I finished something today!

Something exciting just happened. I finished a project! Can I hear a booyah?

I don't have to ask if anyone remembers the family photos we took, because I blogged about it, and said I would send them out as Christmas cards, and then did send them out as Christmas cards. (After Jared read that post he gently pointed out that I just blew the Christmas card element of surprise. Oops.) Well, last week some girlfriends and I got together and mod podged those babies onto canvases, and today I nailed on the hardware to hang them and up they went! Woohoo! I'm excited. Very excited.

These pictures are a little dark because I almost never have the lights on during the day. I'm a natural light junkie.

Can I also say I'm not a crafter? Never used mod podge before. It's fun to be crafty sometimes. (I bought mod podge!)

And here they are! I've already shuffled the photos around, but that's the easy part. I'm just happy the nails are somewhat evenly spread out considering I never hang things alone, but this time I just couldn't wait for Jared to come home to help eyeball it.

Close up. The edges are lined first with brown paint, then with scrapbook paper. (Scrapbook paper! I bought scrapbook paper! That's just weird. I gave up scrapbooking 5 minutes after I started it, which was 5 minutes after I moved to Utah.)
I'm sure there are a million tutorials out there on how to do this. I just did what my friend Christie told me to do. I still may do a very slight vignette around the photo edges with the brown paint, just to soften the look that currently I think is a bit too crisp.

Wide view of the dining area, which of course also includes a bit of the kitchen and the living room. We love our little house.

Are those new dining chairs, you ask? Why yes, they are! Thank you for noticing! We scored 6 of those off of craigslist for $25 a pop, retailing for at least $100 each! So, if you do the math, we saved like a boat load of money by buying them. (Jared and I love to hate that expression, do the math. How condescending is that? We like to say it to each other as often as possible. We also like the idea of saving by spending. Math is fun.)

Of course, both the canvases and the chairs were acquired after the housewarming party we had last month, so to make up for it I might throw a little housewarming blog party for myself on Santa Paula Holla. We'll see...