Live for Today

Our family gallery wall featuring our nephews and nieces

When we bought this house, it was not meant to be our ‘forever’ home.  We bought it because it allowed my hubby to move out of his gracious brother’s house, me to move from Michigan and for us to live cheaply while I traveled between South Carolina and Michigan to finish school.  Redoing the kitchen and putting a laundry room in were easy decisions.  However, I pretty much stopped there.  I didn’t want to make the effort to make this house our home, after all, we weren’t planning on being here forever.

Over the last couple weeks, God has revealed discontentment in my heart.  I realized that I wasn’t living each day to its fullest potential.  I wasn’t living for today and mostly, I was putting my life on hold for things to come.  While, it’s ok to plan and dream, it is not alright to not enjoy today.  I was only given so many days in my life here on Earth, I need to make the most of them.

Years ago, I bought inexpensive picture frames from Ikea.  We had a wall in the living room of our house in Michigan that I wanted to make our family wall.  I never did.  I decided that to help make the most of this house and my life right now, I was finally going to make my family gallery wall.  This house doesn’t have a lot of open wall spaces, but we did have one empty wall in our TV room.  I bought 2 8x10 canvases to paint, and command hooks to use to hang all the frames and the canvases.  I decided to use command hooks because I had 11 frames to hang and I didn’t want to put that many holes in the wall, especially because we don’t plan on being here long term.

The Command hooks in formation on the wall.

The blank canvases that I used.

The Ikea Picture frames.

The frames were white and too plain for what I wanted.  I decided to paint them and initially that was a mistake.  The frames are made of a material that repelled the acrylic paint.  After getting annoyed at first, I started applying a thicker coat of paint and that held better.  I used carbon paper and traced each niece and nephew’s name and birth date onto each frame.  When I went over it with a black permanent marker, the paint started chipping away.  Again, I became irritated and almost gave up.  After stepping back though, and looking at it with fresh eyes, I loved it!  Since the paint chipped off so easily, I ended the process by spraying two coats of clear coat spray paint over each frame.  I painted the background of the canvases to match the frames and then painted a quote on each one. 

The canvases and quotes that I painted.

I chose these quotes because our family is scattered all over the country and we don't get to see our nieces and nephews nearly as much as we would like.  We don't have the opportunity to play as big of a role in their lives, but we still love them to pieces and they are our world!  I love the end result and am so happy that I decided to tackle even little projects to continue to make this house our home, while because we still live here!