Tuesday, November 5, 2013

A cosy interior space for a rainy day

Hi there! Posting from a very rainy London today, which immediately makes me want to withdraw inside with a nice cup of tea and some cool coffee table books. I'm thinking this beautiful space from the Norwegian home of Line from  Vintage Piken would be the perfect place to be this Tuesday morning. I've shown more of this beautiful space here - but you can never see enough of her home right?!









Vintage Piken
I love her style - the vignettes, the beautiful furniture, the photography. Perfect! And I want that cup! What about you?

BLACK SHEEP (WHITE LIGHT) sell the most amazing grey icelandic sheepskin pillows. They're often getting new items in so it's worth following them on Facebook to keep an eye on what's available. Top of my Christmas wish list!

Have a lovely Tuesday!

Monday, November 4, 2013

Chalkboard Wall

I've wanted to do a chalkboard wall in our home forever but as you will see from the photos, our walls are very heavily textured and I didn't think I would be able to write on them. 

But I just couldn't stand it anymore.  I really wanted one.  So, I tested it out first with a piece of chalk and tried writing on it, and surprisingly, it was no big deal at all.  Sure it isn't perfectly smooth, but I could write on it and it still looked fine.  That was all I needed to get busy and paint a side and I couldn't be more happy with the results.


Of course, this did inspire a couple of other projects.  Isn't it funny how that always happens.  When my dad died, I inherited some of his wine collection.  He was quite a wine connoisseur and even though some of it is no longer drinkable, I will never get rid of it and I wanted to display some of it proudly.  I also wanted to display it on the wall against the chalkboard wall color.  I looked for a DIY wine rack tutorial and found this one.  I did it a little bit differently in that I didn't use the same size bolts and I also spray painted them oil rubbed bronze because I didn't care for the color of them. 

Because we already had the barn wood, this project cost me less than $5 because all I had to buy was the bolts for .38 each.  How great is that?  I absolutely love how it turned out.



I've had a lot of emails asking where we bought our light fixture in the dining room.  I actually don't remember because it was bought 8 years ago when we bought the house.  However, I wasn't happy with it at all because it had frosted glass shades on it that forced the light up onto the ceiling instead of down onto the table for a cozier setting.  For years I just lived with it but I couldn't stand how cold the dining room felt with the light like that so I decided to see if I could just remove the glass shades and sure enough, you could.  I removed them all and added clip on shades from Lowes, which I loved and they made the lighting perfectly cozy.  For this project though, I went a little further and added burlap to each shade to give more texture to the room.


I cut out the fabric, sprayed the shade with spray adhesive, wrapped it and hot glued the rest.  Because I didn't cut it out perfectly, I added a piece of rope to the inside to clean it up a bit.  I just hot glued it on.  It just makes it a little bit neater since you can easily see up under the shade while walking in the dining room.


For the sentiment on the wall here, I printed everything from wordpad on my computer and traced it onto the wall using different fonts.  Yes, it took all day but boy do I love it.  I wish I could remember the name of each font I used but I don't.  Sorry.


I still have a couple more things to add to the wall but I wanted to go ahead a share it now.

I love it!  So if you've been wanting to do a chalkboard wall but thought you couldn't because of the wall texture in your home, I'd say go for it!  :)

Have a great day!

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