Like much of the world, with the New Year came our promise to get our house in order one project at a time. Amongst that list are the big projects like installing hardwood floors throughout the house, remodeling the powder room, extending the back deck and adding a pergola, and giving our kitchen a mini remodel. But alongside the larger projects are the small to-do’s that inevitably make a home look, feel, and function better.
Our list includes things like (finally) getting dining room chairs, creating a photo gallery montage on that huge 9ft wide blank wall in the front room, switching out old photos with more current ones thorough out the house, organizing all the closets, hanging up some art, replacing the old loose kitchen faucet, and coming up with a better solution for our media wall. Seriously, just writing that list makes my head spin!
The first order of business in my mind: tackling that total eye sore of a media center we had. When we first moved in Naomi was adamant that we mount the TV on the wall as we had in our previous apartment. I hesitantly went along with the idea because at the time we didn’t have room in our niche to fit all three pieces of our entertainment center which included the tv stand and two media towers. So, we hung the TV on the wall and placed the towers in opposite corners of the niche until we could get a tv stand with the proper dimensions to fit between them. Thankfully we soon found one at Tar-jay (where we also purchased the entertainment center) because the dangling power cords running down the wall were driving me bananas! Unfortunately, even after finding a suitable tv stand we still had the issue of those unsightly cords.
A couple days later I went to Home Depot and bought one of those cord cover thingies that could be mounted to the wall and painted in the wall color to help conceal it. This solution was better, but I still wasn’t feelin it. Over time the TV had slowly crept to the left throwing it off-center, so that ALONG with those pesky cords pushed me over the edge. I finally told Naomi the tv had to come down. Her immediate answer: NO, her answer 2 weeks later: NO. Her worry was that if we brought down the tv there would be too much space above the media center and it would look like weird dead space. I understood her concerns and got to work coming up with a couple solutions to help ease her worries.
I proposed a few design solutions including installing floating shelves which would be a good looking design element AND create extra storage, OR, we could simply add some art with the right proportions which would be another good looking design element and solve her issues the with dead space. Through my powers of visual persuasion (I literally had to draw it out for her because unlike me she has no sense of “see it in her head” design ninja abilities and since shes an analytical kinda gal she has to “see it with her eyes” in order to get it) she finally agreed to take “allow me” to take it down. (insert happy dance here) She chose option #1 and the only stipulation is we had to have the shelves on hand before the tv could come down.
A day and a quick trip to Ikea later, with LACK wall shelf in tow, I left the store feeling accomplished in the fact that I had won the battle over the tv placement. So as it stands, the home improvement stats at casa de Gardner are Shavonda-1, Naomi-0. Oh but this is only the beginning….I may have won the battle, but the design decisions war is far from over!
So here’s the before: (notice the cord cover thingie hangin out amongst the clutter)
