The Heathen Housewife

Over the weekend we did a tiny bit of redecorating in the living room. I thought I’d share it with you while I wait for the UPS driver to bring me my yarn. But the redecorating story really starts several months ago…

One night, Joe casually mentioned at the dinner table that he had purchased four poster-prints from an artist couple that he admires, and that he planned to frame them and hang them on our dining/living room wall. I was a little annoyed at not having been consulted. I was actually a little pissed off at the time. I have to live in the house too, and am present in it much more often than he is. Why should he get to make a decision like this unilaterally? I tried to stay calm.

And then I saw the prints and thought, “Hey, they’re kinda cute.” But still, there were four of them, and they definitely would contribute to whatever theme we’re going for in our room, which up to now consists of somewhat asian, mostly kid-friendly and used.

And on top of that, he thought he was going to be able to go buy poster frames for “relatively cheap” and just hang ‘em up. Uh, no. They are not standard poster sizes, and if I was going to have something hanging on our walls for some indeterminate and probably very long time, I wanted them properly framed. So we sat on it for a few months. Finally a few weeks ago one Sunday morning, Joe ripped the coupon from the JoAnn’s ad, and we dragged the girls off with us to go pick out frames. That process took a Very Long Time, and involved much measuring and entering in of forms to the computer and trying to keep the girls from climbing on the stool at the counter, putting their hands all over the prints, and generally causing mayhem. Eventually, Joe took them off to the kids’ craft part of the store while I waited for a final price. gulp. It was a lot of money. But I sucked it up and paid.

And then they were finished, and I picked them up, and hey, they look pretty good after all. I wish I had picked a darker frame, but we were kind of thinking we wanted to generally match another framed picture that would be on the next wall over.

The artists are kozyndan, and you can see better pictures of the images in question here. They’re actually quite whimsical, and beautiful at the same time. I like them, and I’m happy that Joe pushed us to take a step towards a more beautiful home. (And now it’s my turn to spend some money on new couches, right honey?)

While we were rearranging pictures, we moved the family pictures over here to the corner. I wasn’t happy with this placement at first, but it has grown on me and now I like it. There is room for more photos as we collect them in the coming years. We love the photographer who did our wedding, and have gone back to him twice now for family sittings. We realized this weekend that it’s been a couple years and we’ll need to go back either this year or next.

We moved this picture – actually a framed cross-stitch that I did many moons ago, lo in the black years before I learned to knit. It’s a little country-cheezy, but I still like it. Now it’s over by the door. These kinds of things are supposed to be right by the door, yes?

And finally, this piece was on the big wall where the posters are now. Joe’s brother brought it back from Korea for us as a wedding gift. It’s an original painting, and I quite like it. It took the place of a Georgia O’Keefe print that I was getting tired of anyway. We put it in the pile of things we’re planning to sell at a garage sale later this spring.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.