Sing me a song, piano man

Earlier this week we got a very exciting delivery for our living room...




...a player piano!

The piano belonged to Branden's grandmother and she passed it down to him. For years it sat at his dad's house, since he had no place for it to go. It finally made its way to the house and now fits perfectly in a corner of our living room!



It really classes up the joint. We used to have a desk with a computer over in that corner. Since we got a new laptop, we moved the computer up to the desk in the now-empty office (since I no longer work from home the office wasn't getting much use anymore).

I start grad school next week (yup, I'm getting a Masters of Education in Secondary English... not sure if I'm ready to write papers again but here goes nothing!) so I'll be using the computer in the quiet office to do homework very frequently, I'm sure.

I'm kind of amazed by how well the piano fits in the living room... it's almost made for it!



While it's a little out of tune, it's definitely still able to played. Branden has been working on the mechanics for the player part (you can see the tools in the shot above) and it's almost working 100%. For now, you have to stick some tweezers into the tape deck to keep it playing. :)



I'll have to take a video of the player piano in action and post it... we've been playing a tape of ragtime favorites and I'm pretty sure that the neighbors think we're operating a speakeasy. It sounds like a saloon up in here.

It's always refreshing to do a little reshuffling of furniture. To free up some space next to the piano, we swapped out an end table with one from the dining room and rearranged the table in that room (I'll post some pics of that soon). It's amazing what switching some things around can do to make a room feel fresh.

We also picked up a new pair of table lamps a month or so ago at Homegoods. They were only $30 each, with the lampshades. Love them!



They kind of remind me of spinal cords... in a good way? Each level has a pinkish/red ring painted around it, which matches the couch perfectly. It alllll comes together.



Lucy likes the new lamps, obvs.

Back to the piano, when I sat down at it I definitely needed some time to remember which keys were which. I hadn't looked at sheet music since I graduated college, so I was a little rusty! It's amazing how it all comes back to you though after just a few minutes of playing.
 


I'm really loving having it in the house, and find myself sitting down to practice for a bit each day. Maybe by Christmas I'll be able to play carols and we can all sing around the piano like in Little Women!

Changing it up!

After the holidays, I pulled down all of the Christmas decorations and left everything bare for a little while. Obviously, given my decorating ADD, that didn't last all too long. The buffet in the dining room felt huge and empty with nothing on the surface. I wanted to create a little tabletop vignette that didn't feel season-specific, and that I could stick with for a while. Here's what I put together:



There are some wintry hints, but nothing too literal, since I want to be able to leave it alone for a while.



That is one of my favorite photos of me and B, in a frame that I fell in looove with at TJ Maxx. (Oh, the Maxx. How I love and loathe you all at the same time.) The print in the back was my mother's from ages ago. I've always liked it, and the colors are almost exactly the same as in the area rug under the dining table. That silver vase stuck around after Christmas, when it was stuffed with sparkly stuff, and I added some texture with those balls in a vase.

On the other end of the buffet are some apothecary jars, which I love even when they're empty:



I added some cinammon sticks, but this could easily be switched up and anything could be added... candy hearts for Valentine's Day, leafy sprigs and wildflowers if the two billion feet of snow ever melt this spring... anything you want.

The prints in the frame are one of my favorite pieces I own. I made them years ago. They're polaroid emulsion transfers, made from old slides. The one on top is of my mom in the 70s, at Niagara Falls. She has enormous super sweet glasses on in it. (Love ya, Mums!)



I'm really happy with this general setup, so maybe my design ADD won't rear its ugly head and everything will stay in one place for a while... ha ha, yeah right. :)



OH, I also don't think that I ever drew proper attention to the painting hanging to the right of the buffet. B and I got it at an antiques store a couple of months ago... it's an old portrait of a Saint Bernard! I know that probably makes us like crazy dog owning people or whatever, but we don't care. We both genuinely liked the painting and the frame is gorgeous walnut. It's kitschy and kind of weird, and we like it that way.


Over on the other side of the house, I switched up the shelves above the television in the living room (again). After the Christmas stockings were down, they just looked pretty bare. So I decided to shop around the house and see what I already owned that I could put up there. We still have boxes of things that haven't been unpacked, so I dug around and had actually forgotten about some stuff!



Those three ceramic vases I picked up for $1 each, I think. They're each a different texture and they look exactly like the Ikea ones that I've seen pop up around some design magazines.



In "shopping my house" and making use of what I already have, I found a stash of postcards that I collected while living in London. I spent a lot of time at different museums and galleries in the city (the Tate Modern and National Gallery were my favorites) and I'd buy a few postcards from the gift shops here and there. The one in the frame above is of a Gilbert & George installation. Amazing stuff. I have a bunch of different cards, so it will be fun to switch them out from time to time.



I also dug out this woodblock painting that I bought a number of years ago from a local artist in Portsmouth. The colors are so vibrant, it just makes me happy.



So there you have it. Everything un-Christmas-ified, and probably staying put for a while. Did anyone else feel the itch to ditch their holiday stuff pronto?


In other news, we've been getting dumped on with snowstorm after snowstorm around here. Lucy is loving it, of course, but I don't know how much more I can take! Here she is just soaking it up during one of the (many) storms last week:



(Oh, and see that tiny sliver of reddish wood near the fence back there? That's the retaining wall that we built this summer. It's about 2 1/2 to 3 feet high, and you can barely see it at all... When is spring, again?)

More Christmas cheer!

When I said I was like a crazy Christmas fairy lately, I wasn't kidding. I've been buzzing around the house putting little sparkly things here and there.

Here's the new buffet table in the dining room, all decked out for the holidays!



I went for metallics in mostly gold and silver, with some touches of green and red.



Love that reindeer! I filled the apothecary jar and glass vase from the living room with sparkly ornaments, sprinkled mini ornaments around the votive candles, picked up two cheap-o metallic candle holders, and a silver vase at Homegoods. Then I shoved in some glittery branches with beads and crystals on them from Michaels. Easy peasy.





The dining table got a new centerpiece, too.



We picked up a holiday tablecloth. I used the same wicker charger from the fall centerpiece and threw on a big candle, wreath with berries on it, and topped it off with some red bead garland. Then I popped some red tapers into the candlesticks and called it a day!



I'll post pictures of our tree next, so stay tuned! With the lights outside done, stockings out, and tree up we are officially ready for Christmas!

The faux-mantle, holiday style

Soo, remember when I showed how we hung shelves above our tv to mimic a mantle? That was mostly spurred by the terrible realization (in October) that because our house doesn't have a fireplace, come Christmastime we wouldn't have anywhere to hang our stockings! (BTW, I don't really know how our 90+ year old house doesn't have a fireplace, but whatevvvvs.)

I've been the crazy Christmas fairy the last few days, adding little decorations and dashes of holiday cheer throughout the house. I made some quick changes to the "mantle", adding some snowflakes, jars of ornaments, and of course our stockings!





You know my love of sticking stuff in glass containers...



Works every time. Plus sparkly ornaments make the easiest prettiest decorations!





We decorated those stockings a couple of Christmases ago and they've held up well. I meant to embellish Lucy's last year but didn't get around to it. I wanted to make a felt goose to put on it (since that's her nickname... Goose, Lucy Goose, Goosey, Gooseinator... she's smart and responds to all of them) but then forgot about it. Maybe this year!



So there you have it. Nothing too crazy, but a little added holiday sparkle. It might be a fake mantle, but it holds our stockings. Even the dog's. And someday we'll buy another house with 1,481 fireplaces in it to make up for this one. :)

Oh, and we put the Christmas tree up last night, so I'll post pictures of that in the next day or two!!

No escaping!

Branden and I finally got the gate to the backyard installed which means that it is finally entirely closed in and there is no escape!

This job was a big pain in the butt. More so than the rest of the fence. Granted, I didn't have to actually physically do anything when the rest was installed, so I'm really just saying it was a pain in the butt because I had to hold and lift heavy stuff this time. :)

Anyway, it really wasn't that hard of a job, I guess, it was just cold out and I'm really bad at holding heavy things. Seriously, I'm probably the worst mover ever. I hate carrying things. I would not have made a good Amazonian. Or donkey.



Despite my deficiencies, it came out well! We bought two latches (one for the top and one for the bottom) so we just need to screw those in and it will be completely Lucy-proof. :) From the front it just looks like a continuous length of fence (we're not putting a handle on the outside) so you can't see where the gate is.

Lucy has been running around like a crazy beast out back. She's so happy to have room to spread out.




Around the house I've been switching up some little bits of decor to make things feel a little more like Thanksgiving and to gear up for the real exciting time of year... Christmas! Yup, get ready.

I threw together this harvest-y centerpiece for the dining room table:



(Lucy must love it because she's pretty much melting over there in the background. This is why I call her The Puddle.) The woven disc I got at Target for around $1.50, and the candlesticks were from Goodwill for 50 cents each. The gourds I had gotten earlier for a buck or two I think. The whole thing was super cheap. And together it reminds me of a flattened cornucopia. In a good way.

I also switched up the telephone table to make it a little less Halloween-ish and more late-fall-early-winter-ish. (These are real words.)





I love this apothecary jar. I feel kind of like a scientist with my specimens, but I believe that whatever you put in a glass jar instantly becomes lovely. I just picked up a branch with some berries on it while on one of my walks with Lucy. Then I snipped some dying dried hydrangeas from one of our bushes in the front yard. I stuck some cinnamon sticks at the bottom, and voila! A beautiful little November time capsule.

Next to that I also filled a glass hurricane with some lovely glittery apples:



I've already started planning out my holiday decorations so it won't stay like this for long! Seriously, Branden developed his plans for the exterior lights weeks ago and is planning on purchasing multiple spools of lights to string the day after Thanksgiving. We're crazy over here, I know. But it's our first Christmas in a real home... you really can't blame us for wanting to get into the spirit early!

Cameras and a penguin

The shelves above the tv are starting to come together. I wanted to use the space to display things that are meaningful to us, as well as pretty to look at of course. :)

I wanted to showcase my collection of vintage cameras, and I love how they look like little sculptures on display. They had been stowed away in a box for the past few years, so I'm really happy to give them a home. They're too cool to just keep in storage.



The camera in the middle cube is from the 1930s and is my favorite of them all. It's so intricate; I can't imagine using it without being a math genius. Seriously, everything is manual, and there's a chart on the top with distances and an equation that you have to use to get the right exposure. Who has that kind of time? The one on the right is from the 70s or 80s. I used it in photography class in college.

The weird man statue up there is from the 1930s and is actually a bottle opener. Branden found it when he was building his jewelry store. The wooden bowl and spoon were my grandmother's and came from Russia. I used to play with them all the time when I was little.



This camera is from the 1950s and I think was used by someone in the military. The back is engraved with someone's name.

Branden is very attached to the ceramic penguin, and insisted that it gets a proper place on the shelves. It's one of the only decorations that he is adamant must be on display in the house.





I also switched up the telephone table, since it was feeling pretty crowded with the extra stuff on the shelves above.





I picked up the apothecary jar for $7! Awesome.

The living room feels almost complete now. The shelves still need some more tweaking, but I'm happier with them now. I'm thinking about DIYing some botanical prints for over the couch, so we'll see how that goes!

The power of laser levels

As I hinted earlier, we solved the dilemma of where to hang our Christmas stockings. I know, this is a number one priority that needs immediate attention, given that it is not even Halloween yet. Shut it.



We had been puzzling over what to do with the large empty space on the wall above our living room television. It was so huge, we knew we needed something large enough to fill it up. After looking around for some large, substantial artwork, we realized that wasn't in our budget. (One antique gallery we went to had some amazing 19th century maritime oil paintings, so we will continue to dream of winning the lottery and bringing home one of those...)

We found some component shelving at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and picked up a couple of sets to play around with. As we don't have a fireplace mantle, I knew I wanted to create a long shelf above the tv. The shelves we bought came with some handy paper templates, so we stuck them up on the wall and played around with different configurations.



Happy with the final set up, Branden drilled the holes for the four shelves along the bottom. It wasn't until the holes were drilled and a few of the anchors were hammered in, that we realized that the templates did not actually match the shelves exactly. So many of the holes we'd drilled were off by a good amount.

So, we threw out the templates in a rage, dug out the spackle from the basement, patched up the holes, and let everything dry overnight. The next day, refreshed, we tackled it again, this time measuring the brackets on each individual shelves.



It's funny the way that Branden approaches these projects: so methodically and mathematically. The total opposite of my "just eyeball it" method. He double and triple checks each measurement before doing anything, calculates the exact distances from each wall to find the perfect center, and makes sure that everything is exactly level. With this kind of project, being exact is a must! Our laser level (found on clearance at WalMart for less than15 bucks!) was the saving grace though. So helpful! I can't believe we hadn't had one before this.





And because you know how much I love a good before and after:





It's looking pretty blah right now. Once I can get some accessories up there, I think it will all come together really nicely.

Today Branden's dad and brother are coming to help dig post holes for the fence. It's a huge job, but I can't wait to have the yard all fenced in for Lucy! I'll have lots of pictures to share soon.

In the meantime, here's proof that it's officially, definitely, absolutely fall: