Our Gilded Abode: Foyer

Showing posts with label Foyer. Show all posts

2016 Christmas Decor

It's starting to look and feel a lot like Christmas ... the presents are wrapped, the mantel is aglow, and our home is an explosion of glittery gold, bold red and deep green.

This year's mantel is decked out in three layers of garlands ... a base of vertically strung pinecones, and a lighted spruce garland, topped off with a gilded cascading garland. Instructions for the DIY pinecone garland are HERE.

Above the mantel, a traditional spruce wreath with gold and red ball ornaments is surrounded by a gold open picture frame and a symmetrical arrangement of glittery cutout gold stars and red trees, red felt cone trees, and copper lanterns filled with gold wrapped candles.

A splash of red also warms the hearth area - this darling wood step stool painted with shiny red enamel was built by hubby's grandfather many years ago and is the perfect perch for the vintage red truck and tree. Surprisingly, our gold painted Thanksgiving pumpkin appears to be alive and well to shine on through Christmas.

On our coffee table, a large clear glass cloche filled with red glass ball ornaments is resting on a gold framed mirror tray. In reality, it's not a tray at all - it's a wall mirror found at Target. Nice when items can do double duty.

Accompanying the cloche is a little red lighted vehicle with Christmas tree. It was originally green and received a festive makeover with red paint. Read more about that HERE.

The two slipper chairs in the living room are adorned with red rosette pillows, and my thrifty find of the season ... a dark grey plush throw with super large fluffy pom poms. I was thrilled to find it at Tuesday Morning for only $14.99!!! If you're searching for these, they also had them in ivory and a light tan.

In a break from tradition, this year's large living room tree is decorated all in gold, with burlap garland and gold raffia. It rests in a burlap filled galvanized container. To see how we set up the tree container, click HERE.

The topper is a gold star with white lights, and glittery gold cascading sprays. The sprays were found at Lowe's and the star topper at Target. Tree ornaments were all items we had on hand.

Instructions for making the burlap and book page stocking ornaments can be found HERE.

The foyer decor (adjacent to the large tree) is simple and consists of a lighted tabletop urn centerpiece on the foyer table, and a simple door wreath.

Our gift wrapping color theme this year is a combination of metallic gold, white and black. I created and cut the gift tags from black card stock using my Silhouette Cameo, and shiny gold paper fills cutout tree openings in the tags.

Names were written on the tags with a metallic gold Sharpie (from Lowe's).

In the dining room, a new addition this season is the hot beverage bar on the small antique chest. The chest is just the right size for all the goodies needed to enjoy a hot cup of coffee, tea, spiced cider or cocoa. In addition to the Keurig and K-cups, add-ins are ready to go - chocolate chips, marshmallows, flavored coffee creamer, sprinkles, candy cane stirrers and cinnamon.

The dining room table centerpiece is another large glass cloche, filled with red and gold glass ornaments and surrounded by gold and red beaded garland. This cloche is displayed on a farmhouse style carved round wood tray with metal handles. The tray was from Decor Steals and came in a set of two.

A counter height bar separates our kitchen from our dining room and it's a great place for two lighted 4' counter trees in urns. They're decorated with the handmade cinnamon ornaments from last year (instructions found HERE and HERE).

Next to each lighted counter tree are small gold metal ornament stands loaded with red and gold ornaments and "skirted" with red berry candle rings. The gold metal stands were Goodwill finds this summer.

If you're still with me, have you noticed that pillows move around a lot in our home? :)

In the kitchen, we continue the explosion of festive red. Our kitchen is typically very neutral and at Christmas the red really makes it come alive.

The light fixture above the island is dressed up a bit with green garland and red and gold tinsel wreaths. A similar wreath is also centered on the garland at the kitchen sink window.

Our framed Christmas countdown is in full swing on the kitchen counter, along with a mug of hot cinnamon flavored candy canes in a holiday mug perched on a white and gold dotted cupcake pedestal. A trio of glittery gold cone trees add a little sparkle to the top of the fridge.

The trio of cracked glass lighted orbs on the counter remain year-round because we enjoy them so much.

A white ceramic soup tureen is great for displaying Christmas crackers/poppers (which do you call them?) until Christmas day and a chubby little Santa is keeping them company.

Wrapping up this holiday tour, our master bedroom has a touch of glitz in the form of tinsel trees and matching gold wreath.

How is your holiday decor coming along? Are you just beginning to decorate, shop for gifts and plan your menu? Or, have you finished and are now breathing a sigh of relief?

Your comments are greatly appreciated and I look forward to your thoughts and ideas! I try to respond to comments via email as soon as I can. If your email address isn't available, I will comment here. Thanks so much for visiting!

Shared with:

Saving 4 Six

Two Purple Couches
Finding Silver Pennies
Across the Boulevard
Pieced Pastimes
A Stroll Thru Life
Art and Sand
Nifty Thrifty Things
DIY ShowOff
Julie's Creative Lifestyle
The Chicken Chick
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The Dedicated House

Painted Pantry Door

I enjoy our home projects so much that I go from one to another and forget to blog about them! Last week I added a little pop to our white pantry door by painting it black.

Here's the before:

To prep the door, I cleaned it with diluted Mrs. Meyers Lemon Verbena Multi-surface Concentrate. Smells great and cleans really well. When door surface was dry, it was time to paint.

My paint of choice for this project was Olympic One Paint & Primer in Black Magic interior satin latex.

Olympic One Black Magic Paint & Primer

For me, painting a door has always been a bit tricky - which areas do you paint first, in which direction and in which order?

Fortunately, I found a great source of how-to info at Love, Pomegranate House. Talitha shares a wonderful diagram that shows step-by-step instructions:

Love, Pomegranate House

Using a brush for the inset areas and a roller for all other areas of the door, the first coat of paint went on easily. The dark paint on a white surface always looks a bit scary after the first coat.

Thankfully, the second coat looked beautiful and filled in all the splotchy light areas.

We have lots of black accents in our home and I like the way the door now highlights them throughout our open concept floor plan. And, against the white door frame, the color really pops.

We like it so much that I'm now planning to paint the inside of our front door as well - the black door will look nice at the end of our long foyer.

Have you painted any of your interior doors a color other than white? Do you enjoy them?

Thank you to Kathryn at The Dedicated House for featuring this project!!!

Shared with:

Thoughts from Alice
The Interior Frugalista
Dwellings - The Heart of Your Home
Karen's Up on the Hill
Create with Joy
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Cozy Little House
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The Dedicated House
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The Chicken Chick

DIY Console Table Reveal

Last weekend we took advantage of the gorgeous weather and turned our garage into a workshop as we measured, measured again, cut, assembled and sanded the boards that would result in this beauty ....

To say that we like it is an understatement!

This journey began with the need to replace our drastically undersized original console table and you can read more about that HERE.

Our inspiration was Ana White's Rustic X Console. We followed Ana's wonderful free plans to construct the frame using 2" x 2" and 2" x 4" boards. These were the only boards we had to purchase, as we had the two shelf boards (1" x 12" each) and three tabletop boards (2" x 6" each) on hand.

The finished dimensions are a whopping 76-1/2" x 18" x 32" - a little over 6 feet, making it much more appropriately sized for our 18' long wall (our original console table was only 42".)

You'll notice a few additional foyer changes as well. The wall was refreshed by adding horizontal painted stripes. Read more about that HERE.

A bamboo typography mat for our front door also received a revamp and details are HERE.

Now for the table build ... please be prepared for lots of pics!

We started around noon on Saturday and completed the build on Sunday evening. Add in a couple of days for finish sanding, staining and adding hardware, and the new table was cozy and comfy in the foyer by midweek.

Be sure to check out Ana White's site for a detailed supply list, cut list and plans.

You'll notice that we opted to not include the "X" on the sides of the table.

We made lots of pocket screw holes with the Kreg jig.

Hubby veered from the plans a bit and crafted shelf side braces that allow the shelves to drop into the braces. He's creative that way! :)

We then installed the shelves and at that point, I couldn't resist moving it to the foyer to determine if the finished size was as we envisioned. Fortunately, it was!

After the build, the next decision was whether to stain, paint or a combination of both.

We stained the tabletop with General Finishes Gel Stain in Java.

Honestly, this is amazing stuff! No drips, spills or mess - it's a thick gel and goes on super nicely - just apply with a soft cloth or a brush and wipe off excess. Let dry and you can apply as many coats as you like until you reach the color intensity you desire. For this project, only one application of the stain was needed - it provided a rich dark tone, but was transparent enough to allow the wood grain to show through.

In the end, we went with stain for the entire table and love it - it adds warmth and contrast against the light neutral striped wall.

We also added hardware - corner braces - to the tabletop. To find out how we gave the bright zinc plated hardware a distressed look, check out my post HERE.

Here are a few closeups of the stain and wood grain:

The round mirror on the wall was another DIY - made with wood shims.

And, one last glimpse ...

As you can see, the table decor is constantly being changed and rearranged. I hope you enjoyed seeing how bare pine boards were transformed into a beautiful and useful piece of furniture for our home!