Our House // Update // Of Trees & Artwork

Do you have any idea how hard it is to actually hang things on the wall?
I don’t know, maybe it’s super easy for you, but for me, it’s SO HARD!
That commitment man! Putting holes in your wall, making sure your art is straight, hanging it in a pleasing arrangement! For perfectionists (like me) it’s just so so hard!

But I’m proud to say, I’ve finally hung up art in my bedroom. It’s been on my “bucket list” several times now, so it was definitely time to check that bad boy off!

Do you know what gave me the breathing room to actually pull it off? Command Hooks! And there is a crazy story behind that, so read on.

I’ve had all of these pieces for a long long time. The silver birds hung over our bed in our old house, the turquoise birds came from my Mom the Christmas before Braelynn was born, and the other 3 pieces were a birthday gift at least 3 years ago.

Derrick & I have been married for 7 years at the end of this month and we’ve never owned a real bed frame. Our bed has simply always sat on the cheap metal frame. That’s fine, but after we moved into our new house, we agreed that it would be really nice to actually have a headboard so our pillows didn’t disappear in the middle of the night.

So, that’s my excuse for not hanging all of this sooner. I wanted to wait until we got our headboard!
We’ve been in our house for almost a year & a half though, so, tired of waiting, I finally bit the bullet & went out and bought Command Hooks. That way, if I needed to move anything, I could without having to fix all the holes in my wall.

So, up everything went!

Here’s the kicker: about 2 days after I got all of this hung up? We found a headboard.

We had searched high & low for the best deal. We even went to Ikea and picked out one we liked but realized that we couldn’t fit it in our car, so we didn’t buy it (why didn’t we think of that before hand?). Then, someone gave us an old headboard for free, but our mattress is so high, you couldn’t even see the headboard. So, then I found a deal on Groupon, we took the measurements & everything looked good so we ordered it.

There was only one small problem: the headboard was going to be about 3″ taller than my lowest hanging picture. SERIOUSLY?!

So, thankful for the Command Hooks, I was able to move everything up a few inches and wa-la! Here’s the finished product!

An update & side note: the Command Hooks were unfortunately, not the best choice. I don’t know, I followed the instructions, but when I had to remove them to move my art up, 2 of them damaged my wall pretty badly (so much for not having to fix holes in my wall!) I was so disappointed. THEN, after everything hung for a few weeks, 2 of my pieces actually fell down. You can imagine my horror – can you imagine if they had fallen in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping?! Omigosh! So, paranoid, I took them down & pounded good old-fashioned nails into my wall so I felt everything was secure. Needless to say, the verdict is out on Command Hooks.

SO! The other house update is that we got the tree in our backyard cut down!

It’s not a project we exactly intended on doing when we first moved into our house, but after living here for over a year & realizing what a horrible tree it was, we pulled it’s plug.

It was a big huge buckeye tree. It was beautiful & had obviously been here a long long time, but it was planted in a horrible spot: it was super close to our house. Not only that, but there was a vine that had grown up into the tree & last summer, half of the leaves died very prematurely: a sure sign that this vine was slowly killing the tree. Not to mention the billions of sticky pods it dropped in the spring & would get stuck in our shoes & in Abby’s paws and tracked all thru my house. Then, the sharp buckeyes it would drop in the fall, that also got stuck in Abby’s paws & I was constantly terrified of Braelynn falling on!

So, it needed to come down. My Dad suggested a “tree cutter” & over the course of 2 days, he chopped it down. He was amazing by the way! If you live in the Pittsburgh area & need any sort of tree-cutting done, I will gladly & wholeheartedly give you his info – he was awesome!!

So, here is our backyard before the tree came down:

Here it is after Day 1:

And here is is after Day 2!

You can actually see in the big pile of wood on the left of this last photo, that a large section of the tree was rotting from the inside out. So, in the end, it was definitely a good move to have it cut down!

I was worried that I would really miss it, but I don’t miss it in the least. It honestly did not provide that much shade for our yard (as the sun sets in front of our house, so our house provides a ton of shade by itself) and I have never been so thankful to not have to constantly sweep up those sticky pods!

So, what’s next? We have someone coming to give us an honest opinion on our roof this week (do we need to replace it? does it just need patched?) and after we tackle that, we can move on to making our 3rd floor livable space! We also have plans to finish all the trim work, as well as finish installing all of the new windows on the second floor this summer! So, lots of fun new house projects to keep us busy!

(In case you couldn’t tell, all of the images in this post were taken by my iPhone 5S & do not reflect my professional photography work at all!)