Our fall mantle

For basically my whole entire childhood I wanted to be an interior designer. I wanted to decorate houses and pick out furniture and put everything together and make it look amazing because I watched too much HGTV with my mom. Anyway. I don't do that. I actually have no idea what I'm doing and I am actually the very worst person in the whole entire world at picking paint colors, oh my gosh.

We have a fireplace in one of our rooms and it's pretty neglected. It usually gets the leftover art or the pieces I couldn't find a spot for on my walls (I rearrange everything like every five minutes). It's never put together--it's sort of a mash up of things and it's sort of always my least favorite thing to look at. And people post pictures of their fireplaces with the most beautiful and put-together mantles and I have vowed to be better and more like those people with their put-together mantles.

Mantles are so much fun because they can be 3D and you can layer the heck out of them. And that's just what I did. So, here's my current mantle. I absolutely love it.

Details:

Wood "Marry Me" lyrics sign: I stained a piece of plywood I found in my garage (Jacobean by Minwax) and painted the lyrics with white acrylic paint. Really, really working on not being a perfectionist and being okay with it even though I can see all the mistakes and imperfections.

Wood slice string art: I found this wood slice at Hob Lob and although I had planned on making this on a square or rectangle piece of wood, I absolutely love it on the slice. I didn't stain the wood because I didn't feel like sanding it first and I didn't want all the wood to be matchy-matchy.

Glass bottles: My dad gave these to me. I'm not 100 percent but I'm fairly certain he found them in the ground when his crew dug up a road. They're super old and foggy and I've washed them 901 times to clean them up and because of that I've never really known what to do with them. I mean, I don't have a lot of places for dirty-looking bottles to hang out. These four are my favorite and I think they fit in perfectly here.

Red and white porcelain creamer: I have a matching cream and sugar set from my Mema. Looking at these pictures, I'll probably bring the sugar container out from my bathroom jewelry station and set it up here instead.

Acorns: I saw a super cute acorn garland DIY on the pin so I asked my dad to save me some acorns from his tree. He basically almost died because he has three hundred squirrel families living in his neighborhood who feast off of his acorn tree and he basically acted like I had asked him to starve the things. First of all, I wanted like 15 acorns. He gave me like 75. So, his own fault. I never got around to making the garland and instead glitter painted a handful of them and stuck them in the apothecary jar.

Heart garland: I made this, too. I cute some hearts out of maroon, red, purle and tan felt and then sewed them all together. It's supposed to be a Valentine's decoration but conveniently the colors are perfect for fall.

Wood letterpress "C":  Joann's, last year.


So that's it. I got the books for free when my city's old library decluttered in preparation for the new library. The mirror was a thrift store find from two years ago that I spray painted white (yes, I do paint evRYthing). The picture is old, old, old of Evan and I from the very first time we ever took family pictures of ourselves. I should probably update it since it's not just the two of us anymore, so I'll add that to my list. Our fireplace was red brick when we moved in (if you'd like to see a super embarrassing old blog that I halfway want to delete because of the horribleness of it but that contains pictures of the before fireplace and the horrible 1999-esque room that we thankfully painted white, click here, but you've been dutifully warned) and I hated it like it personally did something to offend me. Everyone gave us the side eye when we said we were going to paint it but it's such an improvement. Also unrelated to the mantle, we ripped down all of that horrendous wood trim you can see in that old blog post. (This poor room, man.) We just have the normal trim in the room now (windows, doors, fireplace) and it's on our to-do list to paint white. I'm thinking of painting the actual mantle high-gloss black. But I'll get back to you on that.