Book club this month was at my house. This turned out to be the perfect incentive for us to finish up a couple lingering projects and give the main living area (family room/kitchen/dining room) a much-needed decluttering. Although I’m not sure it counts as decluttering if you just move all the stuff to another room… Still, the main living area looks awesome. Hopefully we can do a good job of keeping it that way.
I posted a couple days ago about how we finally painted the breakfast room. That was definitely motivated by knowing all the girls would be hanging out there for wine and snacks.
Another thing that has been on our list for quite some time is some kind of artwork for the large wall in our family room. Though we may replace the Ikea TV stand, we don’t have plans to get a giant entertainment center anytime soon, so the TV sits pretty low. This wouldn’t be as odd-looking in a lot of homes, but our ceilings in there are 12 feet tall. The large, empty wall was begging for something fairly big.
We’ve come up with a lot of ideas over the past 6 months. The first was to simply buy a large piece of art, but after extensive browsing at the Art Festival last fall, we quickly discovered that option would cost $1000 at minimum. So we started thinking of ideas for art we could make ourselves. I thought about a photo collage. I also thought about framing fabric, paper, or wallpaper. But then a couple weeks ago, Jose happened to be surfing hubblesite.org. I knew they had high-resolution images available for download and public use, since all the Hubble images qualify as public domain. What I didn’t realize is that they also had one image, an awesome photo of the Carina Nebula, available in MURAL size.
They offered the download in either one large 40″ x 80″ file, or in 8 20″ x 20″ squares meant for hanging together. We used painter’s tape to mask out the area on our wall, and the full 40×80 size just looked too much like a billboard to me. “Let’s make it the same length, but not quite as tall,” I suggested, “and just hang 4 vertical panels.”
I downloaded the single image file, used Photoshop to crop 5 inches off the top and 5 inches off the bottom, and divided it into four 20″ x 30″ panels. I sent the files off to mpix.com, who I’ve used occasionally in the past for high quality prints. A few days later, they arrived and I stopped by the frame shop for some nice, thin wooden frames. And voila!
All in all, I guess it’s pretty geeky that we now have a huge astrophoto on our living room wall. But hey, that’s who we are. The cost for the entire project was just under $250 — not super cheap, but far cheaper than buying any art this size. Each print was about $25 since I had them done on fancy metallic paper, and the frames were $30 each.
This weekend we’re going to try to continue the progress with some work in the bonus room upstairs…
June says
maybe a plant to cover up those cords that go to the outlet. :o)
sorry. pet peeve.
Sarah says
The outlet is unfortunately placed, that’s for sure! I figure someday we’ll get a matching boookcase and that’ll cover it up. 🙂
Karen says
I think the picture mural looks really cool. But why not move the TV above the fireplace?
Sarah says
First, because I think putting TVs above the fireplace in most houses is silly because the fireplaces are tall. It puts the TV way too high on the wall compared to eye level when you’re sitting or laying down. It’d be like sitting on the first row of a movie theater.
Second, the niche above the fireplace is too small, so we couldn’t put it there even if we wanted to.
Brian says
I like the nebula picture, very unique. I bet that 90% of your visitors will look at it and make a comment about how cool it is. You could make the wall look smaller with a bigger tv. For a room that size, you need at least a 50″ screen so you don’t strain your eyes 🙂
Sarah says
Yeah, I like it because it’s kind of abstract!
What is it with boys and huge TVs? Ours is already 46″! But don’t worry, Jose wants a bigger one!