Now that we're well and truly in and settled, the house progress has slowed dramatically. Sure we have the essentials, but the house is still quite bare, it doesn't have any Nat flair yet! I have so many plans to fix that, but unfortunately most of them require money, which means waiting and chipping away at each of them slowly as we can afford them.
For a joint Christmas/house warming present, Ben's mom and Dad wanted to buy us a new rug for the lounge room. Hillory and I set out shopping earlier in the year and found an awesome area rug, at Nick Scali - the 'Larry' in grey, 3.0 metres x 3.5 metres: http://www.nickscali.com.au/rugs/larry.html. Although we bought it a few months ago, we kept it rolled up until Beans was well and truly toilet trained to avoid any accidents - it was pretty expensive after all! So now, with the cold weather settling in, getting it out has been well timed - it's pure wool so it warms up the room a lot and makes it so much more homey. Beans sure loves that he can lay around and play on the floor without freezing on the floor tiles!
The other addition to the lounge room was some 'RIBBA' picture ledges from IKEA: http://www.ikea.com/au/en/catalog/products/60191836/. While we had the couch pulled apart to lay the rug down it was a good time to have my handy-man assistants, Ben and Grady, install them. I bought four of the 115 centimetre ledges and put them up in two strips, with two ledges (butted up end to end) in each strip, one above the other.
I had a specific idea in mind for the use of the ledges that I think I saw on Pinterest a while ago. So with that in mind, I've spent the last six months or so collecting a bunch of random, neutral tone picture frames in a mix of matte, metallic, patterned and plain designs, and filling them with all my favourite photographs.
Once the ledges were up and the couch reassembled, I set about arranging and rearranging the frames on the shelves, fine tuning their positions, and blue tacking them in place, until I was completely satisfied with their organised yet haphazard layout. Perfect!
