…or new use for our bench (previously seen here: The art wall grows)

The sheets and comforter cover outing that led me to muse on the (in)efficiency of cities eventually got washed and suddenly, the bed looked all grown up.

I think Stephanie and I struck a pretty good balance. I didn’t want anything too masculine, and she didn’t want anything too feminine.

I hung some things on the wall last weekend.

It’s amazing how things on the wall change the look of certain spaces. In some ways I kind of like bare walls, partly because they make a space feel clean and uncluttered, but also because I tend to find the irrevocability of pounding nails into [walls] a little unsettling.

Frames and framing things can be pretty expensive, and when moving from apartment to apartment, hanging the same old pictures and photos on the walls seems kind of like I’m pretending that I’m actually not in a new space. Probably for that reason alone, (and procrastination) I neglected to hang anything on the walls for the last oh, 6 months.

I did have a photo printed to hang on the wall—one I like of the Golden Gate Bridge—but after I receiving it I had second thoughts about hanging it while I live in San Francisco.

I like to buy a bunch of flowers when I get groceries. It usually costs $6-8, which seemed like a waste at first, but after a while, it’s really nice having a bunch of flowers in a vase, which in my case happens to be a pitcher from Mark Hewitt.

It doesn’t even have to be an arrangement, most of the time I just get the same type of flower. Which is usually cheaper, and I think, looks nicer.

At this point, I’m not yet sure if this is a wall for art, or a wall of art, but either way, I like it.

While shopping for Christmas presents at Kindred in Santa Rosa last month, I stumbled upon these beautiful placemats handmade out of recycled newspaper. Feeling that their aesthetics transcended their intended purpose, I decided to hang them on the wall.

I believe they were made by Filipino women as part of an cooperative organization that:

helps women work together in groups, obtain government help in skills training, buy raw materials, provide an access to low interest loans to capitalize the industry and obtain titles to their land.

I’m not very good with decorating walls. I tend to find the irrevocability of pounding nails into them a little unsettling. That and commercial wall art can be so corny and expensive.

But somewhere I got this idea, I think from Casey, to accent a wall with a large piece of colorful textured paper. Almost three years and two bare-walled apartments later, I finally stopped by an art supply store on the walk home and picked up three large swathes of textured paper. They were only about $2-3/sheet, inexpensive and accessible enough to experiment and iterate.

I chose colors I thought were nice alone and together. Conveniently they resembled the colors of the furniture we have. Last weekend Stephanie and I alternated between holding them against a wall in various configurations while the other stood back and critiqued. In the end we opted for all three colors together.

We fixed the top corners to the wall with magic mounts, just to get them level and then sat down together to see how it all looked without hands holding them up. As we contemplated, a breeze from an open window across the room began to lift the paper off the wall in a most ethereal way.

We would have left them unmoored, except we knew they’d eventually tear off as we walked between the bathroom and the kitchen. After several minutes of watching the play of air on paper, we fastened the bottom corners to the wall.

In the future I’m thinking they may become canvases for other artworks or backdrops for framed photos.

Update: The art wall grows