Dining Room Update

I spent most of Saturday afternoon working on arranging a little gallery wall in the newly painted dining room.  There was one short intermission when I spent 30 minutes on the front porch with a nervously sweet Estonian door-to-door salesgirl.  I politely refused to spend hundreds of dollars on a 'learning system' for Owen, and then she asked if she could at least get a snake before she left.  Thirty confused seconds of dialogue later, I went in and got her a banana for a snack.  

It worked out nicely that this area rug in our foyer is the exact dimensions of the wall space I was trying to fill.  I used white box tops as a stand-in for the white lamp and ran up and down the stairs to get a look at different arrangements until I liked one.  I'm trying to use a lot of green in there.  (Ask Owen, he'll tell you it's my favorite.)  Then I made newspaper templates to help me get the arrangement on the wall and mark the exact spots for nail holes.  Not my own fantastic idea or anything.  I've seen it lots of places, including here and here.

Then I put up the real deals.

A couple of things that will probably change:

• I shouldn't have tried so hard to work around the lamp.  Think I'm going to move the oil landscape up a smidge and bring the pheasant paint-by-number in so that the lamp overlaps it a little.  
• Speaking of the pheasant, he keeps staring at me with one really creepy red eye.  I'm thinking of picking my own colors and re-doing the whole painting.  On a rainy day... when I have nothing better to do...
• I still want to paint the tree rings like I mentioned here.
• And the new cow painting needs some low-glare glass.  Or no glass?  And should the frame be bronze?  Such important decisions...