Thursday, February 23, 2012

Hiding the Clutter

Living in a house built in 1914 we have found that people in the past must not have need closets like we do today!  I think the two closets we have in the bedrooms were added on to the house after it was built.  Our only other "closet" is a tiny nook in our hallway that we use to store our vacuum, broom, and other cleaning supplies along with a few boxes of my crafting supplies (I have stuff hidden everywhere!).  It really is just a little nook in the hallway with no door or any type of covering and who wants to see cleaning supplies every time you walk down the hall, not me!  So I decided to use a curtain to hide everything.  Here's a picture of the storage nook, see it really is tiny!  We plan to move the ironing board hanging on the hallway door into a closet once we make enough room in there.


I had bought a curtain from World Market to try out on our front living room window, but it didn't quite work how I wanted.  I really liked the fabric and I thought it would work well for our little nook as it ties in a lot of our room paint colors leading off the hallway.  It was about twice as wide as we needed for the storage nook so I cut it to fit.  I finished the cut edge with some no sew tape from Joann's.


And here's a picture of the finished edge:


To hang the curtain we bought a tension rod in an oil-rubbed bronze finish and matching curtain clips.  The tension rod was too long for the nook so we had to cut it to size using our Dremmel.  Here you can see Brian cutting the rod with sparks flying!  (Luckily everything was a bit damp from a recent rain.)


After we hung the curtain we decided it would work best if it went all the way from the floor to the ceiling to give us more space to hide things :o)  But that left the curtain about a foot short:


I had leftover fabric from cutting it to the correct width, but I thought just adding more to the bottom wouldn't look that great, the seam would be obvious because I couldn't match the patterns on the two pieces of fabric.  So I decided to use a thin stripe (two to be exact) of chocolate brown fabric to go in between the curtain fabric.  For this I had to use a sewing machine.  I measured how much additional fabric I would need to extend to the floor and then got to sewing.


And here is what it looked like after I was finished sewing:


And finally, hung in place:


And from another angle:


Much better, now every time I walk past I don't have to be reminded of the cleaning I need to do! :o)

Monday, February 20, 2012

A Gallery Wall

Hi Everyone! Sorry for the blogging hiatus. Brian and I have exciting news which will explain why I was missing in action for the past few months..........we are expecting a baby! I had quite the morning (ALL day) sickness that has been gradually subsiding.  I still don't feel back to normal in the eating department but I'm eating pretty normally (just don't feel all that great after) and the baby is good and healthy. We don't know the gender of the baby yet, as the baby thought it would be funny to have a foot (and even two at one point!) strategically placed during our entire 20 week ultrasound. But that's okay, we are trying to get the nursery decorated gender neutrally.......but whenever I see baby clothes it makes me really want to find out!

So my first blog post back is about some decorating we are doing in the nursery. We have a small two bedroom house so the guest room is now the baby's room. We kept the light blue color on the walls (I'm a girl and I like blue!) and were lucky enough to get an awesome crib from my cousin fit for baby royalty. It really is something fancy! I have been wanting to have a gallery-style picture wall in the room for awhile and had been stocking up on photos, art, and dark wood frames. But now that the room will be a nursery I switched out some of the artwork and swapped the dark frames for white ones we also had on hand to match the white crib.  I then laid all the pictures out on the bed to figure out a layout I liked.


Next I cut up some advertisements we received in the mail (junk mail is good for something!) to the size of the picture frames:


And punched holes in the advertisements where the hooks were located to make it easier for placing the nails in the wall later on.


Then I transferred the advertisements in the same layout onto the wall above the crib.  I used a level to get the first few positioned right and then eye-balled everything from there and taped them into place.


I was able to hammer all the nails into place using the pre-punched holes in the advertisements as guides, and finally got to the fun part, hanging the pictures!


We can swap out pictures as the mood fits us, but right now we have a collection of prints I purchased on Etsy and baby pictures of Brian and I, and don't forget Bailey the cat!

Here is a closer view of the pictures on the left side of the wall (my and Bay's baby pictures along with some of the Etsy prints):

 
And a closer shot of the other pictures (Brian's baby picture, an ultrasound profile picture of the baby, a map with an embroidered heart over where we got engaged, a print that looks exactly like Bailey sleeping, and a couple others):


I also plan to add some sort of adhesive to the back of the frames to make everything a bit more secure since the pictures are over the crib.  So that's what's been happening around here lately.  We have quite a few projects we want to tackle before the baby comes so I will be trying to post more frequently from here on out!