Taking chances

Some of you are going to laugh at me because of this post.  That’s okay with me.  Something you should know about me is that I have a terrible habit of doubting myself.  In almost every area of my life I find it easy to second guess my decisions.  Especially when they involve spending large amounts of money.

Because of this little problem of mine my house has been at a standstill as far as decorating goes.  When we moved in eleven years ago I had big plans.  Unfortunately I didn’t have the funds to go with my big plans.  Over time I have just gotten used to the lack of style my house has, but I always wish it had more style.  The problem is that having style costs money and means taking chances—chances that you might take the time and money to do something that you think will be awesome except then once you do it, it isn’t.  This is where I’ve been for the past few years.  Paralyzed by the fear that whatever I decide to do I will hate.  So, I find reasons to not do anything—I plan, I research, I search for the perfect thing—only I usually never find the perfect thing for the perfect price and then I give up. 

One of the resolutions I made this year was to take chances, make mistakes and be okay with it and to quit procrastinating.  Admittedly, I started small, but you’ve gotta start somewhere don’t you?  I’ve wanted to do a cool picture collage in my house for a long time.  We got some awesome family pictures taken a few months ago and I have been dreaming ever since of how I could put them on the wall in an awesome display.  So, I started drawing out some ideas…they seemed ok on paper, but it was all honestly overwhelming to figure out what frames to buy and what pictures to buy and how it would all fit together on the wall.  I found tons of inspiration on pinterest and a few tips to help me out with my planning.  My awesome husband knew that I wanted to do it so he bought me a kit for Christmas.  It looked like this:I really liked the frames, but the tree thing just wasn’t part of my vision.  So, I used the frames as a jumping off point along with the fact that I knew I wanted a big print of my whole family as part of it.  Once I had a better idea of what sizes the frames were I cut a bunch out of graph paper so they were to scale and then I used another piece of graph paper to give the guidelines of the space I had to fill and I tried all kinds of different configurations on paper to see what I liked.  (I didn’t take pictures of this part, but here are the tools used)I cut out a few more frames than I had in several different sizes so I could get a better idea of what frames I still needed to buy.  Emily loved helping me with this part too.  When we’d find a configuration that we liked we would sketch it out on a piece of paper so we could remember it later.  Here is one of the papers we used to sketch ideas on. 

Once I had all the frames we set it all up how we liked it best and then we searched our pictures to figure out which ones we wanted to use in the collage.  The problem was, that we didn’t take into consideration which orientation the pictures we had that we liked were in so we had to go back to the drawing board a little bit after we chose pictures.  (Thanks to Segi and Tami for their suggestions on this part!)

Once we had the pictures and the general idea of how we wanted the frames we laid everything out on the floor to get a sense of the spacing and everything. 

We made paper patterns of all the frames so we would know the exact dimensions and to help us get the hangers in all the right places and we taped them up on the wall.  This is where I got the anxiety about making so many holes in the wall and had to cross my fingers and force myself to take the plunge and just do it!  (have a good laugh at me now)

Finally done!  I LOVE IT!So, there you have it.  I finally stuck my little toe into the water and hopefully I’ll be able to plunge the rest of the way in soon!  Actually, I’m being forced to because we are re-doing our basement shower and tiling the whole thing.  Let me tell you the anxiety I’m feeling over this one…it’s huge!  It’s so expensive and so PERMANENT!  Hopefully I can do it!  Wish me luck!

Are you a risk taker or a worrier like me?