Christmas Decor

Our Family Christmas Photo

Even though its almost February I couldn't forget about our first Christmas not only in our house but married.  What an expensive holiday, decorations are not cheap! Several Joann's coupons later, I finally had the house looking somewhat how I wanted.

We opted for a fake Christmas tree just in case the pup would be too curious with a real one.  This was probably our safest bet for her being under 1 with a love of sticks.  We had to block off the sides of the tree because Reese was running along it looking out the window, knocking ornaments off on her way.

Very proud of her tree

We didn't have many options for hanging our stockings so we hung them from the railing.  

Kitchen Table Centerpiece

Kitchen Chalkboard

My garland was nowhere near as elaborate as I wanted.  I had big shoes to fill because my mom is pretty amazing at decorating her house.  Here is her garland for the entryway from the living room to the dining room.

I had high hopes of copying this but she's a pro at this.

Reese opens her own presents

Speaking of presents, Santa was really good to me this year..he's a good guy.  Batman got me exactly what I wanted, an iPad!  I have been glued to the thing.  My parents also gave us some refinished pieces that fit in perfectly.  One being this bench my mom reupholstered and painted.  I love the fabric we picked out, mostly my mom picked it out because I could not decide which room deserved it the most.  We found the bench at a yard sale over the summer.  The other piece is also amazing but you will have to wait to see that one.

Well, thats a glimpse of the Batcave this past Christmas.
I promise next year I'll get to this before Christmas.

Gallery Wall

The last time I showed you my office was not only months ago (and last year!) but it had a big blank wall.  I finally took care of this problem, it only took me forever.

The blank wall on the right

Playing around with the layout on the floor

It really wasn't as difficult as I make it sound.  I wanted all of the photographs to be in black and white and all frames to be black and varying sizes.  It took me a while to acquire all of the frames I wanted and figure out which pictures to use.  I ended up going with most of our wedding pictures but in my opinion they're the most expensive pictures I will ever pay for so they better be everywhere!  For a while I had all of my frames up with the stock images in them, this was kind of funny for when we had guests over.

Somewhere in my Pinterest travels I saw someone use toothpaste to hang pictures and this is the best method ever.  If I only remembered where I saw this I could give that person the credit but let me tell you how great this is.  So many times I'm stuck measuring and making a hole and find out I was off by just a tiny bit.  This way, you put a dab of toothpaste on the hook for where the nail goes on the back of the frame.  Then, you place it against the wall where you would like it, leaving a dollop of toothpaste where your nail needs to be.  This takes out all of the guesswork.  I will never measure again!  Some frames required two nails and in this case I did the same thing for both hooks and then used a level, this way I knew the distance between the nails.

So here it is..

Have to have my city scenes of Baltimore and Central Park

The office is finally getting there!