the front hall

We moved into this house in March of 2012, a little over a year ago. Since then I haven't done a hell of a lot of decorating on the main floor. The upstairs guest room is all foo-fooed up but it's mostly white-wall city in the rest of the house.

Years and years (decades!) ago I bought one of those old wooden expandable cup racks at a yard sale. Remember those? They had, like, 9 pegs and you hung your coffee mugs on them? Well, this was one of those, only this one had... wait for it... 75 pegs! I've never seen one like it before or since.

I've got this long from hall, which is actually one wall of the living room, but since the living room is my art studio and filled with a ton of tall furniture (storage!), it has created a long hallway effect coming into the house from the front door. There's a bench and my Boone hutch (with my mom's old butter churn on top, next to the original glass flour canister for the hutch), and an old ladder and an even older trunk, but I had this long chunk of wall above the bench that was bugging me. I played around with the 75-peg-mug-rack and discovered that it would stretch reeeeally long, so I hung it up and dangled all sorts of things from the (75!) pegs.

It was fun going thru my boxes of collected stuff and finding things that looked good on the rack.

The pics are a bit grim because the light was terrible that day and I don't have the oomph to do them again right now. But I'll do another post soon on all the hanging goodies.

The third image is a little bench that I made out of some old red fence boards a long time ago. (So I lied in that last post where I said I had no red in my house. I forgot about the little red bench, but it's all worn and isn't the hurt your eyes sort of RED that those postcards were.)

On the bench is a piece of wood with grooves cut into it that had some other purpose entirely but now I use it to hold ATCs and postcards and collages, done by me and other folks. In the first image, the bench sits between the bench and the hutch. I also have a doily collection you wouldn't believe and the last two pics are the shelves of a piece that sits across from the bench. It has vintage things on the shelves and dog walking paraphernalia in the drawers.

The last pic is a vase of dried curly willow branches that I picked up on about 150 dog walks from a house on the other side of the block. Every time we got a good wind, I'd walk the dog that way and collect some more fallen branches. So far, they're on the mantel, in this vase, in a pot by the front window, and sticking out of a vintage glass lampshade that you can just see behind the standing up spindles in image 5. Oh, and a pile out on the patio drying.