Step by Step

Sing it with me! 

"Oooh, baby!  Gonna get to you girrrrl!"

Fellow children of the early 80's, who was your favorite?  Was it the youngest with his baby blues Joey? Or were you a bad boy fan with the pierced Jordan?

 On the count of three, let's all blurt out which NKOTB boy we had a crush on.   

Ready?

One...

Two...

Three!

Danny!

I kid, I kid! I remember having a lively debate over which boy was hottest with my second grade friends, but we all agreed that the horsey Danny was not our favorite.  Do you concur?

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This is the wierdest intro I've ever had for a post.  Moving on!

With my summer winding down (this is my last week day off), I decided to jam in another Pinterest inspired project: numbered steps.  This is a trend that I see as being very taste-specific, so it will not surprise me if this is not most people's decor choice.  There is just something about bold numbers on stairs that I find kind of whimsical and crisp.

My inspiration photo:

 via Pottery Barn

First, I showed my stairs some TLC.  They had become rather chipped and scarred, and not in a "look-how-shabby-chic-we-are" way.

 Yeesh... 

I painted all of the stairs in Behr's paint and primer in one in semi-gloss.  It was much more time consuming than I thought it would be, but at least I could watch 500 Days of Summer with Dan through the arm rail slats as I worked.

While I debated whether I should use a stencil to paint the numbers on the stairs, Dan reminded me that when we sell our house the realtor might ask us to remove the numbers since they're taste specific.  I settled on vinyl rub-on numbers since I can blow my hair dryer on them and peel them off easily if we need to.   The numbers come from OZA Vinyl Graphics on Etsy and were pretty simple to use.

I simply measure the stairs, taped them in place, used a pencil to mark where to put them, peeled off the backing, rubbed each one on, and peeled off the top layer.  I know that sounds like too many steps (pun!) but it wasn't nearly as time consuming as painting all of them and went quicker than I had anticipated.

First numbers:

In progress:

I like this landing now.  It could use a bit more black-framed art, but it's so much warmer than before.

I feel like the numbered stairs kind of go with the black frame on the art (sentimental wedding gift featuring the bridge in Central Park where Dan proposed):

Again, it's probably not everyone's thing, but I'm liking this wierd trend.  It's like eyeliner for my steps, making them pop a bit.   Look at them, all flirty now like, "Here we are!"

Off to enjoy my last day off!

Let's get lost together

I like the recent travel boards people have been doing on Pinterest, so I decided to try it for myself.   I think the picture below spanks mine, though.  What a world traveler!

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It's almost a little smug, you know?  I'm thinking, "Okay, Carmen Sandiego, we get it!  You like to travel!"

 Reminds me of another pinterest thing that popped up lately:

But back to my twenty minute project! I'm not artsy enough to create something from scratch, but I found a gorgeous calendar featuring vintage maps for $20 at a local gift shop.  The cover was a print of Europe that I thought would work well for documenting our travels, and I figured the added bonus is that I can still use the rest of the calendar come 2013.

I bought a sticker book from the dollar bin at Target for summer school this year, and I realized yesterday that I could use a hole punch on the bottom stars to create little dots of color to indicate cities we have visited.

Really, there's no need for the blow by blow of this project, but I will anyway.  I just hole punched the star stickers in five different colors, one for each country that we visited (three together/ two separately).

Then, we just placed the dots on the different countries we've visited:

I created a little key for the bottom corner, cut out the map, and popped it in a frame.  Voila!  Easy, custom art for our office:

I like the idea of framing a map because Dan and I are always getting lost on our vacations together.  Even though he has a solid sense of direction, I inevitably want to visit some obscure  place, like a pastry shop I read about on Trip Advisor, so he has to do tons of map reading.  He's constantly threatening to give me "map lessons" since my sense of direction is so backwards, but I wriggle out of that by feeding his ego, "But, hon, I have you!"

Side note:  While I'm horrible at reading maps, I am the only one of the two of us who can fold them back up into the neat little rectangles.  Anyone else notice that about their significant other??  What is so hard about using the creases to fold it up again??  I do have to admit that I feel oddly smug when he spends ten minutes expertly navigating us through some complex city... and then has to sheepishly hand the map to me to fold. 

I'm happy with my simple map art.  Definitely has some sentimental value!

I'm almost done tweaking my office, so more pictures of that soon!  Anyone else doing anything "pinteresting" lately?