There is a wall in my house I like to fondly refer to as the problem wall.
This ugly little wall is nicely located right between the front door and the laundry room door.
The designers of this house put a lot of thought into the location of all the eyesores. Where should we stick all these ugly things? Doorbell speaker, alarm speaker, thermostat, smoke detector, motion sensor.
We could put them on the wall next to the laundry room. Tucked away where no one will ever see them. But you know what would be even easier? Sort of but not really. We could put them a few inches away on the wall that is visible from the entryway, and the hallway, and the stairway, and the dining room, and the living room, and you know EVERYWHERE! Oooh ya, let's do that.
Seriously.
And not only is the stuff not pretty, it's about as ugly as possible. The alarm speaker and motion sensor are newer. Yes, we could put this stuff around the corner but this wall already looks ugly. Let's just add to it. Ahem.
The smoke alarm is not even functional so I should really remove it. Even though I know the wires leading to it aren't live, (had them checked) it still makes me nervous to just take it off and have those wires floating in the wall. So, I will wait until someone who knows what they are doing can remove it.
Let's not even mention the fact that the thermostat is crooked. Crooked. For really.
The doorbell is an... antique. I am not totally in love with the style.
The first thing I did when we moved in was try to eliminate all the brass everywhere. I did remove the decorative thingy off the front and was considering painting the brown part. I also removed the side chimes and discovered they are in fact functional so back they went.
After spending much time/energy/angst trying to change it, I decided to just embrace it and work with it. After all, it is part of the history of the house and would a plain speaker box really be any prettier?
Plus, brass is back in! Bring back all the gold things we finally managed to get rid of!!! Right? I'll never fully understand trends.
At first, I fixated on covering all the uglies but I was worried about the functionality being compromised. I also worried that covering them would just end up looking like I had covered something up.
Then as I was browsing gallery walls on Pinterest, (I have always had a bit of an obsession with gallery walls) I realized the ones I loved the most had a mixture of frames and other oddities.
So, if I surround the ugly stuff with pretty stuff maybe people will notice the pretties and ignore the uglies?!
Obviously I NEEDED to run right out and start buying stuff to hang on my wall!
Except that wasn't really in the budget. So, I decided to work with what I had and I could always add to it later.