4 Things

I meant to put this up the other day after just a few hours of I Spy...alas things got busy and I never got a chance until just now.



Rachel got the 4 things updated in the living room correct:

1. Fireplace: Screen and Candles
This was actually my mom's idea and it worked out great!

Here are my inspiration photos:




I realized when I first sat the candle holder in the fireplace it was too short. So after looking at these pictures and seeing that most people, unlike me, actually have an open fireplace and set the candles INSIDE not IN FRONT OF the fireplace so I needed to build it up some. So I scrounged up all the old bricks I could find around my house, which was a good number...I think its a requirement of an old house to have old bricks laying around or something. I would still like to add a few more bricks, right now its more of just a wall of bricks, and maybe some more candles sitting on the bricks. Well, what I would REALLY like to do is open up the fireplace. It should be an old coal burning fireplace, not one that you can put logs into, but it would look really cool...and speaking of cool, the reason we haven't is it will probably let tons of cold air in.




2. Pictures on the wall
If you remember from this post I was never really happy with the pictures above my fu. It was just too much, too overwhelming, and too unorganized. I wanted it to have that intentional random effect like something out of pottery barn and instead it just looked random.




But instead...this is what I had:




So after some more studying and thinking I ended up with this:



I am a much happier wall of photos owner now. It just looks cleaner, less messy, and maybe a little more PBish?

3 & 4. Blue Tables

One day while I was hanging out in my living room I noticed my robins egg blue blanket that was randomly laying on the fu popped nicely and seemed to had a color that rounded out the room. I'm not smart enough to know if it is because it is a cool color and there aren't alot of cool colors in there or what, but it accented everything really well. Then I started to notice pops of blue elsewhere in the living room and dining room. Most of the pictures have a similar color blue in them, the vase on the mantel has blue in it, the rug in the living room also has some blue in it, and my fiesta in the dining room has blue. I think it also helps to tie in the blue-ish green sofa.

I wanted the perfect pop of that old antique vintage cottage blue/teal.




The TV table looks so much better instead of that old crappy off white, that was potentially the original paint from when G-daddy built the table for my mom's first apartment. The corner table later became my toyshelf growing up, the source of many mother daughter fights, most infamously the time I was asked to clean up only for my mother to discover I was only hiding stuff places...like dirty socks in a jack-o-lantern. She proceeded to get a trash bag, run her arm across the top of the table and in one swoop of her arm throw all of my toys in the trash bag to "give to some poor child who would appreciate and take care of their toys." haha! So anyways, after I put a good two coats of blue paint on the little corner table I discovered that apparently the "antique white" paint was oil based, thus my latex blue paint didn't really stick. If you look at it wrong it peels off. So one day, I am going to have to sand and prime it...one day. Even though I love the little corner table with so much family history, hand built by my grandfather, I would love to have a corner CABINET not just a table. I used to have my stereo, as in I saved up all of my babysitting money and bought it in junior high stereo, sitting on the bottom shelf, but decided it was time for it to get moved up into the attic. So I need to get a plant or something to go on the bottom shelf, then it won't look so empty.

Before:




After:



And the table between the chairs
Before and WAY Before:




After: I wanted it to have an antique-y look. Not sure if I'm there yet, but you know me...just let me get bored enough and I'll start to paint something.