Walls no longer bare...

The other day Bob and I finally had the same night off (shocker!) so we spent it hanging all the pictures and paintings that have been sitting in the living room for about 5 months! It took a while, but between both of our artistic eyes, I think it looks pretty good.

When I was home in January, Mom gave me some old family pictures, and I scanned and printed out some more. I have about 45 total, so we made a family wall in the living room. It's kind of a tradition since Mom, Dad and Katie all have one, and maybe Emily too. But it's a great way too see some of the history and genealogy of our family. And it makes all the empty white walls in that room a little less stark! This is the only room in the house that I hadn't done anything with yet, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.


And since we were on a roll, we decided not to stop there! I had made a couple shadow boxes of pictures and mementos from Grandma and Grandpa that I finally finished. Grandma's has an old glass syringe from when she was a nurse back in the 40's and her class pin. Grandpa's is part of his old Navy uniform and a picture of him from WWII. So we put those up along with their respective uniform hats. It's pretty cool.

And then there was the stairway. I had originally put up some of the family pictures there before I got too many and ran out of room! So now that I have an artist in residence (sounds so royal, huh?!) we put up some of Bob's paintings. We also got a couple shelves to put some of his ceramics on as well. Bob said it looks like a gallery, which I think was what we were going for. Anyway, it looks good!

Finally, we put up the chickens. I still think they look like quail, but either way they're awesome! My friend Jessica and I found them at a garage sale earlier this summer, and they went so well with the couch that we had to put them up! Bob calls them road-runners. Kind of reminds me of all Mom's chickens in her kitchen.

So that's what's been going up here - literally! It's nice to finally have an office floor - those family pictures were starting to take up a lot of space! And it looks good to have things pretty much finished in the house as far as decorating goes. Feels like home.