Painting the old bench

Ever see things on pinterest and get motivated to do something?  Then have a huge fail in making it look like you saw on pinterest?  That's what this post is about.

We have an old nasty bench in our backyard.  I don't know when it was built, I imagine from the first owners (we're the third), but nothing much has been done with it.  While I would like to spend $600 on a really cool one I saw on One Kings Lane, I don't really think that's in our budget anytime soon.  Man I want everything on that site.

Yep, nothing pretty.  don't mind my ghetto hay as I weed the back area.  It's a jungle out there, I'm in the process of getting it weeded and mulched.

I hate this bench.  I really wanted to break it down and get a nice iron one, but then I saw some cool ideas on pinterest.  So I bought some paint.  and painted the whole thing.  I originally painted it all white, but thought that was a little bright.  I used the below paint from Sherwin Williams in marshmallow (or something like that).

I used my cricut to cut out the word Welcome and glued it down so I could get a stencil - like  i saw on pinterest  hahahah....FAIL.   That didn't work out so well.  

So I made a few touch ups.

And now it's not perfect, but it's much nicer.

Decorating the walls

I'm not interior decorator, as you've seen from the photos.  But that doesn't mean I can't try!

We have lots of empty wall space in our house and in an attempt to alleviate that, I've been looking for inspiration to move some of the photos on our mantel piece to our wall and then a few more to show off.

I used this site for inspiration:
http://www.picklee.com/2012/02/16/photo-walls/

I went to Jo Ann's for fabric for a baby quilt (that's a whole other post!), and all frames were 40% off.  so I bought a bunch.  I also bought matting to go around the photos.  I bought too many, I'll have to take a few back, but I didn't want to have to go back.

First, I wanted to test out the layout, so I cut and pasted a bunch of paper together in the correct sizes (pretty close) and then put those on the wall to get an idea for what kind of layout I wanted.

This is one of the layouts I tried.

I measured out the distances, stuck some nails in the walls, and voila - photos below!

Though, now I wonder if it looks okay?  My husband looked at it and said 'you didn't center the photos'?  I didn't center them because above where the plant is, we've talked about hanging lights (maybe one like the Hobbs Sconce on one kings lane) either a wall sconce or a hanging lantern / light to add more light over tehre.  Over maybe a plant a bit more compact, like a miniature ever green or something.

And yes, the middle picture is missing.  I'm waiting on it to get delivered.

I don't know, should I move them closer together or center it on the wall?