House Tour - Going Upstairs

So, we have now seen the downstairs of the house. Time to go upstairs.

Here is what the stairs looked like before:

And this is what they look like now:

So, we pulled carpet off the stairs and painted the paneling white. It really helped to open it up, and not feel so much like a dark tunnel.

Then, I got it in my head that I wanted to do some stenciling on the stairs. So, I googled "stenciled stairs", and this was an idea that popped up. I'm not sure if I'll get sick of this in a couple of months or not, but I do kind of like the whimsical aspect of it now. It's not very well done (there's smudging) and you'd kind of think that one of our children did it, but it was actually me and Vern tag-teaming it... him holding the stencils, me painting.

Okay, so then we get upstairs, and we have this hallway that leads to the bedroom. I have a bunch of mats left over from my old art show days, so I decided to do this:

The color of wall is Labrador Blue, which was a color I saw and liked on Modern Family and looked up on this website (seriously one of the coolest websites ever).

The criteria for photos featured on this wall were that they be silly or sweet memories from our lives.

Seen above is Ocean eating corn at Sleepy Eye Corn Daze, which we try to go to every year. There's a picture of Vern and the kids riding the Tilt-O-Whirl during our vacation in Brainerd this summer. Baby Ezra being thrown in the air.

Three-year-old Ocean dressing up in our underwear. Me and Vern outside our apartment from when we lived in Colorado. Vern with the kids on Father's Day last year.

Peace in curlers. And then the one next to that is the kids in front of Al's Breakfast, which is where we go to eat pancakes after the first snowfall of every year. (Peace decides to fall down to be funny... it makes me laugh every time I look at it. That kid has my sense of humor.)

This whole layout, from picking out the pictures to placement to ordering the pictures to putting them in mats and hanging them up, probably took around 4 hours of my time... and it's amazing how quickly they become invisible. Like, you walk past them every day and you just don't notice them anymore.

Here is the mock-up layout I did beforehand, complete with measurements:

Alright, one more look down the hall, and then we'll head into the bedrooms tomorrow.