Happy Accidents

Now that Ross & I are fully unpacked and kicking back to relax, my intuition is screaming at me to decorate! Make this place feel more like 'home,' even if it is temporary! So the last project I had on my to-do list was to hang pictures, specifically in the living room. I'd rather hang the pictures I have then let them collect dust in storage, so off I go.

I was excited to hang my gallery wall frames over the couch since I had the perfect spot in the apartment. If you don't know what my gallery wall is, here's a little refresher from the old home.

 The white frames were one of my favorite things in the old house, so I was excited to get these puppies back out!

*wa-wa-waaaaaa*

That's when I realized the one box I had sat aside, thinking was filled with my white frames, was in fact, not my white frames at all, but other misc. picture frames. The white frames were officially packed away in our garage storage unit, buried behind 2 rows of other boxe, so that idea quickly died.

Once I pulled out the frames from this box, I had a ton of mismatched artwork that was previously hung in random places in the old house.

Happy Accident #1: Why not do a gallery wall with mismatched frames like I've seen before?? This could get interesting and I was intrigued :) My creative juices were flowing!!.....

I didn't do a great job at taking before photos, but basically, once I got all of the frames filled with pictures of family & friends (which was dif. from the last gallery wall...but let's face it, I miss all of them already and knew I wanted to see their shining faces in my living room!!! haha) and figured out the frame arrangement, I hung 'em up!  (Oh don't judge me that most of pics are not straight, haha)

Pretend you don't see the blue peaking out at you in the 2 frames ;) That would be a spoiler alert!!

 

As much as I enjoyed the mismatched 'look,' something didn't feel right. It felt balanced enough, but it felt 'heavy.' For some reason, the heaviness felt like a 'northern decorating habit' and didn't feel right down here in the south. I can't explain it. Call me crazy! But in the south, I feel like decorating should be light and airy thanks to the HEAT we have outside. This was all wrong.

I needed color! Light! Brightness! That's when I decided I wanted to throw color into my decorating. In the last house, I decorated with all greens. Now I wanted TURQUIOSE! YELLOW!! Are you getting excited yet?! B/c I sure was :)

Off I went to the store to find a few new accessories to hopefully tie in the color scheme I was going to incorporate in the gallery wall.

This pillow was a starting point :)

Happy Accident #2: I stumbled across this vase in Jo-Anne's in the clearance aisle. It was PERFECT and turquoise!! So I added some yellow flowers...and VOILA...it's shouting SUMMER! :)

Now I was ready to amp up my gallery wall, so I picked up a few supplies at Jo-Anne's as well. Some scrapbooking materials and paper.

My first thought was to replace the beige mat in dakota's pictures with turquoise paper. I didn't want to ruin the old mat in case I go back to neutral one day, so I just cut out the paper and layed it on top.

Next up was more turquoise paper behind these pictures. You can see this paper was more of a cutout design which I thought was cool. The frames were originally see through glass, now there's another dimension to it :)

 Lastly, I needed to fill two frames I picked up at Goodwill for .99 cents each!

(My best kept secret.... I almost ALWAYS buy frames from goodwill! Also, if you scroll up and see the 4 tiny square frames...those were also .99 cents each from Goodwill and I think they're adorable! The rest of my frames I had on hand.)

Happy Accident #3 (are you tired of hearing 'happy accident' yet?!) I broke the glass in the bottom frame when I was going to put a picture in it. That's when the next idea came to me instead! Why not fill it with something 3D instead, aka 3D flowers in the scrapbooking section.

Here's the 3D picture:

And here's the 2nd picture frame with just some 2 dimensional flowers.

Lastly, since I had a TON of turquiose in the gallery wall, I needed to incorporate more yellow (the above example was one try). So I changed our monogram picture to yellow text:

It's not very noticeable from far away, but I like the subtlety of it :)

And the FINAL result?! I LOVE my new gallery wall :) It feels fresh and exciting!!

I still want to find one more turquoise pillow or throw blanket to balance out the million and one green pillows, but for now, I'm as happy as a peach. If peaches were happy. Which they should be b/c they are yummy. At least Ross thinks so. I'm still indifferent to them. ANYWHO...that's all for today! I'm all decorated out :)

*Kristin*