Mini Project: Prettifying the Foyer.

Today marks five years to the day that our offer on L'Casa was accepted. FIVE. YEARS.

We celebrated by me getting a tattoo. As you do. (It's the wings across my shoulders, for those of you burning with curiosity.)

There's something about when the weather turns crisp for half a second before some more unbearable summer weather and then the true, rainy season known as Ohio autumn begins that makes me all craftacular. I get itchy in the hands for the fresh sting of hot glue burns and the feel of broken sewing needles stuck in the calloused tips of my fingers where they're used to that kind of stick from my glucose meter.

So, since we're in that weird time (really truly until the holidays) where there isn't enough time to really do much of any huge projects, I took it upon myself to start knocking out some mini projects I've been meaning to get to for ... a stupidly long amount of time.

First up, I decided the foyer needed some more sprucing since we'd repainted it a lovely shade of gray and I had a pretty decent idea.

A perk (or a disadvantage, really it could go either way) of being a crafty person is that you accumulate a lot of ... well, stuff. This is also a derivative of being someone who loves a sale, because when the two parts of your brain combine and see something that could maybe be turned into something else with a little bit of proper adhesive technique and some vision, you get all happy and grabby with things.

This is the case with me and clearance Halloween decor, specifically at Target but I've had some luck at Michael's and JoAnn, as you might expect.

Anywhoodle, probably something like four years ago I was doing my little seasonal scope of Target to see what awesome autumnal goodies I could dig up, when I came across some very simple, solid colored frames:

That unsurprisingly, were pretty much the color scheme of my house. I guess I live in a perpetual autumn over here. Makes sense if you really think about it -- nearly all of the decor in my living room is Halloween stuff, or at least it was marketed as such. Whatevs.

(Ignore the bright & summer clearance table cloth. It's a temporary table-protecting solution.)

Anyway, so I picked up one of each color and promptly squirreled them away for some unknown future project maybe someday or maybe I'd just end up selling them in a yard sale, you never know. 

Then, about the time I was working on Tova's room, I discovered a site that had some decent free printables amidst the personal life stuffs called Sprik Space. The printables are basic graphics but clean and bright and come in tons of colors and are easy to manipulate in Photoshop if need be. I grabbed one for a frame for Tova's room and bookmarked the site for future perusal/downloading and promptly forgot about it completely.

That is, until a few weeks ago on Pinterest when one of the printables popped up in my feed and I was all, OH YEAH, THAT and since I was fresh off from cleaning out my basement craft room/future mom-cave-office-space I remembered the very-barely Halloween frames and a light bulb went off.

So I got out the frames and played with them a bit on the dining room table to figure out a good grouping for a five-piece word art mini-collection, and came up with the combo you see above. Then, I went through all the printables on the site and picked the ones I thought best fit my family and our lifestyle. Next was the slightly painful task of deciding what printable would go in which frame to not only make each individual printable look awesome, but that would be in contrast to the other printables/frames and all mesh well together as a unit. It was more of a headache than I can really explain without having you spend that two hours with me at the dining room table, laptop aloft over the frames, painstakingly tweaking the hue, saturation, vibrancy, and brightness of each printable in an order that made both logical and aesthetic sense. With two toddlers underfoot, no less.

Anyway, after crossing my fingers and putting matte photo paper in the printer (and busting out my old scrapbooking page trimmers to get extra clean lines so I didn't have to fiddle with scissors) I ended up with a pretty nice spread:

I wanted this little bit of decor to be sort of a pick me up in the house, right before you left it, like little reminders so life outside of our home doesn't get you down, if that makes sense. Some of it was intended to be for the kids when they get older to read as they go to school or whatever, and honestly some of them are reminders for me as I wrangle children and cats and such our the door and into a different kind of chaos.

So I knew exactly where to put it, I just needed the kids to go to bed and to get out the ladder. Oh, and to add saw tooth picture hangers to the back of the frames because the only downside of buying cheap seasonal decor is that, you know, it lacks things like a legitimate way to hang them on the wall as opposed to using the super flimsy hinge stand thing on the back. Luckily I'm (a) used to that being the case and (b) had some lying around so that issue was easily remedied and I moved on. 

After some eyeballing and a lot of up and down on the ladder, this is what I ended up with:

And I pretty much love it. I feel like it really does bring all the colors of the rest of the house into the foyer, sort of tying it all together right as you walk out the front door. I love how they pop against the gray but without being too OMG LOOK AT THE BRIGHT THINGIES OVER THE DOOR. 

I also had the foresight to add some poster mount tape to the back of them aside from the saw tooth hangers because our screen door is just ghetto as hell and you have to punch it open and slam it closed, so the poster mount tape is there to make sure that little pieces of wood and glass don't come crashing down on someone's unsuspecting head. I know the people who actually come to my house are totally grateful for that because, well, yeah. Nothing says "Thanks for braving the ghetto and coming over!" like beaning someone with shards of glass in the noggin followed up by a trip to the ER (good thing we're close!).

So, while not OMG EPIC, it's one of the little things I could knock out in an evening that makes me smile every time I see it, and brings this house another step closer to really feeling thoroughly like our home.

Because, you know, the last five years have just been practice.