Framed Vintage Wallpaper and a Pretty Little Chair

I went to an estate sale on Saturday and found this amazing roll of vintage wallpaper. The first few feet of the paper was crumbling apart, but the rest was in perfect condition.

And did I mention it was free? I talked to the woman running the sale for awhile when I first walked in, and when I came back later to ask her the cost of the paper, she said to consider it as a gift :).

I love the farm scenes, the huge red flowers, and the pretty little blue birds! The colors match the paint colors in our new house perfectly. The first thing I decided to do with the paper was frame it. I just unpacked the blue-grey thrift store frame I painted almost a year ago and knew they were meant to be together. The frame didn't have a back, so I cut out a piece of cardboard to fit it from one of the hundreds of boxes that are still sitting unpacked in our house. I used modge podge to glue the paper on to the cardboard.

And yes, I have purchased a few pieces of furniture for the house already. Some new and some old. Here's a little chair I found for Annie at the Recycled Furniture in Old Saybrook for $10. They have some awesome deals there. I plan to recover the chair with a fun fabric soon.

Love the Beasts,
Emily

Tiny Birdhouses For Aine's Room

Initially for Aine's 2nd birthday I planned a birdhouse theme and bought a bunch of $1 wooden birdhouses from Michael's. Later the theme developed into "Springtime," then it quickly changed to "Let's not have a theme and just have a family birthday party on Easter Sunday." Despite the changes I still had an excuse to use the birdhouses, but I wasn't sure I wanted to paint each and every one on my own. Eventually I came up with the idea to have Annie's aunts, uncles, and what we like to call spare-aunts and spare-uncles to paint the birdhouses as decoration for both her birthday party and her new room. I bought a multi-pack of brushes and acrylic paint in colors that I thought would eventually complement the colors in her room. They turned out great! Here are the 5 completed birdhouses. We still need 2 more painted by her Aunt Jenny and Uncle Rory to finish the set.

Taking a closer look below, the one on the left was painted by her Uncle Terry and the right was by her soon-to-be Jo-Ma Jennifer. Jo-Ma is one of many terms for "Aunt" in Chinese.

The birdhouse in the middle was painted by my brother Calvin, Annie's Jo-Jo. He mixed a few paint colors to make the silver/grey color. Not exactly matching the color scheme that I planned for her room, but who cares?! It's R2D2! Could you tell?

 

The left one in this picture was painted by her spare-Aunt Julie and the right was by her Aunt MaryGrace.

Thanks to all of them for taking the time to paint these for Annie's room! Eventually I'll hang them up from the ceiling. I'm taking the idea from others in the blogging world of finding a big branch, painting it white, and hanging these birdhouses from it. We'll see how long it finally takes me to finish that project!

Love the Beasts,

Emily

Our Kitchen...Now With Bamboo Flooring!

I don't have complete "after" pictures of the kitchen yet (mostly because the house is a mess and we're still unpacking), but here's some before and during pictures of our kitchen floor.

We started with this amazing pastel geometric laminate:

My husband Brendan and his father tore up the floor, and Brendan and his sister Jenny began painting 2 accent walls red:

Here are the first few rows of carbonized stranded bamboo going down:

And here it is towards the very end! We finally were able to move into the house when the kitchen flooring was done (although we couldn't use the dining or living rooms and didn't have our gas stove/oven hooked up yet):

After pictures will eventually follow :). Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Love the Beasts,
Emily