on my walls

Dawn showed off the gorgeous framed puzzles she's decorating her new house with and asked what the rest of us have on our walls. There's not much on mine yet, even though we bought the house a year and half ago.

I do have nice looking walls, though. The woman who owned the house before us must've had a crafty streak because she cut individual little leaves from the wallpaper border to make these vines that go down the walls and around the windows. I don't think I really like the wallpaper pattern that much, but the vines are fabulous and aren't going anywhere, ever.



She wallpapered and paneled just about every room, including the pantry and mudroom. We repainted the kitchen in a radioactive shade of green I let myself get bullied into. Someday, it's going to be a garden-y green. With vines.

This is the one picture I've managed to hang --



I love this still life. Doesn't it look like it belongs on that wall? The picture doesn't show the lacy swagged border just below the ceiling molding, or the light oak chair rail, but it looks even better when you can see the whole room. It's one of my signs that we belong in this house, because I bought the picture long before we ever saw this place.

It used to hang in our old living room, against light pink paneling sprinkled with butterflies. I'm probably going to wonder for the rest of my life why someone would deliberately put paneling that looked like it belonged in an old rusty singlewide trailer up in what could have been a cute house. And why I lived with it for eight years.

The picture itself is one of my best ever thrift store finds ($7.95 from Red White & Blue, a place up in Portland where it seems like a bunch of crafty bloggers are always finding neat vintage stuff.) I saw it from across the store just as a guy took it down from the wall and started in that direction, whispering under my breath for him to put it down. He did, and I grabbed it, and it's been on my walls ever since.

I brought all of our framed stuff down in the back of the Durango so it didn't get banged up during the move and there was a nail on the dining room wall in just the right spot. It was meant to be there.

Just like I think we're meant to be here, despite what other people are saying and despite the current water situation.

Rachel asked in the comments what was going on. To make a long, whiny story short, our old well suddenly has no water. Two weeks and $10,000 later, our new one isn't hooked up yet. And I'm dying for a long shower that'll turn my skin red and peel the wallpaper off the bathroom walls.