Decorating/Christmas Decorating

I have lived in my current home for close to two years now. I enjoy every inch of this home because I picked it, and it screams ME! I am done with the large furniture pieces, but I am still decorating these walls! I draw inspiration from everywhere! I love to visit model homes to get new ideas, and my other favorite place is Pinterest! I have a long hallway that needs some love so this is my new project. below is my progress thus far. Frames were given to me by my lovely mother and phrases were purchased from JoAnn's. All together I spent $6 on this project because I had to buy one can of spray paint. I want to possibly add a quote later and maybe some ironwork above the frames.

When it comes to decorating for the Holidays...In my opinion it should not take more than a couple of hours to easily remove everything and store it away once the Holiday is over! I despise nothing more than looking at a Christmas tree in January...come on Christmas is over! I do not mind it being up for the 1st of the year, but after that is too long!  I LOVE Christmas, but unfortunately Christmas does not help pay my mortgage so I do not allow it to consume my entire house.

The Christmas Tree:

Some of my fondest memories at Christmas are of decorating the tree. My older sister and I were so possessive of the tree because the younger two did not know what they were doing! We would literally hand them one ornament at a time! My tree is synthetic. I prefer synthetic over a live tree. I cannot stand bugs and I do not want to find them crawling in my home because they hitched a ride on the tree! For those of you who do not know you can get a synthetic tree at end of season for 20-100 bucks! Yes! I am a total end of season shopper...anyway I went to Walmart 3 years ago end of season, and purchased this reg. $225 tree for $22 dollars! (I was on cloud nine that day until I got home to my apartment and realized I had no place to store it!). All of my ornaments are from Walmart. I refuse to spend a ton of money on ornaments because I like to switch up colors every other year.

The Mantle:

I like to keep my mantle simple. I have an initial I crafted displayed and two stockings. How I long for more stockings on that mantle! (but that is a whole other blog entry ha ha)