Naomi, Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

Welcome to Day 3 of our anniversary week! In case you’re tuning in late, on Monday we had a photoshoot, and on Tuesday we competed over who could do the best passing off their mediocre photography as art. Today we’re continuing to inspire you by talking a bit more about the house progress you’ll see (we hope…) on the blog this year.

We both included some house-related goals in the 2017 goals we set and shared last week, so today we’re each describing in a bit more detail what we have planned. If these projects don’t interest you, best to just tune out now and check back in next January.

Naomi

I mentioned three house-related goals as part of my overall goals for 2017:

Finish decorating/furnishing the dining room
Do a partial makeover of the bathroom
Start the exterior renovation

Maybe that doesn’t seem too ambitious for someone who supposedly writes a blog post about house projects every week, but let’s first establish the baseline: it is taking me over a year to decorate my bedroom. I swear that is almost done, however, and then it is on to new projects!

First, an easy and fun one: I want to finally finish up my dining room. I have a lot in there that I love (like a yellow console that I made over from a salvaged cabinet, my rug, and the chandelier of my dreams). However, it also still hosts a lot of temporary stuff (like a table that I got for free with my first apartment) and usually has piles of disorganized storage in the corner.

(Shown here pre-yellow cabinet, and with the random piles of stuff moved out so I could take a decent looking photo.)

I think that if I just pay this room a little bit of attention and invest in a few long-term pieces, it will turn into my favorite room in the house.

Next, I want to do a temporary makeover of the bathroom. It truly needs a real renovation, with new tile, shower, fixtures, etc., but that won’t be the priority for us for a while, either with time or with money. (We’ll want to tackle the exterior and the kitchen first, two big projects.)

However, this is a room where we’ve done very little and it shows. The tile and tub were painted by the previous owner, and the paint is now peeling and gross. There is very little storage, and the sink area is a sad, stained laminate.

I think with some temporary DIY fixes, I can make it a little prettier and more functional for a while while I focus on other things. I am a big believer in half makeovers – a half makeover is the whole reason why my kitchen is livable right now, and not a gross yellow cave!

Finally, while I do all that, I want to get started on item #1 of the “serious renovation projects” list: the exterior. This won’t be a DIY and will be pretty disruptive, which is why I’ve stalled for so long.

But it really needs to be done. The outside of our house is discolored aluminum siding, and we want to replace that, finish insulating the walls and replacing the windows that we didn’t get to in our first renovation, and build some exterior spaces, like a porch and deck. I’m not sure we’ll finish it this year, but I want to at least get it started!

So that is the plan! However, this is a hobby, so it is entirely possible that I will get interested in and distracted by another project along the way. I’ll see where the year takes me!

Sage

As you know, this past year we took a major step forward in the house and renovated our kitchen. It was a big project that consumed all our time and house-related spending, so the rest of the house definitely suffered from some neglect. That’s okay because the kitchen was something we definitely needed to get done, but now that it’s (mostly) wrapped up I have two goals for the house this year:

Make the basement less scary
Make the outside of the house less bleak

As far as the basement goes, we have a nice big partially-finished space to work with. We’ve done some projects down there already, including turning one corner into a home gym:

And making another corner into my workshop:

That said, there are still some scary and sadly underutilized areas of the basement, like the section where I hoard broken furniture:

And the area where we do our laundry (doesn’t it look so hygienic?):

The curtains and purple bathmat are gone because this is actually a photo of before we moved in, but nothing else has changed except that I do things like use my circular saw and orbital sander on that table so everything is covered in sawdust

And then there’s the corner where my table saw and the litter boxes live, a natural grouping (all the rest of the tools have migrated over to my workshop area).

Add to that the fact that during the kitchen renovation we stored 50% of our kitchen down here for months on end, and you’ve got yourself one chaotic basement. I have some simple projects in mind that I think will make some valuable improvements, so I want to tackle those this winter (Naomi, I made a pretty kitchen while you did your garage, so now it’s your turn to do something nice-looking for the blog while I work on a space that will never be more than “not as cavelike as it was before”).

Then assuming the spring comes (it usually does, but you can never assume — this time last year I assumed an orange reality show star/six-time bankruptcy filer/fascist could never become president of the U.S.), I want to turn our attention to the outside of our house. Two years ago we did a fair amount of work, planting a hedge and some flower beds.

The hedge has grown, which is awesome. Here’s Sam for scale to show progress over about 18 months:

But as anyone who owns a house knows, outdoor upkeep is a lot of work and we definitely have a lot of maintenance catch-up to do, plus some new projects like hopefully a new patio.

I don’t expect the basement and yard to completely fill 2017, but in terms of setting goals this is what I want to be sure we accomplish. Here’s hoping!

So there you have it, a bit more about what we plan to tackle at home in 2017. We hope you’re at least a little bit intrigued…. And in the meantime, we’re back tomorrow with more blog anniversary celebration with our favorite thing ever: ridiculous crafts. Those Tiny Bloggers might even make a cameo, we’ll see!

Welcome to our week of posts celebrating the two-year anniversary of this here blog! In case you missed it, yesterday we kicked things off by sharing photos from an awkward-but-not-as-awkward-as-the-first-one photoshoot we did for the occasion.

For Day 2 of our celebration, we’re doing one of our favorite things — challenging each other’s creativity by each taking on the same project. Not only do we thrive on ~~vicious~~ healthy competition, but we also love seeing the different directions that we each take the same makeover or prompt.

We did this with a pair of lamps to launch our blog, and since then have done dueling makeovers of cabinets, chairs, and even chemistry supplies.

So as you can see, when we do this we really both win, because we’ve both been inspired to do a fun project. (Except not really because THAT’S NOT HOW COMPETITIONS WORK AND THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE WINNER!!)

Ahem.

While we’ve usually done this by finding two identical items for us each to transform, this time we challenged each other to do a craft from the same prompt:

What can you do to turn your mediocre, everyday snapshots into something that you can actually display in your home?

We’re not professional photographers so we all have these shots — meaningful, decent photos that would be perfectly fine to post on facebook but are not nearly nice enough to print out and frame. How can you get use out of these images? Fortunately for you, we each had a pretty good idea!

Sage’s Colorblock Travel Posters

This idea came to me while Sam and I were on our trip to Iceland and Scotland this fall. I liked the idea of displaying some photos from the trip, but it feels high stakes to frame one’s own photos and call them art — my photography skills don’t exactly rise to that level (especially when using my camera phone). Instead, I decided to play around with some artistic effects in Photoshop Element, and found that the “cutout” effect made a cool drawn poster-like appearance that preserved the image but punched it up a bit.

Here’s one from our time near Loch Lomond in Scotland — I took the photo on my phone while out for a long run (original photo on the left, poster version on the right):

And here’s one of Reykjavik from the very top of Hallgrímskirkja, the iconic church in the heart of the city:

I like these because the original photos really don’t have to be anything show-stopping for them to make attractive posters, and I can easily make more over time as we travel. In fact, I liked them so much I made a few more using photos of places I love. I had them printed at Kinkos (for $1.25 each) and then framed them in simple black frames with mats I cut myself (using my mat-cutting kit — best purchase ever).

Here’s a closer shot of each one:

Easy DIY Travel Art -- Plaster & Disaster

Scotland

Iceland

Adirondacks

The fields of Western MA where Ragnar Trails New England takes place

And one of my favorite places ever…our home!

I hung them up in various locations across the house. Unfortunately most of them are in places that are really hard to photograph, like our back hallway. But here’s the one that landed in our bedroom so you believe that I did actually put them up:

These are super easy to make yourself if you’re interested! Here’s how:

Pick a photo you like. I found that the simple ones with a few contrasting colors worked best.
Crop the photo to your desired proportions. I wanted my final prints to be 11×14.
Using Adobe Photoshop Elements (which is a $99 version of Adobe Photoshop that I like for photo editing), pump up the saturation a little and then play with the “cutout” effect under “artistic filters.”
If you want, add text that indicates the photo location
Get it printed at a place like Kinkos or Staples
Frame and hang
Enjoy being reminded of your favorite places in the world

Naomi’s Modern Couple Portraits

Brad and I don’t have any photos of us together up in our home, so for my project I wanted to use some shots of us together. We’ve never had a real photoshoot done, even though I’ve promised my parents that we will do one eventually, so I only have casual in-the-moment photos of us. I looked through my files, and chose this one, taken by my neighbor at a friend’s wedding last year.

I knew I wanted to end up with something a little modern or edgy, but still calm enough to go in our bedroom. I played around with it for a while, and eventually turned it black and white and bumped up the contrast really far.

I then had a lot of fun with a very sophisticated graphic design software called “Paint.” Calling back to my childhood love of making-squiggles-and-using-the-pouring-paint-can-to-fill-them-in-with-colors, I did the same to this image. I came up with a lot of combinations and it was very satisfying!

However, I eventually decided on a pretty simple one, using a nice yellow that resembles the yellow of our interior doors, which is a feature color throughout our house.

(As a bonus, this is also approximately the color of the sky on Mars, which is the setting of the novel I am working on.)

I had so much fun with this, that I decided to try it out on a bunch more photos. The other that I ended up actually printing and framing was this one, an uber-casual snapshot of Brad and I at a picnic with my parents several years ago. For some reason, I’ve always really liked it.

Rather than just use contrast, for this one I tried out the Graphic Novel effect in Photoshop Elements. It got to a fun line-drawing look that was just begging to be filled in by that little pouring paint can. However, when I went to do it, the color bled everywhere since the lines weren’t complete.

I used the line-drawing feature in Paint to finish closing off some of the areas. Can you spot the differences in the below?

I then filled it in with all sorts of colors, picked a couple of my favorites, and lined up several in a row for a modern look.

Weird? Absolutely. But also very me.

I got both of these images printed at Staples, and then framed them using the same mat cutting kit as Sage, which I had enthusiastically bought after reading her post about it a while back. (I needed silver frames to go with most of the ones in my house, and I found affordable ones here, which came in a wide variety of sizes.)

The first I made pretty large to fill a good-sized wall space in our bedroom. I love the yellow in there, and it’s really nice to have a picture of us up in our bedroom.

For the second, I swapped out an image in our gallery wall that I never really loved. I think the colors go really well.

We guess we’re both winners, since we both have nice, new art up in our homes. So what do you think — would you try these art techniques? How do you display your personal photos?