Picking the Perfect Palette: The Loft

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Frame by Frame Style

Fall is on its way and soon we will be diving in to our indoor home improvement projects. When it comes to painting our house, we always wait until the weather is cool enough to open the windows and pull in some fresh air. Fall is usually a great time because the air is not too moist and sticky. In the meantime, we are deciding on the color that we will paint our half wall in the loft and hallway. I chose a palette of yellow, blue and blue/green paint chips for our alma mater color scheme and taped them to the wall using painter’s tape. Now we can see our choices on the wall while we make our decision.With this palette, I chose complimentary colors to our existing room colors. We have several different shades of blue in our room which is why I chose the blue and blue/green chips for our palette. I chose the gold and yellow chips to complement our maize yellow pillows. I like the idea of the golds being closer to the shade of the pillows because we do not have several different shades of gold existing in the room.

The color that we choose for the loft will carry around the half wall and down the catwalk hallway. With that being said, we need to choose a color that compliments both the loft and the hallway. I think I’m leaning toward the golds, but I can’t make up my mind. I also really like the blues. Decisions, decisions.

On another note, you might’ve noticed that we have new curtains in our loft. I liked the previous curtains, but they were slightly to short. Some folks like their curtains to be just above the ground but I prefer the curtains to touch the ground. Finding out the curtains I bought were too short was definitely a lesson learned. Always measure before you buy!

When I went back to West Elm, where I bought our gray curtains, I found the same pattern in dark blue. I like the dark blue even better than the light gray and this time I made sure to buy a longer length. That’s it for now. I’ll keep you posted on our paint chip selection process!

Photo Finish, Part 2

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Frame by Frame Style

Last weekend, I started planning the addition to our foyer photo collage. As you saw in our last post, Photo Finish, we added a few new photos to our stairway wall leaving our two collages looking a little disconnected…

To connect our two collages, I chose three different frames from our “stock pile.” I chose one 11 x 17, one 8 x 10 and one 5 x 7 frame. Next, I made patterns of the frames using white printer paper and painter’s tape.

After I finished making the frame patterns, I started the process of arranging the photos on the wall. Of course, this proved to be more challenging than I planned because it felt a bit like I was playing Plinko on The Price is Right. (I love that game!)

Okay, I’m kidding, but that would be fun!! (Well… Until all the frames crashed to the floor, right?)

To place the patterns on the wall, I leaned over the upstairs half wall and taped the patterns down using more painter’s tape. Once I taped the pattern to the wall, I ran around the upstairs hallway to the other side where I could see the entire collage. I did this several times before I was happy with the patterns’ positions.

As you can see, I went through several arrangements before I was satisfied. After staring at the collage for awhile, I realized that I needed something at the bottom. To balance the overall collage, I took the 8 x 10 pattern and added it to the bottom right corner of the foyer wall. Perfect! Now that I’ve decided on the locations for the frames, I need to choose new photos and decide if I want to change any of the existing photos. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

Do you like to hang photo collages in your home? If so, what is your favorite type of photos to hang… portraits, scenery, flowers, etc?

Picture Perfect

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Frame by Frame Style

So what have BJ and I been up to lately? Quite a lot actually.

First, we added some new furniture to our master bedroom.

Then we finally started adding pictures on the wall of our upstairs hallway.

I also bought a few more frames to add more photos to the walls of the upstairs hallway and continue into the loft. BJ and I also started planning out how we would like to design the space in the loft. Right now, it is a mix of furniture and not really usable. We have a projector that we would like to use for movies and we are thinking about turning the loft into a movie/game room. We both went to the same University, so we would like to incorporate our alma mater into the theme in a classy way.

Here’s where we stand now, it’s pretty empty. Just a few piece of furniture and no seating.

One of the challenges of this room is that it is the first thing you see when you come up the stairs. We’ve gone back and forth on the design of the loft. We’ve talked about putting a sectional couch and adding some bookshelves, and we’ve also discussed just putting some chairs from Ikea with the ottomans and making it more of a place to relax and kick back. If we go with the Poang chairs, then we plan to add a few side tables and skip the coffee table.

There are many options to choose from and I’m sure we will find something perfect for our space. In the meantime, we’re enjoying coming up with some over the top ideas and then of course, ruling those out. But if money were no object, we would have a pretty cool looking loft already! 🙂

Making a House a Home

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Frame by Frame Style

One of my favorite boards on my Pinterest page is my Making a House a Home board. I use this board to pin pictures that I would enjoy seeing incorporated in our home.

For example, I love these wall letters and they gave me the idea that I could incorporate something like this in our kitchen. Once we finish the crown molding project, I want to hang the word “Yum” on the wall.

Below is another pin from my board. I love the pillows on this couch, and since we just added a new couch to our living room, I decided to do my own interpretation of bright pillows on a dark couch.

I took our existing pillows and added a few more.

I also appreciate the look of a clean, well-organized pantry and I’m working on getting ours there.

A few months, ago I started collecting OXO vacuumed-sealed containers.

And I started incorporating the containers in our pantry.

Recently, I found a 12 pack of the OXO containers at Sam’s Club. They’re kind of a pain to clean because you have to hand wash them, but I’m slowly getting them all cleaned and into our pantry.

I’ve added about half of the 12 into the pantry and had to do a little reorganizing. It looks a little like a hot mess right now. But I’m on my way to a better organized pantry and our food will last longer in the vacuumed sealed containers. No more wasted snacks!

Just focus on the top shelf for now. Doesn’t it look nice? 🙂

Another picture I’ve pinned to my Making a House a Home board is the antique-looking wooden wall quotes.

I found a similar one that doesn’t have quotes on it, but I love the idea of incorporating wine into our kitchen decor, so this will hang above the entrance to our dining room once the crown molding is finished.

What is your own favorite Pinterest board? How do you find inspiration to make your house feel like a home?

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

A little wine with your home decor?

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Frame by Frame Style

Mmmm wine. I love how some of it tastes and I love to use wine bottles in our decor. We came across these wine racks at Ikea while we were still living in our apartment. When we moved into our house, we hung them up in our kitchen and ever since then, we’ve found different ways to incorporate wine into our kitchen decor.

The flowers and grapes came from Michaels. I bought them for another project and just on a whim, I weaved the flowers through the wine racks and then hung the grapes from them for a little something extra. I’ve always liked the way it looks and now I don’t remember what I originally bought the flowers or grapes for.

One of the fun things about using wine bottles in your kitchen decor is the constant change of scenery. As friends and family come over and you enjoy a bottle of wine together, you replace that bottle with a new one.

And you can also use the corks. Here is how we are reusing our wine bottle corks. Our collection is still in progress.

Finally, to go along with our wine decor, we found this neat wall hanging.

Once we finish the crown molding, our plan is to hang this above the door into our dining room.

BJ and I became more into wine around this time last year when we took our first anniversary trip to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. We took tours of the winery, participated in a wine tasting and even enjoyed a wine and chocolate pairing. If you enjoy wine and haven’t been to the Biltmore, I definitely recommend it. If you are interesting in learning more about wine it’s a great way to get away to the mountains and learn about vino while you’re there!

Who wouldn’t want to kick back, drink a glass of wine and enjoy this view?

Have a great week!

Holy ginormous wall, Batman!

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Frame by Frame Style

It’s no secret that the wall in our foyer is large and rather daunting. I’m always trying to come up with clever ways to decorate that huge wall. So far, I’ve decided that whatever we do has to be made up of small pieces. The thought of hanging something large and heavy that high makes me queasy. I would be so afraid that it would come crashing to the floor just as someone walked underneath of it.

One idea BJ and tossed around is similar to this picture I found on Pinterest:

Our thought is to take one of our favorite pictures of a mountains landscape and break it into several smaller pictures. Like a mosaic.

We also thought about several wall sculptures, like these:

One concern is that we do not not want to take away from our photo collage on the other side of the foyer.

We’re still tossing ideas around. Once we finally decide on a plan for this wall, implementing it is going to be a bit of a challenge. Because the wall is so large, it will require a very large ladder and more bravery than it took to put up the photo collage on the other wall.

Until we make a decision, I’ll be working on my bravery.

Progress in the making…

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Frame by Frame Style

It’s been a little over six months since I started this blog to keep family and friends up to date on our home improvement projects. Since then, it has become a way for us to log our projects and share our experiences with other homeowners. We hope that readers find our post useful and even feel adventurous enough to take on projects of their own.

One thing I’ve learned since we moved into our own house is that home improvement is not easy. It also requires you to have two wardrobes: “clothes i like” and “clothes i get dirty in.” I still haven’t figured out how the people on HGTV shows do not ruin their clothes. They must have a million of the same shirt and you never see the one with paint all over it.

It makes sense why people pay money for companies or individuals to do their renovations and installations. But when you are newlywed homeowners like us, you work on a budget and your own time.

We’ve been working on projects since we moved in, but now it feels like our house is becoming more of a “home.” People who visit say “I love how your home is decorated” and “you’re home is beautifully decorated.” It feels good to hear such lovely compliments on our style.

Here are a few of my favorite transformations:

The Living Room

The Dining Room

The Kitchen (the addition of the island)

The Wall in the Foyer

We still have more projects in store for this year and as we continue to see our hard work pay off, we hope you find inspiration and come up with your own unique ways to decorate and redecorate your home. If you have any good home improvement stories, sends us an email at framebyframestyle@gmail.com. We would love to hear from you!

Projectpalooza!

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Frame by Frame Style

It’s been a crazy busy week. I must’ve been joking last week when I said I would have more time before Thanksgiving. Looks like another year to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade while I’m furiously running around the house trying to get everything done! 🙂

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately…

1. BJ installed the wall outlets for our ceiling speakers…

2. We bought the crown molding, sanded and painted it white…

3. And… we ripped up the carpet in the dining room…

4. And then the tiling began…

Needless to say, we’ve been VERY busy. All of these projects kept us up late this week burning the midnight oil. But they will be beautiful when they are finished! Oh and not too mention, I worked on the decorations for our Thanksgiving table last week. But more on that later.

Now that you’ve seen what we’ve been up to, let’s back up and explain how we got here. If you remember my post from two weeks ago, we started a crown molding project. We had to take a break from that project for a week because of busy schedules and work trips. But now we are back on. We worked on getting everything sanded and painted this past weekend. And then when BJ started cutting all the trim pieces, he realized the saw he borrowed from a friend was a hair too short. After a pause to get a new saw, he was back at it again.

Meanwhile, I was in the dining room furiously trying to get an odor out of our carpet (LONG story). I was using a Bissell steam vac and home remedies for odor removers, but nothing seemed to work. After tirelessly trying to get the smell out, we decided to pull the carpet up and find the source of the odor. One thing lead to another and soon our foyer looked like this:

Once we pulled the carpet back, we realized we were at a point of no return. We ripped the carpet, the trim and the carpet tacks up and were left with bare concrete floor. Next, we had to quickly decide of what would replace the carpet. Off to Home Depot we went. We browsed around the flooring section looking at all of our options from laminate flooring to tile. I’ve always wanted a dark tile floor so slate seemed like the perfect option (it was also the least expensive! WIN.). After sorting through box after box of broken tiles, we managed to come up with 30 boxes of unbroken tiles to take home and start our project.

Because we are working in the evenings to complete these projects, the tile floor will be a bit unfinished by the time our guests arrive for Thanksgiving. We made good progress though. The only thing that will be missing is the grout and the base board. We may replace the baseboard with a wider piece of trim for a different look.

Here’s our progress this week…

We started laying tile Sunday evening…

On Monday evening, we picked up where we left off Sunday night…

And Tuesday, BJ took the remaining tiles to Lowes to have them cut to fit the edge of the room. And then I finished laying the cut tiles while BJ put up crown molding…

So here’s where we stand. All of the tiles are down. Tonight, I am going to seal the tile and then tomorrow morning, we can start moving the furniture back in the dining room in time for Thanksgiving dinner. We will grout the tile after the holiday.

Once the dining room table is back in the dining room, I will take pictures of the centerpieces and try to get those posted tomorrow or the next day!

Safe travels everyone! Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Making progress

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Frame by Frame Style

We’ve officially started our crown molding project. Before you start any big project like this, you have to decide on your design. For this project, we needed to design our crown molding. After looking at the options to do a two piece molding, we decided to go with something more traditional and chose a one piece molding.

Below are our one piece molding options:

And the winner is…

So now on to the project.

Before we can install the crown molding, we have to finish the speaker wire project BJ started earlier this year. For awhile, there’s been a long string of wires hanging from our ceiling. In order to install the crown molding, we have to tuck those wires in the wall and run them down to an outlet behind the entertainment center.

And when you run speaker wire through the wall, you get to cut a big hole in the wall!

Actually: two big holes! Below is the place where the outlet will be.

So once we get the speaker wire in the wall and connected, we will install the crown molding to hide all the wires and our lovely hole. I’ll keep you posted on our progress!

A year in the making…

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Frame by Frame Style

One year ago, after a trip to Home Depot, we taped a blue paint chip to our wall. And that paint chip stayed there for a year.

Friends and family came and stayed at our house and still the paint chip stayed on the wall.

Until last weekend, the paint chip seemed like a part of our wall. We even joked that we would go back to Home Depot and get enough paint chips to cover the entire wall. Finally, last weekend we went to Home Depot and bought a gallon of paint instead. After a year of living with our paint chip, we decided to take the leap and paint the wall.

So below is our paint of choice for this project. It’s Behr Premium Plus Interior Eggshell Enamel. We like eggshell paint because it is more durable than a flat, but doesn’t give off any sheen. Our color of choice: Glass Sapphire. The paint chip was actually for paint that included primer. Since our walls were already a light color, we chose to go with the regular interior paint. Because we went for the non-primer paint, they had to color match our chip, which sounds funny, but it turned out perfect.

On Sunday morning we got up, ate some breakfast, prepped the paint brushes and rollers and sanded the rough spots in the wall. After we sanded the wall, we wiped it down with a dry cloth.

While we prepped the brushes, rollers and the wall, Zoey came to inspect the paint supplies and supervise.

And to help BJ tape the trim.

After we put the kitten upstairs to enjoy lounging on our bed while we were busy working, we finished taping the trim, laying all the drop cloths, ate some lunch and then painted. So here is the wall sans blue paint:

Then the first coat went on: