall. I really didn't want to do a picture arrangement over the couch and then a secondary picture on the right side of the wall. I don't like the idea of chopping up the space into two sections, but it was hard to find something that would look good going over both spaces and uniting them. My friend Kajsa did the greatest job at this, uniting the space over her piano and TV, and I looked and looked for a large object like the window pane and wreath that she used but I just couldn't find anything that I loved for the price that I was willing to pay (which was like a tiny amount of money). However, we had a whole bedroom full of picture frames from our last apartment that have been looking for a place to go and so we decided that a picture frame gallery wall was our best bet. 

Sidenote: Before we moved I was in a book club in our old ward. Each member of the book club takes a turn hosting and it's really fun. In January, I was assigned/volunteered for hosting the month of October. They knew that we would be in our new house by then and were all willing to drive over. (Lets be honest - it's only like two minutes away from where we used to live.) So when we moved into our home in February, and we decided to wait and feel things out before we threw things up on the walls, I told David "That is fine, but I'm hosting book club in October so this room has to be done by then. Fast forward to two nights before we were scheduled to host book club and our wall was still very, very empty. 

So I did what any self-respecting Photoshop lover would do. I took pictures of all the frames that I wanted to use, took a picture of the blank wall, and played around with them to see if we could find something that we liked. I did a couple, but they were too chaotic for David. So he jumped on the bandwagon and created his own (the bottom left) but it was a little too symmetrical for me. So I adjusted his just a tiny bit and came up with our final design (the top right). 

We laid out the pictures on the ground and kept the photoshop file open on the computer then just kind of went at it, checking back at the picture on the computer to make sure that we will following the plan. It ended up a little bit different but I love it! It's amazing the difference that having that wall filled makes. It's not like before we would walk into the room and say "This room feels empty, like someone just moved in." But now you walk in and it just feels so good, like a real home.

We loved the updates so much that we decided to celebrate with our favorite Aggie Ice Cream - Aggie Blue Mint. (Complements of David's brother Kevin, our only sibling to follow in our Aggie-loving footsteps.) We love our home and are so blessed to be where we are.