Green Room Gallery Wall

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. Covid plus 4 kids in school and activities really has made keeping up with this website more difficult than I could have expected. Now that all the boys are in part-time to full-time school however, I’m finally feeling the energy to come back into this space. I’m still very unsure if I’ll come back to running the Etsy Shop anytime soon. Trying to run that business during the onset of the Pandemic really burnt me out on small business ownership. But it’s also so hard to walk away from something that was such a wonderful creative outlet for me. I’ll keep you posted.

Anyways, on to why you all are really here: the Green Room. The ‘formal dining room’ in our house has always been a wildly awkward space. The room is much too narrow to accommodate a long table, which when you’re already a family of 6 without guests, really is quite useless for hosting large gatherings. For two years it acted as a makeshift classroom for my oldest who was stuck doing distance school and needed a dedicated space for his laptop and school supplies. As soon as we got the news that in-person school was back, however, I was ready to convert the room into something Dave and I had been joking about for years. A library.

Dave and I first connected over our mutual love for fantasy novels. As avid readers we both wished for a dedicated space in our house for our books. A place to lounge, read, and listen to good music in the evening after our kids were in bed. So once school was back in-person, we took a look at that awkward formal dining room and decided to just go for it. Nothing like two years stuck in your house to decide to just embrace your weird and really make your house a home.

I decided I really wanted to let our nerd shine through in this room, while still feeling like a space that was beautiful, cozy, and chic. I fell in love with the ‘gentlemen’s library’ or the ‘dark academia aesthetic’ and was determined to make that happen in our library. We decided on a dark green paint (Succulent by Sherwin Williams) and from the moment the paint hit the walls we dubbed the room, The Green Room.

I knew I wanted a modern but classic Chesterfield, and fell in love with the Pottery Barn Square Arm Chesterfield. It took absolutely forever to ship so I started collecting vintage frames from local antique shops as well as some frames from Target that I knew I could use (Frame 1, Frame 2, Frame 3, Frame 4, Frame 5). The canvas paintings from target, especially have fun frames to work with and all you have to do is cut your image to size and double-stick tape the image on top of the existing canvas. Super easy. Mixing the new frames with vintage frames works really well. I touched up a lot of the frames with gold rub & buff as well to help add that perfect vintage shine.

Once I had collected frames and arranged them on the wall, I spent an insane amount of time trawling Etsy and other online shops for paintings and sketches of modern subjects that still looked vintage. I mixed in some standard paintings as well, but tried very hard to find as many nerd paintings that I could. I will link them all below.

Links for other fun items in the room:

LIFE LATELY, DIYLeanna RetterathComment