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All Things Home

All Things Home

wallpaper paste comparison

I know you’re just dying to know which type of wallpaper paste won out in my head-to-head challenge.  Was it Roman 880?  Was it Dynamite 780?  Oh, the suspense.  Oh, the drama.  This is the post you’ve been waiting for all your life. Okay, not really.  Wallpaper paste isn’t exciting, but I will tell you that you will appreciate this post if ever you’re installing unpasted wallpaper! By the way, I was paid heaps of money by the brand I’m going to encourage you to use and I bought stock in their company.  I’m just kidding.  I bought both pastes with my own money and I have no affiliation with either brand.  I compared them on my own, primarily because I ran out of the first gallon and had to run out and buy whatever I could find locally to finish the project, so I had to use two brands

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All Things Home

guest room dresser & mirror

Last week, my mom and I needed a break from hanging wallpaper and installing box molding, so we went to an antique mall (Countryside Antique Mall) and to a local consignment shop (Kismet) to see if we could find a few things on my “wish list” for the room.  One thing that was at the top of the list was a dresser.  The bed was flanked with antique washstands from my last house, but they looked a little dinky in the room.  I wanted to replace one with a dresser and the other with a desk. I didn’t find the desk, but we found the dresser! It’s a pretty oak piece with a serpentine front that works well with the other pieces in the room (the oak bed frame and the antique German wardrobe.)  I thought initially I would want to paint it, but now that I have it in

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All Things Home

wallpapering the guest room | pasted vs. unpasted

I have been looking at wallpaper patterns for a couple of rooms in our house for months, but I haven’t pulled the trigger on any of them for one main reason – almost all of the papers I liked came unpasted.  To me, “unpasted” might as well have read “you cannot install this on your own and will have to hire a professional.”  Unpasted seemed complicated and intimidating and, perhaps, easier to mess up. Well, now that I have installed both pasted and unpasted paper, I can tell you that my assumptions were wrong.  Not only that but I now prefer unpasted. I used prepasted wallpaper for the upstairs bathroom in our PA house.  It was beautiful mural from . The upside to prepasted is that you don’t have to go through the extra step of applying the paste.  The downside is that you don’t have any control over how

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All Things Home

wallpapering the guest room | part 1

Thanks so much for all of your encouraging comments on yesterday’s post!  I am really looking forward to reworking some of those designs (even just making the scale larger) and getting them available for you (and me) to purchase.  Your supportive words have made me even more excited about it. So, if you’ve been following my Instagram stories, you know my mom and I worked on wallpapering the guest room (yes, the room she’s staying in) this week.  We always like working on projects together and this was the biggest one we had to tackle, so we wanted to work on it during the first half of her visit. I was ready to get right to papering Monday, but we had a lot of steps to do before we could even open the first roll.  First of all, I wanted to install a chair rail, so we had a “stopping

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a slice of life

carrot white bean soup & croutons

When my shoulder pain was at its worst a few weeks ago, local friends from our church and community stepped in to encourage and support us by giving me rides to my appointments and bringing a few meals.  You have no idea (or maybe you do) how amazing it was to have jars of soups and a “hot dish” (aka Minnesota for casserole) in the fridge just ready to go.  I couldn’t cut food, maneuver pots & pans, or even eat with my right hand, so knowing that we were stocked with easy-to-heat-up and easy-to-eat meals was such a tremendous gift. All of the food was great, but one of my favorites was a Carrot & White Bean Soup my friend Cheri brought over to me.  I must admit that when I saw what looked like large jars of carrot baby food, I was thankful, but a little skeptical.  But, I’ve

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All Things Home

tips on selecting wallpaper

As I shared a few weeks ago, I’ll be hanging wallpaper in our guest room (above a chair rail).  Well, my mom is visiting this week and we’re taking that on as our big project.  Hanging wallpaper in an entire room feels like a bit of a risk for me, but a guest room is a good place to take risks.  This particular one is in our basement, so it’s separate from the rest of the bedrooms and the living spaces where we spend most of our time.  Ever since I hung a wallpaper mural in our tiny upstairs bathroom in our last house and saw the visual impact it brought to the table, I’ve been eager to try it again on a larger scale. And this guest room is one boring box that could use a visual punch to make it special. I realize that I’ll be putting a

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All Things Home

how’s your view?

A door frame is not just a door frame.  It’s a frame. Whether it’s intended or not, it frames out the view of the room that is beyond the opening. A couple of years into blogging, which involved taking lots of pictures of my home, I started to take notice of this idea.  How does a room look through a door frame?  How does one room invite you in from the next? What are the common design threads that tug on your senses and delight as you round a corner? When decorating a home is approached like this, it isn’t just a building with connecting rooms.  It becomes a home with a story that is told throughout.  The story might be one of color or style or something else altogether. As I’ve been working through this house, specifically the first floor that is full of “frames”, I’ve been keeping this in mind when

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All Things Home

studio closet

I have always loved this corner of the studio…  the oak hutch with the bird pulls, filled with art books.  The vertical row of brushes and the dress form flanking it. Having a good storage piece seemed like the best solution for that wall, but once I started really using this space, I realized that the oak hutch only provided a fraction of the storage I needed.  I had bulky photography equipment and video lighting and tripods and stands tucked all over the house and I really dislike work stuff encroaching on spaces meant to be just our home.  (I know it’s a fine line, but I try to keep the spaces distinct as much as possible.) So, over the Christmas break, I made a list of things I wanted and needed in my workspaces.  More storage was at the top of the list and that had me looking a

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I’m Marian, a painter, writer, and lover of all things creative. From art and antiques to home projects and everyday life, I share my journey in hopes of inspiring you to embrace your own creativity and make beauty in the spaces you live.

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