Front Entry Mini Makeover

Lately, I've been pinning black doors on pinterest.  I loooove how classy and timeless they look and I wanted to copy that same look in my own home somehow.  After browsing through some of these images on pinterest for weeks and weeks, I finally decided to stop looking and just make it happen.  So last weekend, while buying some paint for our back deck, I made a tiny splurge on a small quart of black paint for the inside of our front door.  That's where the black was going to happen.  

Yesterday, I started the painting.  It took three coats of Behr's Satin "black suede" paint to get the job done.  After the first coat was on, I was scared.  It looked like a big black mess.  But after each additional coat of paint, I grew more confident in my decision to paint the inside of our front door.  By coat three, I was in love!  I love how so much white in a home can make everything feel so airy and open.  However, I think having a few dark statements here and there really adds an element of sophistication.

The paint for this project only set me back about twelve dollars.  (Not bad.)  But my financial resources, as far as this front entry way goes, were exhausted after just buying the paint.  While the paint on the door was drying, I put my original IKEA door mat back in front of the door and stood back.  Meh..., I didn't really like the beige and the black together.  Then I remembered that I'd bought a black and white striped little rug about a month ago on clearance at Target.  I had no where to put it when I bought it.  I simply bought it because I was in love with it and it only cost $6.49!  I knew I'd find a place for it someday.  So I brought it home and stuck it in the back of my closet for another day.  And then the day came.  I traded out the rugs and the black and white stripped rug completed the new look ...almost.

The whole time I had been envisioning the inside of my front door black, I also had been envisioning a classy little boxwood wreath hanging on it.  But I didn't have a boxwood wreath hanging around anywhere and I didn't have the forty to fifty dollars to buy one either.  

These times in life when I don't have the financial resources I would like, to do some of the things around my home that I would like to do, often turn into blessings.  They force me to get my creative juices going and I have to think outside of the box.  So I did.  And a great idea came to mind.  We have a random boxwood growing in our backyard.  A sweet neighbor gave it to us.  At the time, we didn't really have an idea of how we wanted to landscape our backyard, so we just stuck the boxwood in a random spot in the ground and it's been growing there ever since.  It's getting pretty big now actually.  So I decided to go in the backyard and trim some little branches off of it.  I brought those branches inside, found a card board box that wasn't being used and cut a wreath like circle out of it, and then I plugged in my glue gun. (Just hoping I could pull all these objects together to make a boxwood wreath.)  I lined up some of the branches in a circular pattern on the table first, to make sure I had enough branches, and then one by one I started gluing and layering the branches onto the cardboard.  And it worked!  It looked like the cute little boxwood wreath that I had been picturing all along.  I hot glued some black ribbon to the back of my homemade wreath and then tacked the ribbon to the top of my newly painted front door.  Then I stood at the top of our stairs and looked down at my completed project - a freshly painted black door, a cute little clearance rug, and a homemade wreath from scraps around my home.  It all came together exactly the way I had hoped it would.  What a blessing.