a painted attic entry.

so when we had central heat and air put in last summer, they had to make a new attic entry for us (the original one was barely small enough for me to squeeze through, and definitely not up to code). it's big and convenient and it's been great to have. however, it wasn't painted as you can see above, and just a lovely natural shade of brown.

we bought a small can of white primer almost immediately to paint it, but like many other things, it sort of just sat there, sad and forgotten. but i had a free afternoon and decided to just DO IT. so i did! the frame itself i had to paint standing on the ladder, looking up. my neck hurts today. and a sponge brush may have detached and hit several parts of me on its way down.. so i may or may not have paint splotches on my legs and some of my clothes... but it's done! it's not quite the same white as everything around it, but you wouldn't notice unless you look really closely and are OCD like me. and you definitely won't be able to tell in a cruddy phone picture. doesn't it look so much better?

next up - decided on a paint color to finally paint the hallway walls.. there are so many test swatches on the wall right now...

diy: stocking holders.

we bought personalized velvet stockings (don't you just love the little elf sock one for sanford?!), and needed some way of putting them on the mantle place. so with a piece of spare firewood, some hooks and spray paint, we made our own! though, there is certainly still some work to do on them - anything heavier than the stocking itself would yank them right off at the moment.

james was super stoked to be able to finally use the miter saw we bought over the summer. it had been purchased with plans to build a fancy planter box, but unforeseen circumstances put those plans on hold.

after drilling pilot holes into the little cut logs, we screwed in some screw hooks we'd picked up.

before spray painting, i taped around the screw-in point and then wrapped with more paper and tape, just to be safe!

the rust-oleum in champagne mist was so pretty that i also busted out about half the pinecones we'd bought to decorate with and gave them a gentle spritzing too!

since we can't put anything in the stockings yet, we'll need to do some more work to them so that they can be weighted down from behind the holder itself.

the star and garland-ing was from michaels, and the stockings were from pottery barn.