Over the weekend we finally got around to hanging some things on the nursery walls… including the alphabet art I showed you sitting against the wall last week…

All of the deets about making the art can be found in last week’s post, which is here. But it’s now safely hung!

Much better, eh?

Since we were on a roll with hanging, we also decided to hang this metal E that I picked up at Anthropologie way back in February…

I love this thing and it’s one of my favorite things in his room. It took us a long time to decide where to hang it. In the gallery wall? Over the crib? In the end, the skinny wall next to the closet won.

Please ignore the disarray in the closet tower since I was doing laundry and digging through bins that day. Whoops.

Now it seems like all we have left to do in here is get a gallery wall going, which I honestly haven’t put much thought into. We were able to hang the alphabet art and the E because we brought Easton upstairs with us for one of his naps. He camped out in his crib 🙂

No we’re not mean, he literally spit that pacifier out on to his chest. Anyway, now that it took me 4 weeks to realize that I can put him in his crib while I work in his room, maybe I’ll try it again to plan out his gallery wall. I’ll add that to this week’s list of goals 🙂

**THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED**

The winner of the RapidRoller is Tammie, lucky commenter #77 who said:

“Wow……the rapid roller is amazing!!! I have a new house and painting is in order since the walls are egg shell white…ewww…..this will make my life easier!!!”

Congratulations Tammie and enjoy your new RapidRoller! 🙂

As promised, this week we will be giving a Black & Decker RapidRoller away to one lucky reader!

The holidays are a great time of year to either freshen up some paint around your house or give one as a gift to your favorite home improvement addict. In case our review didn’t do the roller justice, here is a video courtesy of Black & Decker that shows you everything the roller is capable of…

So for the deets…

• One reader will win a Black & Decker RapidRoller (a $35 value)
• To enter, simply visit Black & Decker on Facebook (facebook.com/blackanddecker) and browse their holiday gift guide (listed on the left side of the page)
• Come back here and leave a comment letting me know what gift from the guide you’d like to receive and why

And the rules…

• Only one entry per email address is allowed
• A winner will be chosen using Random.org
• This giveaway closes on Sunday, December 11th at midnight. Any entries made after that time will not be counted.
• A winner will be announced on Monday, December 12th so check back 🙂

While you’re on the Black & Decker Facebook page, don’t forget to “Like” them and play their Holiday Match & Win game for more chances to win free stuff! Good luck!

ps- We received a RapidRoller ourselves in exchange for hosting this giveaway. And happy first giveaway to us 🙂

Before Easton was born, I posted about my plans to make some sort of an alphabet print for his room. My original inspiration image hailed from Pinterest…

(from Free Home Decorating Ideas via Pinterest)

My previous post covers how I went from planning this out using paint and canvas, to printing on canvas, to finally just making it a print using Photoshop.

I’ve said this before, but I am no Photoshop expert. In fact, I have no clue of what I’m doing 99% of the time. When I posted about deciding to make the art using Photoshop, I figured Mike would make it because I was lacking the skils. Well, throw in a late baby, a husband who is busy with his own work and me spending hours in bed and guess what? I did it all by myself 🙂

I camped out in bed the last days before Easton came and one of the things I did was whip up a little art on my laptop. I started as just playing around to give Mike an idea of what I wanted, so that he could then do it better. As I played around, I realized I could do it on my own if I just kept tweaking it. It ended up being far easier than I thought!

I started with a rough draft… all I did was type some letters in Photoshop and change the font, color, size and location of each individual letter until I liked the way it looked. I was surprised at how easy this part was since each letter was it’s own layer and I could go back and tweak whichever letter I didn’t like.

My first attempt looked like this…

I liked it for the most part, but there was a lot of dead space. I had to figure out how the letters would look in the frame and make sure there wasn’t too much white space at the top and the bottom of the letters. We had picked up a large Virserum frame from Ikea before even starting this project, so that we were sure that we could size the print properly to fit the inexpensive frame. You may remember seeing the frame hanging around in some pictures…

The frame is 30 ¾” x 41 ½” and the mat opening is about 27 ½” x 19 ½”. I mentioned in my previous post that I saw on Shutterfly that I could order a print as large as 30″ x 20″, which was perfect. I would just have to make sure that my text was centered around the  27 ½” x 19 ½” size of the opening and that I made the image large enough pixel wise to print clearly.

So I set my Photoshop canvas to the size of the print (30″ x 20″) and began to tweak my first draft. A little bit of making fonts bigger, a little bit of overlapping letters and just playing around, then my final product looked like this…

I ordered it and it cost me a whopping $15 to print through Shutterfly. It was supposed to take over a week to come, but it ended up arriving in a few days and coming the day before Easton was born. If you remember from my birth story, I was already in labor at this point so Mike ran it upstairs to show me how great it printed. He put it in the frame just so I could see how it looked, but I didn’t snap a picture of it.

The large canvas size I chose worked because the letters were not at all blurry.

We planned to put it on the wall in between the giraffe sconces.

Since the sconces are white, the dresser is white, the frame is white and the mat is white, I thought it was too much white. It would look nice and clean, but I was just looking for a little more fun and contrast on this wall. So I decided to spray paint the mat navy blue.

I picked up this can of paint while I was in labor. I figured walking around Lowe’s would help, though I was in such pain that I could hardly walk and I had to stop and sit on a pile of wood. Whoops.

Finally this week, I decided to take the hour I had in between feeding, burping and cuddling to run outside and spray the mat. Hello backyard, I haven’t seen you in a while.

I just laid the mat on the grass because Mike was due to cut it anyway. The blue will be gone with one pass of the John Deere 🙂

It took several coats to make sure there were no white spots. My hand started cramping since the Valspar trigger was really hard to push down, so Mike took over.

Once we were done, the grass looked like this (which was actually really cool looking)…

But the mat looked like this!

Fast forward a few days after it completely dried and I had another baby nap to put the mat in the actual frame. Sidenote: Mike’s been spending most of his spare time working on the built-ins in the new office that we abandoned to work on the nursery. So I’m usually on baby duty and can’t work on projects, but I can’t complain because the built-ins are looking awesome 🙂

First I wanted to make sure the blues looked good together. The lid of the spray paint can looked more bluish than navy, but it was the most navy one I could find. Thankfully, it dried much darker!

I put it in the frame and I was surprised that he “glass” in the frame is plastic. No wonder why Ikea can sell such a large frame, with a mat for just $29.99!

We couldn’t find the hardware that came with the frame, so I just leaned it up against the wall to see how it would look.

And I love it. I’m shocked at how well the colors match the color scheme of the room. I really just tried to incorporate the blues of the bedding/curtains/ceiling, the greens of the bedding/closet/bookcase and the gray of the walls. This artwork was meant to be the glue that brought everything together, and I think it does.

The plastic “glass” of the frame made for some awful glare, so it was hard to capture pictures. I may actually just remove it when we mount the frame, at least to take better pictures for you guys 🙂

Though the glare does allow you to see the other elements in the room with the art, like how you can see the chevron curtains hanging out in this picture…

One more picture from the other side of the room!

Not to shabby for $15 for a DIY print + $29.99 for a large frame and mat. Oh and a couple of bucks for spray paint!

Since this post took me 3 sessions to write, Mike is actually at Lowe’s at the moment picking up some stuff for the office and some hardware to hang this bad boy. Hopefully this weekend we can both have time, at the same time, to hang it since it’s a two person job. Then we’re one step closer to actually being ready to give you a full nursery reveal and tour. I’m so excited 🙂

Update! Since I just completed this and I didn’t have time to tackle a new project, I decided to use this as project as my summer Pinterest Challenge entry, hosted by Young House Love, Bower Power, Centsational Girl and Ten June, all of which are some of my favorite blogs. 3 out of 4 of my Pinterest Challenge projects have been some form of wall art, guess you can tell what I like to do for fun…

Oh and we did get around to hanging this print on the wall, which I posted about here.

Tada! 🙂

When we vacationed in Jost Van Dyke earlier this year, I realized that I really want a room with a view.  Waking up, and falling asleep, to magnificent water views was not only incredibly relaxing but inspiring.  There was no need for a television or fancy decor in this room to keep us entertained.  The views were plenty; the sounds, too.

So it was no surprise that when I stumbled upon Jack Dorsey’s New House in San Francisco on home-designing.com, my eyes (ok, my wide open mouth, too) were fixated on the views this property has.  Jack Dorsey is a co-founder of Twitter and he picked up this cliff side house for a cool $9million in San Francisco.  It has views of the San Francisco bay and the Golden Gate bridge.

Jealous, I am.

If you’re looking for interior shots, head on over to home-designing.com. Until then, here are some of the incredible views.

Hopefully that SongMeanings IPO takes off one of these days and we’ll be able to live in a house with spectacular views quite like these.

As promised, I am back with more pictures of the house we stayed at while on vacation in the British Virgin Islands last week. These pictures cover the common areas of the house. There were actually 4 (yes 4!) other bedrooms in the house, 2 of which the owners rented out to us and 2 that they kept private. The 2 we rented were being used by our friends and I didn’t want to invade their privacy with my house tour. The other 2 belonged to the owners’ children and I thought it was nice that they didn’t let strangers sleep in their beds. If I was a kid and lived part time in another country, I think I would like to have my own little space kept private! Each of the 4 remaining bedrooms had their own bathrooms.

Once again, I’ll just let the pictures do the talking 🙂

The view from the upper deck by the entrance of the house, which had a mini-putting green. Master bedroom is on the right.

On the left side is the kitchen and dining area.

The kitchen had a few sets of double doors that led into it. We kept them open during the day and closed them at night, but since I took these early in the morning, I forgot to open all of them.

And there’s Mike checking his email! There’s another bedroom behind him and one on the floor below that.

The kitchen was in use for breakfast, so I only snapped a quick picture.

There was a small sitting area off of the kitchen.

The views from the patio area outside of the kitchen were unbelievable.

Down some stairs from the patio outside of the kitchen was a deck area with a small plunge pool. It was like a stunt infinity pool… sort of looked like it, but not quite the real deal.

Then on the opposite side of the pool was another part of the house that was a newer addition. It had a family room and 2 more bedrooms with bathrooms.

The family room had a big tv that we had no luck getting any good channels on (they had a satellite). So we only sat in there for a few hours one night.

The crooked cable box and wires are bothering me. Which is weird because we had a wire hanging from our TV for over a year and it didn’t bother me…

This room also had an awesome ceiling. AND it was painted a pretty blue color. I love ceilings that remind me of the sky. More about that another day 🙂 (hint: on the nursery list)

And the views! Are you seeing a theme to this house? All about the views.

There was a bedroom and bathroom behind the TV area and another one underneath it, which was accessible from these stairs…

Here’s the view from this portion of the house looking back towards the kitchen area…

The property was huge and had gardens, walkways, banana trees, papayas, a laundry area underneath the master, an outdoor shower and a library room. They were all hidden around little paths that I only walked down a few times (stairs are not my friends right now).

Here’s a video of some of the areas in the pictures. I tried to go down a few steps of the path to some of the more hidden areas so you’d get an idea of how big it was, but I changed my mind. Sorry for the shaky camera work, it ain’t easy walking and filming!

And that’s the end of our vacation posts (and our vacation) Thankfully it’s been pretty warm in NJ this week so the transition hasn’t been awful. It’s going to be a sad reality check when the freezing cold weather comes back though 🙁

ps- the downside to staying somewhere not accessible by car? Carrying your luggage up a hill to get home….

Which was followed by a taxi ride, a ferry ride to Tortola, a ferry ride to St. Thomas, a taxi to the airport and finally, a flight home…