New mantel!

Our fireplace, sad and mantle-less.

A mantel has been on our to-do list since we moved in.  I looked at a few tutorials, but the first time my friend Kelly came over, she commented, "we have an extra mantel."  Four months later, we finally got measurements to them and she and her husband confirmed the size of their mantel.  So we took our corolla the five blocks to their place and tried to get this bad boy in the car.   

It took several tries.

 It may have gotten a bit ridiculous. 

 But! We got it home and here it is, in front of the fireplace, fitting perfectly.  I was absolutely thrilled when we first saw it, since I was expecting a plain, generic mantel, but it's beautiful and fancy.  I especially like how the center part comes to a point.  We are going to paint it and do some repair work.  We're not sure how many layers of paint are on it, but hopefully it's just one layer and can be sanded down pretty eaisly.  Ideally we would sand it and stain it to be wood-colored, but I think that it might be best to go ahead and paint it, but we aren't sure what color.  We could go with the same espresso brown as most of our other furniture (does Ikea sell black-brown paint?) or possibly the same latte color as the walls in the living room. 

Anyone have any color suggestions?

Tablecloths.

So, I made this tablecloth, and then, once we put it on our enormous table, we realized two things. 

 

1.) A white backdrop makes the carpet look very dingy.

2.) A pattern on a 120 inch table looks really busy. 

 

So we decided that from now on, only solid colored tablecloths and no white.  It was hard to tell, because I ordered the fabric from Fabric.com, how busy the tablecloth would look. However, ordering fabric is probably the way to go, because most tablecloths are far too expensive for our tastes.  The width of this fabric was good (I think it was 54 inches), but I definitely didn't need 4 yards. I think in the future I would order 3.5 yards.  Probably something like this textured indoor/outdoor fabric could work well but I'm not sure how the bright green would look with the dark green of the carpet (but our existing green tablecloth looks okay.)

Holidays

I'm not sure how early I want to start decorating for the holidays around our house.  Normally, I'm steadfastly in the "IT'S TOO EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS PUT YOUR TREES BACK." camp.  However, I'm thinking I would actually like to get our lights up on the earlier side this year (like probably on Sunday when we get home).  This is for a number of reasons.  The first, simply put, is that we're really busy and every year it seems like we have less and less time to do things like hang lights.  The second is that I have a really hard time with daylight savings time.  Monumentally, insurmountably hard.  Holiday lights make me happy.  So why not hang them already?  The third is that we have a LOT of windows and it's going to take a lot of work to get them up. 

I also want to deck the halls, but we have limited storage space, so I'm trying to think of creative ways to make that happen without spending money/being wasteful.  I love the ideas of putting together a bunch of these to go in windows and around the house.  I also like the idea of decorating with found natural materials or compostable materials - one year, a friend and his wife decorated their whole tree with pinecones and other nature things, which, as much as I made fun of them at the time for having a "themed" tree, I really liked and thought was nicely executed. I just need to find a place to get some holly and some other stuff.  I'm sure that if I wanted, I could go to a Christmas tree stand and take all of their braches and stuff off their hands for use in decoration.  Popcorn strands are a thing, but why am I stringing popcorn instead of eating it? 

(source)

We have some rosemary that we re-planted from our community garden, and if that flourishes, we can use some of it in the décor and also to just make the house smell plain delicious. I also, apparently, really want to create a fake fire in our fireplace and imagine I'll be thefting some wood this weekend and making a creative display with red Christmas lights. 

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Another question for this year is whether we will get a real tree.  We have a pre-lit artificial tree.  Is it so amazing that it doesn't look fake? No. Is it nice to just set up the damn tree in three easy pieces and plug it in and turn it on? Yes.  We decided that an artificial tree was probably more environmentally friendly than a real one, and that while we lived in 2nd story apartments we would have a fake tree.  Then we would buy a house and have our fake tree in one room and our big real coniferous fir tree in another with electric trains running around it.  Then we bought a 12 foot wide 1400 square foot rowhome in the middle of downtown Baltimore and so I think the fake tree is staying for the forseeable future. I also hate watering real trees and worry about house fires, so fake tree it is!  (I'm not sad about this, even if I sound sad, because seriously, my worst childhood memories are pouring two liter bottles of water into the tree stand while I got needles in my hair.) 

The one thing I do think we will finally invest in is a really nice wreath or a big wreath form.  We have a couple crummy ones and those will probably go up in various places in the house and I think I'll bring one into work, but I want a big, bushy, pretty, real green wreath with a big red ribbon on it.  I'm thinking of buying a wreath form this year and then decorating it with leaves and then changing out the decorations during the year, so we don't have to store the wreath and because I think it would look nice. 

Shelves

We hung some shelves Sunday.  Finally we have a place for some of our knickknacks and other various items. M. also fixed my desk so both arms extend when you open the top.  Unlike some secretary desks, this one is an automatic one.

And I went through a giant bag of pens, tested, and sorted them. 

I'm just not sure what to do with those two cups of highlighters from the first picture.  I also have a lot of extra markers and stuff, but I'm hoping I can donate those along with some books to the Baltimore Book Project.   

 

These pictures are really awful. I think I'll be breaking out my DSLR for some good pictures this weekend before our housewarming party so that I can do a full-on house tour of our almost done house!