Little Improvements

Remember how we bought a house back in March? Some of you have wondered why I never gave a grand tour (although plenty of posts have featured the bright green walls in our kitchen, and let's not forget that you've also seen the whiteboard in the basement AND the backyard full of spring flowers).

It's not that I'm opposed to sharing pictures of our house. In fact, I still love it just as much (no, even more) as the day we moved in.

But . . . the truth is, I'm a painfully slow decorator; I have a really hard time making decisions, plus I don't have an eye for what looks good. I've just been hoping that someone from HGTV would show up on my doorstep offering to give my home a full makeover, but so far, no luck.

So I finally decided to tackle one thing that's been bothering me (the improvement of which was within the budget): the blank living room wall.

When we first moved in, it looked like this:

I couldn't stand the color of the walls, and so we painted them within the first week. Midway through the process, our living room looked like this, leading to the aforementioned meltdown:

 But eventually, the walls were painted, we had somewhere to sit down, and order (even if it was a stark and bare order) was restored.

For awhile, I was content. But about a month ago, I realized that we'd been in our house for six months already, and it still looked like we'd just moved in. Even if I couldn't do the big improvements I wanted to, I could at least get something up on the walls!

I was reminded of what Pa Ingalls said when the town of De Smit was first being built:

"Now that's what it takes to build up a country," said Pa. "Building over your head and under your feet, but building. We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started."

I knew I couldn't sit around and wait for those HGTV designers one more day. So I did the next best thing and called my friend, Kathy.

I couldn't afford a painting or a mirror large enough to fill that vast space above the couch, so I opted for a photo collage instead. I had Mike pull out every frame we owned, and then Kathy and I (but mostly Kathy) laid it all out on the floor, arranging and rearranging until we were happy with the way it looked. Then we cut out paper patterns and taped them up to the wall so we could see what it was going to look like.

There were a few missing pieces that I searched the thrift store for, after which Mike painted everything a uniform black.

And finally, it was ready to go up on the wall:

There are still some things I'm planning on changing (for example, I think I'm going to change out the Proclamation for just a simple quote or a scripture), but for right now, I am just enjoying having something up on our wall.

It makes the room feel much more complete and like we're actually planning on staying in our home for a good long while.