After: Dining Room Gallery Wall & Front Yard

I am so excited to actually check off a few small projects on my list! After a week of tinkering and tweaking the new gallery wall in the dining room, it is finally finished. Verdict? I like it.

I couldn't to decide if I should leave some of the frames mismatched, but went ahead and sprayed them white, along with the two shelves which were originally cherry. It's enough that the art and mats are all kind of a hodge-podge, the frames were really crying out to all be one color.

Before.

During.

After.

I do intend to replace the pictures in the top, horizontal frame with actual art work at some point (I usually buy little paintings and such on vacation or in the thrift store). The bird and the letter E are just placeholders for now; they're actually just note cards!

Bonus Micro-Project: Incorporating this little "no soliciting" sign into my front door wreath. Since I work at home, it's become clear that we needed something to shoo away the non-stop time-wasting salesfolk of the world. It says "No Soliciting: We love our vacuum. We've found God. We gave at the office." I highly recommend one.

The rest of my weekend was spend starting the first of many yard projects. Today's project was labor intensive, not expensive or super challenging-- mulching. No fun there, but it felt good to be out in the nice weather (love our Florida sunshine in February!) working with my hands. My dutiful hubby was the mulch-buyer-delivery-boy-and-unloader and I was the installer. Together, we laid out forty bags of mulch, plus four bags of river rocks along the front walkway that gets nailed by roof rain runoff (we don't have gutters... yet).

I think it's a good start for the season. I aggressively cut back our "shrubs" (if you can call them that at this point) and fertilized them, along with our wimpy front yard tree, in an effort to beef up the greenery around here (some green is starting to wind its way back into our grass after this tough winter). We still have to mulch the back yard around the patio and this car-park area thingy at the end of our driveway, plant some actual plants, and build this giant pergola on the back of our house that I've been dreaming about for ages. All in good time!

So, it's been a pretty productive Sunday around here. I totally forgot that I spent the whole day yesterday running errands, getting my hair done with my mom, having dinner with my dad, etc-- today seems like it's been at least three days.

I'm off to apply some liniment (yes, I say liniment-- no, I'm not 80) to my inevitably achy joints!