Dining Room Gallery Wall

As I've mentioned before, we have a long, narrow dining room. I have already tried to create the illusion of more space and light with my Pottery Barn Eagan Mirror knock off, but the fact remains that the room is still less than 10 feet wide. (What were the builders thinking??) To make matters worse, the breakfront against the right wall was eating up precious space. When sitting on that side of the table, it was nearly impossible to push out your chair and stand up between the table and chair, rather you kind of had to slide in and out from the side. I guess it wouldn't be so bad if we only used the room a few times a year, but we use it every single week for our Shabbat (Sabbath) meals.

If you noticed that the shelves are mostly empty, you'll be correct when you guessed that we decided to sell it. I went through everything that we stored in there and gave away the stuff that I didn't use. Do I really need 12 vases? Definitely not, especially considering that I use the same ones all the time! But now we had another blank wall to deal with. I had been wanting to put a gallery wall somewhere in the house and I knew this would be a perfect spot. My hubby wasn't so sure about it and needed some convincing before we put all those holes in the wall.

So I got out a roll of paper, traced each frame that I planned on using, cut them out and hung them on the wall so he could get a good idea of what I had in mind. He was still on the fence so I went a step further. I took a picture of each piece of art/frame and photoshopped them onto the wall. I tweaked the placement a little once I saw how the frames looked against each other so I am actually glad that I did this extra step. (Interestingly enough, Brooke just did a post about photoshop decorating in reference to a gallery wall. Dare I say great minds think alike? :-)) I sent it to him at work and he gave me the green light. When he got home later that day, he said, "Why did you take all the pictures off the wall?" My photoshop skills were so good (in his eye) that he thought I had actually hung everything up already! Love that hubby of mine!

I planned to use only gold and black frames to make it more cohesive since all the frames were different styles. And at first I thought we'd use only black and white photos, but in the end we liked using color. I also included some printables that I found on pinterest to add some variety, and here is the finished wall.

The square artwork on the bottom is a 3D paper cut of the "Woman of Valor" (from Provers 31) that my hubby gave to me after we got married. The vertical piece was a wedding gift from a neighbor that has our wedding invitation mounted with a nice glossy finish over it. The gold frame has a metal-cut street scene of the Old City of Jerusalem. To the right of that is a personalized lithograph of the blessing given to a bride and groom that my parents had the artist create for us when we got engaged. The smallest frame (you can see it better in the picture below) has etched in the glass "Zecher L'Churban" (Hebrew for "in remembrance of the destruction," referring the the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rather than get into a long explanation about that, please feel free to email me if you're interested.) The big letter "B" is from Michael's - just a few dollars on sale. The rest are all family photographs that I can easily update.

You can see there are a few brown frames also mixed in that I originally planned to spray paint black, but now I'm leaning towards keeping them brown (and not just because I'm being lazy!). I think they add some warmth to the wall. What do you think - spray them black or keep as-is?

I really like how it came out and what I love the best (besides being able to sit at the table comfortably) is that I can see the gallery reflected in the mirror right from my seat - I can enjoy two walls of something I created at the same time!

Have you worked on any wall art lately? What do you think about mixing and matching frames?

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Knock Off Pottery Barn Eagan Mirror

Way back I posted about my loooong dining room wall and how I added stripes to try to break up the space. But it was still a long wall of nothingness.

We have lots of artwork but I couldn't exactly hang up a whole row of frame across! What I needed was a large statement piece to anchor the wall.  Ever since I saw this mirror online, I loved the design and knew it would be perfect for that wall.

Unfortunately, with the $700 price tag, it was simply not happening! And then Layla came to my rescue. She gave an amazing tutorial how to recreate it - count me in! I am not going to document my process in detail because she does such an amazing job, but here are some photos showing what I did.

I used 1/2" plywood instead of MDF because I knew I was going to hang it (Layla has hers on her mantle) and it would have made it extra heavy. I also glued the mirrors and trim one row at a time.

You can see my oh-so-glamorous basement workshop in the background. The guy at HD who cut the original piece didn't do a perfect job so I waited to do the outer trim last and centered everything else. I ended up using outside corner moulding to go around the border because I wanted the exposed sides to have a clean look.

Here's a closeup of the rosette detail where the trim intersects. I love how it covers up the seams.

Voila! Here it is all pretty and hanging up. Ignore everything you see in the reflection because it's (hopefully) all going to change. I used two picture hanging anchors that hold up to 100 lbs each because, man, this thing is heavy! I know it's only about 30 lbs or so, but better safe than sorry!

I LOVE how it came out and I couldn't have done it without my amazing dad! In total I spent around $200 which is much more reasonable than PB's $700 and I got to make it the exact dimensions that I wanted to.

What kinds of things are you eyeing that you want to knock-off?
 

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Fabric for Dining Room Curtains

We are currently in search mode for some new fabric to make dining room curtains. The ones we have now are maroon and gold - very traditional and not at all my style. We got them a few years ago, I think I picked them out because I knew the hubby would like them. :-) His taste is much more conservative and formal than mine so I know this is going to be a challenge.

I would like something with color to brighten up the space, preferably with a geometric type print. He would like something rather plain and muted. We were both off this weekend so we went to a few fabric stores but there wasn't anything that we agreed on, or rather I should say, nothing we agreed on that was in our price range i.e. not $75 a yard!

So now I'm looking online at different swatches. Here are some I picked out at fabric.com:
(Sorry for the mis-aligned swatches, I can't seem to figure out why they are not lining up properly. Boo.)

Covington Windsor Mariner ($12.98/yard)

Premier Prints Twill Gotcha Girly Blue ($7.98/yard)

Dwell Studio Bella Porte Charcoal ($18.98/yard)

Waverly Ellis Turquoise ($9.98/yard)

Waverly Cross Section Charcoal ($13.98/yard)

Swavelle/Mill Creek  Felton River ($8.98/yard)

Swavelle/Mill Creek Oskar Sea ($8.98/yard)

Premier Prints Key West Village Blue/Natural ($7.48/yard)

These are more my hubby's style. The first one is actually not too bad. I would try to do something to pull the blue out of it, but the second one... definitely not going to make it past the first round of cuts!

P Kaufmann Vassar Paisley Horizon ($14.98/yard)

Waverly Synergy Jacquard Sienna ($22.98/yard)

So what to do?? How does one convince their more traditional spouse that something more contemporary is the way to go? I guess if we had a very large formal dining room that would be one thing... But our dining room is used very often for family and friends to get together. And I mean we use it every. single. week. And 3 out of 4 weekends a month we usually have company so I don't want to get anything too precious that will make me go crazy if some food gets on it.

What do you suggest? What are your fabric picks? Do you ever disagree with your hubby about design decisions?

Stripes!

So here's what our  looong dining room wall looks like. In a word, blah. Now, our house is not very big, a bit over 1400 square feet, but this wall is over 20 feet long!

Just for reference, this is what the room looked like right before we moved in (with the previous owner's stuff).

I admit, I kind of liked what was going on with the stripes, but they had to be brought into the 21st century. The wallpaper had to go (along with the green carpet, not to mention the chandelier)! We had the wallpaper removed and the walls painted before we moved in and we were fortunate that there was hardwood underneath the carpet that we had re-finished. But we lived with those plain walls for a few years, hadn't even hung up a picture, and I said "enough is enough!" So back to those stripes...

When I had a small vacation from work, the hubby and I measured and taped and measured and taped one night for what seemed like hours (probably because it was). That is not the most fun part, but it's all in the prep! I put little dots of tape in the areas that I was not supposed to paint just so I wouldn't get mixed up at any point.

This is what it looked like after the first coat of paint. The main wall color is "Bleached Almond" by Behr and the wall was painted in an egg-shell finish. The stripes are the same color but in a semi-gloss finish. The stripes are really subtle, which you'll see in a moment, but it really adds a nice layer, without too much contrast that it would be distracting to hang pictures on.

   

And here it is all complete. As I mentioned, you can see the stripes, but they are very subtle and depending on the lighting or from what angle you look at it, sometimes they disappear.

And my favorite part - ripping down all the tape (don't forget to do it before the paint dries!!). I just want to say that we used frog tape for this project and we had absolutely no painting seeping through. No touch-ups necessary! Amazing! I highly recommend it for any job like this. So what do you think?