So, I love to decorate my home, but I like to change things a lot too. There is nothing worse than paying a lot of money for home decor and then being totally sick of it by the next year. I have been trying to find creative ways to save money, but keep my home trendy at the same time.
One thing about me is, I HATE white walls, but trying to find great wall colors that will go with a lot of different decorating styles can be quite challenging. So, I found a paint color that looked gray with a hint of blue for my living room. The paint swatch looked PERFECT!! Gray can go with anything right?!! My husband does not allow me to paint walls because I apparently don't do it correctly (this is fine because I despise painting anyway). So, I return home from work one day only to discover that my entire living room is BLUE...not gray with a hint of blue, but blue!! How could this happen? Well, apparently we should have only purchased a small sample of the paint because 2 gallons and $50 later, we were stuck with this BLUE living room. Country Blue!! If any of you watch HGTV the experts always suggest sampling colors first, but we don't listen. Shame on us! Anyhow, I was not about to purchase more paint and go through the headache of moving furniture around for a 2nd time...I had to make the blue work. So, we did what we could, but there was one huge blue wall that still needed to be tackled. So, we bought a book shelf to hide the wall.
It still wasn't quite tall enough; there was still entirely too much blue showing. Now we needed art work, but we are hoping to sell our home soon so we didn't want to add any additional holes in the wall, and we didn't want to spend a lot of money on a piece of art that we may not like a year down the road. So, I started looking through my 3 year old daughter's collection of art work. She brings home at least 3 paintings a week from preschool, and I just add them to a tote in the closet because....what are you supposed to do with them? Let's face it, there is only so much fridge space. Anyhow, a lot of her art work is really good and completely frame worthy. I then found all of these cheap frames from Ikea...if you've ever been to Ikea then you know you can get a boatload of frames...any size...for under $20.
And, by leaning the artwork against the wall, not only did we add depth to the display, we also eliminated the need for nail holes.
By adding a homemade piece of my own (the monogram N) and the 8x10 photo of my daughter, we now have a contemporary and eclectic display of original art work. It is a completely non-country style, but yet it works with the HORRIBLE blue wall!!! (please ignore all of the additional clutter because the bookcase that saved my living room has now become a catch-all)
