life and puppies

Projects projects projects! And more … PROJECTS! This weekend we just went for it …

We swapped out a broken fixture in the dining room for this beauty.

I’m struggling with a decent pic because the rest of the room was messy, but here you go. It’s brass and it kinda unites the milky white and brass one in the adjacent front room. It also LIGHTENS (as in weight-wise) the room immensely. I hadn’t realized until recently just how oppressive our other fixture had been. I don’t want to speak ill of dead-to-me like fixtures but Oy. It’s pretty, I guess, but didn’t work well in our small space. Or, you know, any space that gets dust. Or that is near a kitchen that is used.

Upstairs, I rearranged some pictures (moving some from the dining room – stay tuned for my Etsy finds!, which is what I’m going to replace them with) to make the bedroom make more sense. Pardon the reflection of the bed and the bedside sconces.

And finally finished painting a cabinet we bought from an antique store two years ago. Yikes. Of course, there’s no before picture, but imagine it a very dark, very rough wood and you’ve got it.

And then perhaps the real piece de resistance, at least as far as I’m concerned, is some more self-adhesive wallpaper, which really has to be one of the greatest non-medical inventions of all time. I had bought this for our hallway but, as I was about to install it, I realized that the sizing was going to cause me some headaches. I’d already exchanged lots of emails with the company – Swag Paper – over the custom sizing I needed and I thought I had it all figured out. My plan was to put the paper up to cover a hallway wall from side-to-side and then AO and I were going to add board and batten underneath. But. The wallpaper was looking much longer than I’d expected. Or, honestly, our walls were shorter than I always remember them to be. So. I stared for awhile, realizing that any decent board and batten would be cutting off the map. I had known that some cutting into the map was going to happen, but once I saw in person how beautiful it was and when I realized just how much I’d be losing, I decided we should scrap the board and batten, move the map and install a basic chair rail in our already too-narrow as-it-is hall. Pretend all that info made sense. Or don’t and just look what I did!

It’s a 1909 map of DC in 4 panels that overlap each other. It’s also slightly uneven because I’m not so great at patience (up half an inch on the right side) and our floors and walls and whole house is wonky. I. Love. It.

AO also sawed and measured and sawed and nailed and created two THREE new garden boxes. And made me delicious pancakes. And let me watch lots of Lifetime movies. It was a great weekend.

And what’s up next weekend?! More projects!