Home Improvement

We live in a small, 2 bedroom/1 bath, rental in a great part of town. We love the location of the house and how close it is commute wise for both James and I to USC, it's walking distance to 3 different grocery stores and I can hit my 9 iron and have the golf ball land on the Lilly Pulitzer store. In a word, the location is perfect. Other than location, the house has few, if any, graces! Its small, it has no place for us to sit and eat a meal (hello dinner trays!) and the washer and dryer in the kitchen provide the only usable work space. However, it is a roof over our heads that is very affordable and real estate is all about location, location, location.

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That being said, we have been trying to make small improvements in the house to make it more of our home and less of a house that we rent that we aren't super jazzed about. This whole idea happened after I went to visit my friend Cam, baby Thomas and her pup, Lilly. Cam's house looks like it's from a magazine and I came home to James and told him we were going to spend our weekend getting our house to look like something we were proud of. James still likes Cam, even after the 4 trips to TJ Maxx and Marshals a few weekends ago.

Enter the gallery wall. You've seen it on Pinterest and all over the blogosphere but no one (in my humble opinion) has done it as well as Young House Love (swoon!)

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There were 974 pictures from our wedding (thanks to our amazing photographers, Landon Jacob Productions) and a few hundred from our engagement session (again- the images Landon Jacob Production takes are beautiful!) that we wanted to have on display. In order not to make it a 'Shrine of Sarah and James' we also wanted to use some prints that I found on Etsy that represented our honeymoon in London. We found frames at Southeastern Salvage, Wal Mart and the Goodwill (we are on a budget after all, so the ones I covet from Pottery Barn will have to wait a few years!) and one evening James got to work (using shoe string to level the pictures!) and our gallery wall was born!

So here are two 'befores' of the space (some fall visitors - Hi Jess and K Oz!)

And the after!

It is just what I wanted it to be, an eclectic mix of frames, colors and styles but with an underlying theme. My mom saw it for the first time in person this weekend and she loved it!