Home Improvement

I've been saving a lot of pictures of gallery walls to my desktop, and when we moved into our current house I thought this might be a nice remedy to the white walls staring me in the face at every turn.

It was kind of tricky putting it up, and it was hard to tell if it looked how I wanted it to until it was all pretty much in place.  I think I would have spaced them a little further apart if I'd had the motivation to fix it after the fact, but it will do for now.  Maybe I'll add to it to make it fill the space a little better.

 The other area of our house that needed some work was the kitchen.  Ours is teeny tiny.  I had a feeling I'd end up scratching our pots and pans if we kept them in a cupboard (and to be perfectly honest, I hate having to dig through a million pots and pans to get to the one that I actually want), so we took a leaf out Julia Child's book and put up some pegboard (this should have been pretty easy, but we ended up having to go back to Lowe's to get different screws three separate times.  Apparently our walls are abnormal).  We painted it blue, and hung everything up.  I have really loved it because everything is so easy to find and we didn't have to sacrifice any storage space.

 Disclaimer: the stains on the kitchen floor are permanent.  We really have tried to clean them. 

Upon moving in, we quickly realized that we didn't have a microwave, so we got one on sale at Target (thanks Dad).  The problem was that we didn't have anywhere to put it.  Our kitchen has minimal counter space to begin with, so we weren't going to take it all up with a microwave.  We realized that we could just barely squeeze the microwave in between the oven and refrigerator if we squished the dryer, oven, and fridge a little more.  Then we picked up some 2x2s, 2x4s, and a piece of plywood to make a very basic table for the microwave to stand on.  It was a tight squeeze, but it fit perfectly, and the table even gave us a place to put our trash can.

We had fun making the house feel more like our own (when I wasn't pulling my hair out about the pegboard situation) and it was nice to have a chance to break in some of our tools (including our power drill!)