More Vinyl than any one wall should have

A couple of months ago, right in the middle of my busiest month substituting, my husband asked me if I would be willing to do some vinyl work for his bosses.   They were putting in a second office and wanted an inspirational quote wall.   Not just a couple of quotes, but as many as I could fit on the wall.

This is what I ended up with:

The final design is approximately 11'x6' with ten different quotes.  I used Oracle 358 because the wall is textured and I wanted to be sure it would stay.

Hanging a wall like this is a huge undertaking and I learned a lot doing it.  If I could go back, I probably would do a few things differently.  Things like I pieced more than I had to because I was worried about making sure the quotes were spaced properly.  I would try harder to not piece in the middle of words.  Some of those black boxes are in three pieces and took some clean up time with an Xacto knife to get them looking like they should.  I might even have gone to full outdoor rated vinyl as well.   Textured walls just don't like vinyl.   It's hard to get it to stick.

 The design was a challenge, but I'm very happy with how that came out.  I looked for inspiration for quote walls on the internet but just about everything is plaques or only has one or two quotes on it.   There just wasn't anything like this out there.  I could have used more quotes, but I wanted the letters to be large and have a big impact.   The boss said to "use lots of fonts" which is customer speak for "make it interesting, please."  You might notice there's only two fonts here, Playball and Potterybarn.  I added visual interest with the black word boxes.  Playball was a dream to work with.  Loved it.  Potterybarn looks great and paired beautifully with Playball but those serifs drove me nuts.

I enjoyed this job.  It was a challenge to do the physical work, but I loved best getting to exercise my creative muscles.  I love working with fonts.  It's amazing what beautiful things you can make just with text.   Words are lovely, aren't they?

What I've Been Working On

So between me working 40 hour weeks in May and the run up to my parent's 50th wedding anniversary bash, I haven't have a lot of time for blogging.   I've also been busy working on transforming my front room.

When we originally moved in, it was the living room.  It was also 1980's doctor's office mauve.  If you lived in the 80's you know exactly what I'm talking about here.  It was that dusty pink/purple that went with country blue.  I'm sure your picturing the tiny flowers on the wallpaper now.   Needless to say, we painted it pretty quickly.   I went with a lovely sage green.  I've enjoyed it, but it was worn out and needed re-done.  I decided it might be time for a change of color as long as we're going through the trouble of painting.  Then I got thinking about other changes we could make.

So I talked my husband into this:

I know, all that big talk about how "my house shouldn't look like other people's houses," and I go with board and batten wainscoting.   It looks pretty, though.   I'm very happy with it.  The picture ledge is fabulous.   I console myself with the fact that only four people on the planet have that pear picture (I only gave/sold three copies of it.  It's mine. It will also have a red "mat" as soon as I can find the blasted picture file.)  and that paper cut is a custom SVG done by my lovely friend Helena.  She sent it to me to do a cut test.   I loved it so much I framed it.  

Here's a close up of the pillow: 

That bench is right by the front door.   I figured at my age, a little memory prompting can only be a good thing. The words are iron on vinyl.  The fabrics are the leftover pieces from the pillows in the sitting room.   Since I used the same color scheme, it was a great way to tie the two rooms together.   

Here's a terrible picture of the other side of the room.

I'll take better pictures soon.   I have never been happier with my house.  It's been a long process, but I have found over the years that, contrary to popular style fads, the more color I add to my home the happier I am with it.   I would never have been happy with the room if I had painted the space above the wainscoting Sherman Williams Sea Salt like everyone else.   I need color.

Never be afraid to do your own thing in your home.  You do not have to decorate to make the online bloggers happy.   They mostly live in UT; they probably won't visit you anyway.  I read blogs to check the style trends to see if there is anything I might like and to learn some great design lessons.  You can take design tips and use them for the things that work for you.

I'll post better pictures in a bit.  I want to get a new centerpiece put together and I have to paint the eighth chair.

My Sitting Room

Well it's as done as it's going to get for awhile.   The furniture is done and I have stuff on the walls.   It could use a little tablescape on the table between the chairs, but that will have to wait.  I haven't really been inspired and I think that will have to wait until I find the right pot for our pathetic plant.   But here it is:

Here's the fabulous handkerchiefs.  We found three perfectly sized double glass frames at Gordman's.  I painted the frames to match.   Obviously I'm still waiting for my mother to get the story written for the antique hankie.  The double glass works great with the hankies.  The glass is not perfectly sandwiching the hankies.   I took the thin wood piece that usually sits behind the second sheet of glass and put it between the glass sheets.   This gives the fabric of the handkerchiefs room to breathe so they don't fox or mildew.   This meant I had to find a way to hang them since I didn't have the pressure of the glass to hold them in place.  I used full strength liquid starch.  the starch will not harm the fabric or lace but does stick the fabric to the glass perfectly.  The large poly-cotton hankie is only stuck at the corners.  The other two were fully starched and then laid on the glass.  I put my large cutting mat behind the glass so I could get them perfectly placed.

And my lovely photo framed professionally.  I was going to go cheap with it but my husband had it done for me as a Christmas gift.  It came out lovely didn't it?  

Here's another angle of the room.  You can see my Chinese lanterns in the corner and my big pile of  pillows.  I'm actually kind of proud of the pillows.  I found four fabrics done by four different manufacturers that coordinate beautifully.  I love being able to do that.  It's so much more fun to put my own collection together than to just buy a pre-done set.

The curtains are inexpensive bedsheets.  They have a nice stiffness to them that works for windows but would be awful on a bed.  I trimmed the edges with a striped ribbon.

 There are still more things to do.  We need to replace the carpet some time soon.  I'm leaning toward a wood laminate.  We live in a neighborhood where that would be a standard choice, so I won't even feel like cheaping out.   We also need to replace the back door.   It's old, ugly and has never shut right.   We'll probably do a single full light door.    The window also needs framed out.  When this addition was built they didn't do wood framing on the windows.  There's only three windows so it shouldn't be hard to fix, I just need to get it done.

So there it is.  My sitting room.  It's not fancy and it's not perfect, but it's comfortable and it's the prettiest room in my house.  Not bad for under $500, huh?

The Awesome Closet My Awesome Husband Built

We have three girls sharing one bedroom with a walk in closet that was pretty much useless.  Across the shortest section of the closet were two rods and that was it.  I neglected to get before pictures again, but it was pretty bad.  There was no space for dresses and their shoes were always in a pile on top of each other and impossible to find or organize properly. 

Recently, we decided it was past time to get that closet useful and organized.  We found plans at Ana-White.com for a fantastic shoe organizer with lots and lots of room for shoes.  Since two of our girls are teenagers, we needed the space.  

We had Home Depot cut the wood for us, which made things a whole lot easier.  It's possible to get straight cuts along a sheet of plywood with a circular saw, but it's a pain.  My husband took a cut plan with him to the store so he could have everything cut the way he needed, then he could just come home and start building.  

The plan for the closet gave the girls two shirt height rods the same length as they already had (we were able to reuse the poles) and we added a full length dress rod, as well as a shelf across the top.  Their closet was so pitiful they didn't even have a shelf before.   Obviously if this were my closet, I would have made an effort to organize things by color for the picture and make it look nice.  The girls organized it by owner and garment type so it's useful to them.  

 The wood is 3/4" maple plywood.  It was very reasonable priced.  Steve also added the laminate edging to the ends so make it look more finished.   It looks good doesn't it?

The "shoe shrine" was a very tight fit.  We altered the plans to make the tower the full depth of the closet and boy howdy was it a pain to get it in.  We actually had to *ahem* cut the top off and then put it back on once it was in place.  So basically, if you're going for a tight fight, make sure you build in place to begin with.

Ana's plans were great.  She does a great job of breaking things down step by step.  I appreciate the cut list.  It made putting together a cut plan for the plywood sheets really easy.   It can be very easy with this tower to get the edges misaligned, so do be careful and build on a solid, flat surface so your front edge looks good and lines up.  We don't own a pocket screw jig, so my husband took advantage of the fact that we were putting the edging up by putting screws on the ends of the boards under where the edging went.  It made the tower very sturdy and we didn't have to fill any screw holes.

Steve even added moulding at the base and crown at the top to really finish the organizer off.   He did a great job, didn't he?

The girls are very happy with it and I do have to say that they are doing better picking up their shoes and getting them put away now.  It's also a heck of a lot easier to find the pair they want to wear.

My Perfect Lamp

Well, perfect for me anyway.  I love how it looks in the room.  It sits next to the couch on a little white plaster column.  The column I've had for over a decade.  It just keeps getting shifted from place to place as I find a better spot for it.   The lamp is new.  Newish.

A couple of years ago I was shopping at a thrift store with my husband when I saw this fabulous cast iron thing.   We had no idea what it was, but we had a great time making guesses.  We finally settled on calling it our "burglar b-gone because it weighs over five pounds (can you imagine getting a blow to the head with this thing?)  It was a drab, dark gray but had such interesting design I had to have it.  I paid seven dollars for it, brought it home, and hid it away in the store room.  I was over six months into the redecorating of the sitting room before I remembered the burglar b-gone.  I needed a lamp but I didn't want to pay the $40 it would take to buy the great turquoise lamp from Target that was too tall and didn't even come with a shade.

The burglar b-gone was perfect.  Just the right height and I already had it.  A quick paint job with a newly mixed paint sample ($1.20) and a lamp kit ($4.50+$4.00 for the harp) and a $10 shade gave me a great new lamp.

Lamp kits are fantastic.  I'm not kidding when I tell you it took me ten minutes to wire this up.  10 minutes.  Super easy.  The directions left a little to be desired, but I do have a bit of experience with wiring.  I have really only replaced old electrical sockets, but it was enough for me to be able to follow the diagram and get this done right.  Just remember when you use one that it is important to get your wires lined up right.  You can get fantastic fireworks if you swap the wires, but most people don't want fireworks next to the couch.  Don't be afraid of it, just test it outside if you aren't sure of your work.

So three lessons from this lamp for me:
1.  don't pass up great things at the thrift store just because you aren't quite sure what to do with it.  Of course, it really does have to be GREAT.  You don't want to fill your home with nice or cute things waiting for a spot.  Nice and cute are easy to find anywhere.  GREAT doesn't come along everyday.

2.  Just about anything can be a lamp and it's fast and easy to do.

3.  Always take before pictures.  Imagine how cool my Pintrest pin would be with a blah thing in the before and my awesome lamp in the after?  You'd think I would have learned after I forgot before pictures of the chairs.  One of these days . . .