Home in Progress

Hopefully most of you will be able visit our house in person one day, but until then I'd like to give you a glimpse of things we're doing and changing around here.  The house has been a work in progress since we moved in, and we've made quite a bit of progress so far.  Almost all of the work has involved painting various rooms in the house and adding a few pieces of furniture here and there.  Now it's finally time to add some decorations and really make our house feel like a home and an expression of us.

I'd been wanting to display some of our honeymoon pictures from Italy for a while and I was also looking for something to put on the walls in our very plain half-bath.  Turns out that a gallery wall of Italy photos, Venice postcards, and a few sketches I made would be the perfect way to solve both problems.  I started by making my sketches from pictures, choosing some photos and then picking out a few pages from a postcard book of Venice paintings that Mom gave us.

 The artwork waiting to be framed. 

 My next step was to begin gathering frames for all these pictures.  Joe and I made several trips to our local Goodwill store to find the correct number and sizes for frames.  Once we had all the frames, I disassembled them, cleaned the glass and frames and labeled them all so I would know what glass piece went with which frame after I was done painting them.  A quick trip to Hobby Lobby provided the spray paint and one large photo mat board that I would use to make all the mats for the individual pictures.  Once the painting, mat cutting, and assembling was done, I traced all the frames onto brown craft paper and cut them out.  That way I could arrange them on the wall using painters tape and avoid having to make too many nail hole errors.

Some of my "ugly duckling" frames.

Arranging the frame templates.

With the papers all in place, Joe made quick work of hanging the actual pictures up and the art installation was done!  I love having something nice to look at on the walls, and of course I love remembering all the amazing things we saw in Italy.  I hope you enjoy it too!  Oh, and it definitely looks better in person, so you should probably come visit to see for yourself.  Plus, I couldn't get a nice picture due to the bad lighting and tight space in there.    

This coming weekend Joe and I will head to Wisconsin with his family to celebrate his Great Grandmother's 100th birthday!  We're looking forward to seeing everyone up there!