Making This Place Our Home: Living Room

I keep meaning to write posts about some of the fun things we've done to decorate our house, but then the house gets messy and I don't want to take pictures of a messy house and then I get busy with work or crafts or reading and I don't make time to blog. So I'm taking advantage of a slow afternoon to finally write another blog post.

We have a very large wall in our living room, and I knew from the moment we moved in that I wanted to create a collage wall. We did one with our wedding and engagement photos when we first moved in (sorry, no pictures). We just eyeballed the setup, and it was nice. But then we started realizing that our pictures were kind of old, especially since we had gotten updated professional family photos. So we decided it was time to update the pictures and set up a new collage.

I looked around online and found a pretty cool way of setting up a collage without ending up with a million nail holes in your wall. We got a couple rolls of cheap wrapping paper, then traced and cut out all the frames and the items we wanted to put up. We also made sure to mark where the nail would need to go. Then we taped the paper frames on the wall and could move them as often as we needed to.

Tracing and cutting out the paper was pretty annoying, but in the end, I think it was worth it. It was so much better than having to take down frames to move them over an inch. It also helped us visualize it better so we could tell just how many pictures we could get on the wall.

I really like what we ended up with. I love having some of our vacation photos up along with our professional photos. I also always love having Andrew's photography up. I think the picture of Diagon Alley is my favorite.

Sorry it's not the greatest picture; if there's no glare from the window, there's a glare from the lamp. I did my best.

Another project we did for the living room before we even moved in was the bookshelves. Andrew and I have two of the tall bookshelves from Walmart with the super flimsy nearly cardboard backing. We had each had our bookshelves for years, since before we got married, and they had been through multiple moves. And sadly, the backing just didn't survive the move to the house.

Instead of buying new bookshelves, we decided to try and fix them ourselves. We went to Home Depot and bought the big sheets of bead board. The nice thing about Home Depot is that they will cut the pieces down for you; we just had to make sure we had the correct measurements. If I'm remembering correctly, they didn't even charge us for all the cuts. And if they did, it usually runs about $.25 per cut after your first.

We then picked out a fun, sea green that we both liked and that we have since used throughout our house. (Such as on the letters on the collage wall.) We painted the bead board, let it dry, and then tacked the boards into place on the backs of the bookshelves. And I love the way it looks.

Not only does this spice up our bookshelves a bit, but the bead board also acts as a really good, sturdy frame for the shelves. They're no longer wobbly, and we don't have to worry about pushing a book too forcefully on the shelf and ripping the backing. Now our only issue is bowing shelves. We're planning on buying some new IKEA bookshelves in the near future (because they're wider and taller and would hold so much more stuff), and we like the look of these bookshelves so much that we're thinking of doing the same thing to our brand-new shelves and then just relocating our old ones instead of getting rid of them.

We have also added some fun items for display. I love all the typewriters and vintage cameras, and I especially love the roll-top desk that my Grandpa Newman made. I'm so happy that I ended up with it and that it fits so well.

There are still some things I want to add to the living room (mostly just a real piano instead of a digital—one day), but I love this cozy little room and how well things fit.