Two niches down, the entire upstairs to go

We’ve been kind of paralyzed about decorating since moving. We want to redo a bunch of the rooms, but don’t even know where to start. So the walls were bare until this weekend when I finally said “that’s it, we’re not living like this any longer, we are hanging s&*! up and I don’t care if we change it in a month, we know how to fill nail holes.”

So little by little our house is feeling a teeny bit more like home. Our pictures are all up in the downstairs (wahoooooo!), and Maggie and I even made progress on the two massive, ceiling-height art niches. We got this neat pottery and wood-ring vase and filled it with funky dried plant and seed pod stuff. Here’s what it looks like from the hallway:

And here’s what it looks like from the front door. You can see our two princesses in the background checking out my first attempt at a tissue-paper flower, which will be one of the decorations at our egg hunt this weekend. And you can see the didgeridoo TubaDad got in Australia pre-kids:

The big niche over the stairs finally, finally has something other than dust in it. We picked up an awesome textured pottery vase (at least I think it’s pottery, damn thing feels like it weighs more than the Prius): and a talllllllll mirror to live behind the vase. TubaDad was less than thrilled when Maggie and I showed up with the mirror and excitedly asked him to please hang it, but he was game. And smart -- he immediately called my dad. Luckily, my folks were around to evaluate the problem.

By the way, TubaDad and I thought the hanging wire should be strung straight across between the two hangers, but my NASA engineer dad explained something about sines and cosines and how the force on the wire increased exponentially as you straightened the angle, and we just figured we should quit yapping because clearly he knew best.

Both pieces were tricky, and the vase in particular was staggeringly heavy:

But now they’re up there and we never, ever have to move them (because we are never, ever moving again). The colors look a little funky in these pictures, by the way. All of the walls you can see are a dark tan and the niches are medium brown (the niches photograph kind of reddish/rusty in these shots and that’s not quite how they look):

Many, many thanks to our crackerjack decorating team of Maggie (shopping) and TubaDad/BobBob/Wela (trigonometry and manual labor)!

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Post #17 of my Spring Fling 30 posts in 30 days. You know it’s interesting that the more I post the faster I get. I think I worry less about each word and just get something out there, which is way more fun. These awesome bloggers are also participating in the Spring Fling and are kicking butt with this challenge: And babies make four…, Another Journey, Birdie and the Queen Bee, Catherine’s Chatter, Diary of a Nouveau Soccer Mom, Dragonflies, Journey to Motherhood, Koprowski Kids, Life with L and M (julialaine.net), Love and a Little Craziness, Mindful of Mine, Moments with Maisie, No Ordinary Family, One Plus One Equals Four, Our Boy and His Cricket, Searching for Sophie, Spectacular S, Three Kids = Chaos, To Vietnam and China, We’re Here.