Living Room Before & After

Here is the living room of our house before we bought it. 

Here is what we did to it.  Matt sanded down the mantel and re-stained with Kona stain. I then used  the Valspar Virtual Painter program to help me decide my color scheme.  I used Behr's "ultra pure white" on the fireplace wall and Valspar's "delta sandbar" on the surrounding walls.

Ristras

When I am homesick for Arizona I do things like cook Mexican food or decorate our house with Mexican looking things.  After painting our kitchen periwinkle I wished I had some strings of chile peppers (ristras in Spanish)  to hang in it.  I saw some fake ones at Hobby Lobby and then thought to myself maybe we can make some.  So I googled it.  There are plenty of directions online on how to dry chile peppers for ristras and the specific way to tie them but in an effort to be quick we bought some already dried bulk chiles at the grocery store and some twine and tied em together.  The walls I wanted to hang them on are pretty narrow so we didn't want a big bunch but rather a thinner string of them.  Here they are- I love them!