Making a Home

It's been just about 4 months since we moved into The Lodge, and while the pace of projects is slowing bit from the insane asylum of our first few months, we're still tackling a project or two with every spare second. While its been really gratifying to watch it all come together, it's also really frustrating that this place still feels like a work in progress, and not a home.  One of my favorite bloggers, Katie from BowerPower.com, hit the nail on the head for me with this post late last week.  Sometimes you are so connected to your last home, the one you literally spent your blood, sweat and tears on, that it's really hard to see the new place as home.  I find myself missing the comfort and warmth of The Bungalow all the time, and in comparison this new house just feels big, cold and empty.

So this week, I've decided to follow Katie's lead and start making this house feel more like our home.  The best way that I know how to do that is fill it with pictures and memories of us, things that make us smile or motivate us.  Things that are unique to my family.  I started by taking inventory:

This, my friends, is the current state of our 5th bedroom or as we refer to it, the Exercise Room.  Although right now it's more like the island of misfit home decor than a home gym.  It's where all our "not sure where to put that" decor has landed, and the perfect place to start operation Make This Joint a Home.  I dug out all our frames and miscellaneous wall decor, and wrote out a list of every frame we had in each size.  Next I spent a little time playing around on my computer with design programs plugging the various frames in different configurations where the house needed a little love.  It looked a little something like this:

I even wrote in some of the ideas I had to fill each frame (since most of the stuff that's currently in each frame needs to be switched out.

 

P.S. I do realize the irony in the fact that I'm taking an incredibly clinical and obsessive approach to making this house feel more "homey," but all we can do is work with what we have people.  

Once I had a pretty good idea of what would go where, I realized that there were a few frames that would need to be updated to fit in with their new digs.  Out came the spray paint.

And yes, while I was at it I sprayed yet another flower pot indigo blue, since I had to snag the one from the Living Room Deck to place on the new coffee table in the Screened in Porch.  No such thing as too much of a good thing baby.

I hope to spend some spare time in the next few days reprinting photos and making some new art to fill all my frames, and get all this love up on the walls.  Sure, I've got a bunch of other bigger projects to tackle on the horizon (the Laundry Room, a head board and nightstands for our new Master Bedroom, and getting a coat of paint up in the Playroom already to name a few) but I've made it a priority to get a little piece of us up on the walls and filling up our home.  Because all this hard work won't be worth it if at the end of the day we feel like we're living in someone else's house.