Before I get started with this week's Pin-spiration, I just wanna tease a few awesome things coming up this week. First, I just made/devoured a DELICIOUS dinner, so there's a Food Friday to look forward to. The first since July, in fact. Womp womp. Also, I got a lil somethin' somethin' in the mail from eShakti today, so expect a product review soon. But most excitingly, I have a sweeeet giveaway lined up for tomorrow! So that's pretty awesome. Make sure you come back tomorrow evening and ch-ch-check it out.
Okay, anyway. Pin-spiration time! Inspiration on top, my take on it below (if you want the original pins, just click either of the top photos).
Just for reference, here's how it looked before:
So, functional but ugly. A re-do was definitely necessary. This was yet another "I'll just kind of wing it and see how it turns out" pins. (Are you noticing the trend here?) I went to Lowe's and bought a couple of 1/2 inch dowel rods, a pack of 1-5/8 inch screw eyes, and several packs of 1-5/8 inch s-hooks.
I cut the dowel rods to the size I wanted them with our circular saw, which was actually pretty terrifying, then sanded down the raw edges. As it turns out, the dowel rods were just the tiniest bit too thick for the screw eyes, so I sanded them down a little more to fit in the hole. Then I spray painted them...guess which color...white. While they were drying, I bent the s-hooks open a bit so I could hang my jewelry on them without opening the clasps every time. That proved to be pretty difficult with just a pair of needle nose pliers alone, but when I gripped the hook in one set of pliers, then pried them open with the other set, it went pretty quickly. There were nearly 30 of them though, and my hands are still sore :(
Anyway, after that, it was an easy enough process. I just measured out where I wanted to hang the bars, drilled some pilot holes with a drill bit, and screwed the eye screws into the wall. (If you're doing this yourself, it's important to remember that you should drill the pilot holes smaller than the screw itself; that gives the screw something to hold on to in the wall.) Then, I just threaded the bent s-hooks onto the bar and slipped them into place. Voila!
I'm thinking about getting some sort of mirror piece for the top of my dresser, but I haven't decided yet. All I know is that black-ish wood does NOT jive with the stain on my jewelry box. Eh. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, don't forget to come back tomorrow and enter to win some jewelry :)
You guys, I am thanking God/Allah/Buddha/whoever for the long weekend we're having. Seriously. All told, I worked nearly 60 hours last week, and I hit Saturday night like a brick wall. But Sunday I got to relax, which by my definition means I got to knock some of our house decorating projects out of the way :) And today I slept till 11 (11! It's so late! I love it!) and later, Matt and I are going to a few cookouts. Love it.And I'm so excited to show you all the house as it's coming together! It will definitely be a work in progress for a few more months, mostly because of money limitations, but it's finally looking like people live here and not a bunch of hoarder vagrants. So that's good.No before photos on these projects...they were just embarrassing. So here's what I did yesterday:
Living room gallery wall.
I've been wanting a gallery wall for ages, so I was really excited to get a move on with this project. I found the frames at garage sales and spray painted them black. The New York City post cards were purchased on our trip last month, and the black and white French prints were actually cut from a poster that I had a long time ago. The weird abstract thing is actually a post card from an art show I went to at OU. It's a photograph of a street in Spain. I love the urban feel of this wall! I will probably keep some of the frames blank, and add more frames/photos/post cards to the gallery as I find them.Oh, and please don't judge us for the gross couch. We're getting slipcovers, I promise.
Vanity in the bedroom.
Our bathroom is just too tiny, with not enough counter space for me to get ready in the mornings. For some reason, I don't really like balancing my makeup and hair products on the toilet as I'm preparing for my day. So we had this shelf left from our old place, and we just attached it to the wall with some L-brackets. The shelves and the lamp were from the old apartment too, and we bought the mirror and chair at a consignment store called ReTag It. (My new favorite store, by the way. Appliances, electronics, furniture...all relatively new, all deeply discounted. Saw a Mac mini for $200 and I about died. But I digress.) I'll probably get a new, more attractive lamp at some point, and paint the shelf top, mirror and chair so they match. Probably black, maybe all white. Who knows. That's a project for a later day.
Jewelry storage.This is a temporary solution, really. I wanted to make a more attractive, easier to access display, but I just don't have the time or money right now. I've pinned quite a few different options, so I really have to just pick one first. But there's no rush on that. I actually used Command strips to hang the cork the first time (it's what I did in the old apartment, and it held fast for more than a year). About five minutes after hanging all three cork pieces, I heard a loud CRASH from the bedroom. Yup, half my necklaces tangled on the floor. So I nailed the cork to the wall. After five minutes more, the OTHER necklaces all fell! I just gave up on the Command strips and nailed all three in. Holds much better, now :)
Shoe storage.I used to have one of those over-the-door pocket organizers for my heels and flats. But the door in the new house just doesn't have the space for my shoes, so I had to find something else. I was actually going to buy this shelf from Target for $15, but I stopped by Goodwill and found the exact same shelf in a different color, for $3. So I grabbed that baby, slapped some paint on it, and voila! Saved $12. Made my day, haha.I guess I should note that this is maybe half of my shoes. The rest are in my closet. My Converses (I have four pairs, haha), running shoes, etc. are in a bin, and my flip flops and sandalls are in one of those hanging compartment things. What can I say? I love shoes.I was going to post some closet photos too, but I think that really deserves a dedicated post. I feel like a lot of bloggers have a "this is my closet" post, anyway. But it's finally organized and put away as well, so do you know what that means? Outfit photos to resume tomorrow :) Yay!Did you have a productive Labor Day weekend? Or a deliciously lazy one? I hope so!
