Undomestic Bliss

After detailing the amount of time I spent hunting down wedding decorations, it's probably no surprise that I had trouble letting some of them go. There was one piece that I knew, without a doubt, I would NOT be getting rid of - the mantel from the back drop!

I mean, look how cool it is! That could totally be re-purposed, right? The only problem was, after the wedding, we were living in a pretty small apartment with nowhere to put it. So it sat awkwardly in our living room for a good 8 months until we moved. Then it sat in a storage unit for another month until we moved into our house. Then it sat on the porch for a couple months. You see the pattern. But one day, the planets must have aligned because we had a weekend with no other home projects scheduled AND the motivation to work on something. A rare instance indeed. Finally, it was time for the mantel to be transformed into a usable piece of furniture.

All it needed was a decent sanding, a couple coats of paint and a few shelves and now it's a TV stand/bookcase/holder of knickknacks. Plus, now it holds even more decorations I didn't want to part with. I think my favorite thing about it though is that it hides the ugly cords for our various electronics.

Those french bulldog bookends from Target might be my favorite things in the entire house right now. I spent WAY too much time trying to artfully arrange those bookshelves but overall, I think I like the way they turned out!