DIY Branch Light

This afternoon we finished the Domino shoot! I'm so excited to share all the projects we did to get the house ready for this spread. We did a few DIY lighting projects and I love how they turned out. And actually, for Phoenix locals, I've partnered with the Home Depot to make this project and to host a DIY lighting workshop on July 12 from 10-11:30am. You can register for a spot at the TEMPE (Baseline) location here. I hope you can come! I've attended a couple of DIY Workshops before (the one on tile was SO helpful!) and they're always a good time. I'm excited to help lead this one where we'll be talking about lighting trends - it will be super casual and hopefully a lot of fun. :)

So for this lighting DIY, I desperately needed a new fixture for the upstairs landing. The old one was a big bummer, and after splurging on a new Arteriors chandelier for the entry, I didn't want to spend hardly anything on this light. I remembered posting this idea years ago and it felt like the perfect quick solution for our landing light!

I picked up 12 socket splitters at Home Depot. They were about a buck each, in the electrical aisle by all the outlet and switches. In the same aisle, you can find a simple porcelain canopy socket for about two dollars.

After taking all the stickers off, I screwed in the sockets and figured out the overall shape I wanted for the light. What I love about this project is you can shape the light however you want. You can make it more organic and branch-like or you can keep it pretty compact like I did. The ceiling on our landing is not super high, so I needed to keep the fixture short. 

I spray painted the canopy and the assembled fixture (which is easier to spray when it's put together) and I used a little painters tape to protect all the electrical parts. After two good coats and drying time, the light was ready to install.

I also ended up buying a ceiling medallion from Home Depot. I like the way it finishes off the fixture and makes it look a little more fancy. I think it's so pretty to mix really traditional things with more modern ones.

Twelve of the splitters makes a pretty good-sized fixture that produces quite a bit of light. I used I think fourteen 25-watt bulbs. It's so sparkly! :)

And I LOVE how it looks with our new wallpaper! Such a quick and cheap project, but I am so happy with how it turned out!

PS The people at The Home Depot who invited me to host this upcoming DIY workshop sent me a link to a lighting contest they did with Instructables.com. The winning project was this pretty reclaimed wood lamp. That geometric shade is made from straws! Very cool!

Wallpaper in the Entry

I love how high the ceilings are in our entry, but it makes it a little bit tricky to decorate in there! The big walls just swallow up even two or three pieces of art stacked on each other.

I'm so excited to share more, but at the twelfth hour before the big shoot next week, we have decided to wallpaper the entry! I am beyond excited. 

The wallpaper arrived within an hour of the wallpaper hanger today - just in time! We saved a little bit of money by prepping the walls ourselves, but I wish I could have DIYed the whole thing. I've hung wallpaper a bunch of times before and it's usually a doable project, but this was definitely a job for the pros. A big part of it is we are completely out of time and this was a last minute decision, but the bottom line is I get dizzy just thinking about carefully hanging those long sheets on a 18' ladder! It is worth every pretty penny to get to admire from afar on this one! ;)

I can't wait to share the afters, but in the meantime, I'll show you my inspiration photos. I LOVE how wallpaper can stand alone in a room, and how it looks so magical layered with art and other colors and patterns!

A Bloomsbury Life

BHG

Meredith Heron for Style at Home

Anna Spiro (her gorgeous wallpaper line is HERE)

Celerie Kemble

Alison Womak Jowers

Markam Roberts

Timothy Whealon

Restoring a House in the City

Back to work! On my to do list for tonight: tuft a little headboard and dye six curtain panels. Sheesh - what have I gotten myself into??

The Staircase: Dread for Treads

We're getting close with the floors. We were all a little sore and tired, so we took a little break and focused on the fireplace this week, but I think this weekend we're going to start laying the chevron in the library (yay!). So, since our floors are just about done, my eyes keep floating over to the staircase, which hasn't been touched yet.

The plan was just going to do paint-grade wood in white on the risers and matching white oak planks on the treads. We will have to order oversized custom treads for the bottom three steps. They're extra deep on the right side because of the curve of the staircase.

The lead time was a little longer on these and they were much more expensive that I was hoping, so I haven't made any progress here. I feel sort of stumped and sick of spending money. And when I've felt like that in the past, I usually just end up painting the whole dang thing and calling it good. And truthfully, it might be a good interim option for us.

I could paint the whole shebang from rail to tread white or black or a combo of the two and then add a thick runner to the stairs to hide the planks on the treads, which bother me (I wish they were solid planks).

Or I could take apart the railing and replace just the baluster spindles with something a little cleaner-lined? It looks like all I'd have to do is pop off the little covers to access the screws. Seems like an easy enough job.

The curved rail is pretty simple and would be hard to replace, so I would plan to reuse it for sure.

And I'm thinking it would be way easier to paint the whole thing disassembled, so that's another bonus. The prep would be a pain and all those curves and angles on the balusters are terrifying to think about covering at every angle.

It's a hard choice, since these stairs are like the first thing you see when you walk in. It would be fun to have something special here. Then the other (lazy) part of me thinks, you know, whatever. Those balusters aren't so bad. A little paint would go far there. And maybe black would be really cool (although dusty looking? Hopefully my house will never be this dusty again. blerg.)

Well, now I think I've officially talked myself into painting everything first before looking into anything else. Why not? It could look cool and worst case scenario is I'm out a little paint and some time, and then I can just move forward with ordering the expensive treads and replacing the balusters.

What would you do?

Two's a Collection

I found this vintage gouache painting a year or two ago at an antique store called Granny's Attic in New Jersey (the same trip I picked up those bergeres that I did an upholstery series on).

I wanted to hang it in or around the girls room, but it just always felt lonely or something (can art look lonely??), so it stayed tucked up on a shelf for a while. Until I found another vintage gouache at the flea market. This one is by a different artist, and obviously the subject matter is completely different (fish!), but I LOVE how they work together. Harmony in the busy-ness of the patterns.

They are living in the hallway right in front of the girls' bathroom/bedroom. I think it's fun for the art to get a little more child-like in the common areas where the kids spend a lot of time.

Evie calls the fish painting her "Quardium" (aquarium). Sad and cute :)

   Thanks again for your vote in the Homies!

Entry Progress: A Bright Red Secretary

The entry on our parlor level is pretty small. There's a coat closet across from the powder bath and a teeny tiny little bump out next to the front door and that's about it. Here's what the space looked like on move in day.

Not pretty, I know. We've since had all the walls painted Farrow and Ball's Cabbage White, which is bright and fresh, and the doors were painted Pitch Black. We still need to do all the trim work in here, but we had the small floor boards painted BM Decorators White.

When I was trying to figure out how to best use this space, I sort of fell in love with the idea of a secretary (a really narrow one), so there would be a place to throw mail down, but we'd also have lots of hidden storage. The issue was finding a secretary that was less than 23" wide so that the door could open all the way. Not easy!

For a while we kept the vintage vanity desk from this post in this spot because it fit and it was a place to put things down (you can see it peeking out in this post), but I definitely was left wanting something taller with storage after a couple months of that. Then one day at an antiques store in the burbs, a vintage Thomasville beauty presented itself. It wasn't in perfect shape and the dated-looking fruitwood needed to be painted out, but the size was exactly perfect and the price was right at $175. (Especially compared to the inspiration pieces I was eying on 1st dibs! yikes!)

I knew I wanted to paint the secretary a fun color (aren't you surprised!?) because the entry is pretty bland and it needed some cheer. I went to Home Depot to get a color mixed and I stumbled across and ENTIRE GALLON of my beloved Safety Red, formally known to me as only-available-in-spray-can-form-Safety-Red. It's been a four year love affair, so I couldn't not try it, right? 

I expected it to smell as horrible as the other Rustoleum oil-based paints (like this one), but this paint smelled more like linseed oil and less like fumes. Sort of like the Ben Moore Advanced line. It had an interesting, very thick consistency too. The finish was great though (smooth as glass), so I can't complain.

You're probably wondering what happened to the glass here. I have plans to get mirror cut, but I decided to paint out the glass from the inside so no one could see the things I have stored inside. (it's a whole bunch of vases and it looks really sloppy). I'm not completely minding the white actually, but I think the mirror will help to brighten up the space. (I was going for this and this look.)

I'm really loving it and am just aching to get that moulding up now!

I did put down a small rug and that helped too (seen here formerly),

And I hung the peacock mirror on the wall next to the kitchen. I need to put art on the wall to the left of the kitchen though and I think that will help even more. 

But, it's progress! And just in time for holiday dinner parties (thank you so much for your votes, by the way! If you haven't had a chance to pop over, the $500 contest will go through the 23rd. xx)

PS A little tip about painting mirrors or cabinets with glass panes without using painter's tape.