Look who's in the magazine!

Our town has a magazine that runs local stories about events close by, new restaurant openings, etc. I usually read it see what's new around the area, and I noticed that the contractor we used runs ads in it. When they finished our kitchen in September, they asked if it was okay to use a picture of our kitchen in their ad, and we excitedly gave our approval (I took it as a compliment to our superb design skills...:) ).

 

It turns out it made the "holidays" edition of the magazine, which came out a few weeks ago! You can see below the little picture of our kitchen in the contractor's ad.

It looks a lot like this picture, although their version had a dog leash hanging by the door and clutter on the counter (at least more clutter than our picture below...).

 

We'll try for the cover next time!

Pleasantly surprised by stencils

We have a space around a window in our living room that was really calling out for some pizazz. I collected lots of wallpaper samples, but since we're still laboring through removing decades-old wallpaper upstairs, we were hesitant to contribute more wallpaper to the house. A friend recommended we stencil the space, an idea she'd seen on Esty. We were definitely skeptical but decided it was a low-risk move to order a stencil online from Cutting Edge Stencils, especially since our friend had experience with stenciling. When it arrived, said friend was invited over to help, but when she and her husband arrived, we learned none of us knew what we were doing. Luckily, we're all quick learners and not perfectionists. :-)

Here's the space a few months ago right after the bookcases were installed.

And here we are working on the top portion. (I'm supervising and the process was aided by college football, pizza, and our friend's home brew!)

 

 

And once we finished, we were actually pretty pleased with the wall. The gold really warms up the blue room. Now we just need drapes to literally warm up the room!