A Tale of Two Frames

There is a running joke among Michiganders that we have two seasons: winter and road construction. While the road construction season can be a pain in the neck sometimes, I prefer to think of that second season as garage sale season.

I love garage sales. One person’s junk often ends up as my treasure. I do try to think very critically at a garage sale though, ensuring I have a clear purpose for any item I choose to buy. The last thing I want is to buy something just to put it in my “to donate” pile at home. When I stumbled upon these two frames at a sale last year, I knew exactly how I’d use them. 

These frames are 21 x 21 inch frames made of solid wood. They were priced at $4 a piece, which is a steal in itself. But I did what I always do at garage sales – get my Mister involved. He is the world’s greatest negotiator. Truly, the greatest. I swear he doesn’t pay full price for anything. I don’t go to garage sales without him. Anyway, I whispered to him that I really wanted the frames and we walked out of there with both of them for $5 total. If the frames weren’t so heavy, I would have done a happy dance all the way home. 

My plan was to hang these frames in our master bedroom but they sat in my closet for a year while I debated what color to paint the walls. Now that that life changing decision has been made, I decided it’s time to hang these beauties up.

Originally, I contemplated replacing the matte in both frames. I had two options. One, I could have a local frame shop do it for me. Two, I could buy some matte board and a matte cutter and do it myself. Having it done for me proved to be way over my budget at $55 per frame. And, after weighing the idea of doing it myself, I decided the mattes in the frames really weren’t that bad and went relatively well with my new décor plan. So after all of that contemplating, I decided to leave the mattes alone.

The next decision was what to put in the frames. We’ve been married almost two years and still have zero wedding pictures hanging in our house. I’m not usually a procrastinator but when it comes to decorating, I tend to drag my feet a bit. I went through our engagement and wedding photos and picked one of each for the frames.

The current opening in the frames for a photo is 8 x 8. I learned that not every photo print shop offers 8 x 8 prints, and some of the ones who do charge quite a bit. Walmart came in at $2.84 a piece which I thought was really reasonable. Before I clicked “Order Prints” I checked out the Sam’s Club website and was pleased to find the prints for just $3.10 total and I was able to pick them up the next morning. Even more reasonable!

I pulled the frames apart, laid in my prints, and reassembled them. I knew which wall I wanted to hang them on and I knew I wanted them side by side but I wasn’t exactly sure what height to hang them at or what spacing to use between them. I revisited my own blog post about hanging art and used a couple of those techniques to find my perfect arrangement.

I traced the frames onto some brown mailing paper and then cut them out. I taped them up on the wall and played around with the spacing until I was happy with their location.

Because these frames are so heavy, I drilled my holes and put in some wall anchors first and then added some screws. 

Both prints fit the theme of the room: the first is romantic, the second is comfortable. 

I love how they turned out, and I love even more that they were only $8.10 total.

I plan to put something between them but haven't set my heart on exactly what that something is yet. I'm excited about how our master bedroom is evolving!

What’s your favorite garage sale steal?

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My Favorite Photos

Photography has always been an intriguing area for me. So often, I've viewed photographs taken by professionals  and longed for the skill to duplicate the clarity, colors, and creativity within their shots. The snapshots on my point and shoot didn't come close. When my parents handed down their Nikon D-70 to me because it was too much camera for them, I was excited about the prospect of my photography getting better. But with little to no knowledge about how to use it, I often got very similar results to my point and shoot. 

Frustrated, I decided it was time to pick up a how-to photography book or take a basic class. While my desire to learn to take better pictures was existent and growing, my patience was not. I wanted a quick fix like, "Three Easy Steps to Amazing Photography." I tried multiple times to sit down with a photography for dummies type of book but after a chapter or two, I gave up. There were too many things to learn and not enough room in my day or my brain for that matter. 

Then I started this blog. While blogs are a place for people to write things, they seem to be a bit more interesting and engaging when they have photos. In addition, it's really hard to have a blog about how to get organized without showing pictures of organized things. Can you imagine me explaining how I organized my command center without showing you any pictures of what I was talking about? A picture is worth a thousand words after all, right?

So as I started putting together my first 10 or 20 posts, I noticed a trend. The photos I was posting were dark, out of focus, grainy, and boring. They were nothing like the photos I was seeing on the more established blogs that I follow. They were nothing like the photos I had envisioned would fill this space. 

That was kind of a kick in the pants for me to get my act together and learn how to improve my photography. Not only is this a skill I want to develop for myself, but it's a skill that I want to pass on to each of you as you read my words. I want to give you pretty pictures to look at too!

Since I hadn't had much luck with books in the past, I committed to finding a photography class. Lucky for me, our local Community College offers both an in person class and an online class so I signed up right away. 

I'm now in week 6 of class and I'm finding it much easier to stick with. The motivation that weekly assignments and other students' photos provide is tremendous. I've learned so much in just six weeks and I'm really excited to get out and practice this new found knowledge on real life subjects. So if you see me often in real life, be prepared to see a camera around my neck or in front of my face. 

And speaking of photos, how boring would this post be without any pretty pictures? I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite photos I've taken over the last few years. They have bad shadows, poor use of aperture, the wrong ISO, and maybe even terrible coloring but they mean something to me. While this place is a place I vow to share organizing tips, I think it's also important that you have the opportunity to get to know me a bit more too (if you want to). So enjoy the collage below and I hope that in the next few weeks you'll be able to see a distinct difference in my photography.

The Beginning of Winter Love in Michigan

AuSable Light House (I climbed to the top!)

Grand Haven, MI

Chase, our family dog

The Pacific

Mando & His Stick

Baby Mando's First Christmas

Down on the Farm

The Arch in St. Louis

Our First Winter at Our New House

The City We Call Home, Grand Rapids

Mr. Mister running the 10k like it' nothing

Selfie of my mom and I. We look nothing alike, I know.

A blurry NYE with the Mister

How I Manage My Digital Photos

I’m in a bit of a pickle – a picture pickle. I’m overloaded with the number of digital photos on my computer. I don’t even have children yet. I’m in trouble.

I made a sort of New Year’s resolution to get this issue under control. I figure now that five months of the year are already about over, it might be time to get started.

So here is where I’m at. I have 5.5 years of digital photos on my desktop computer. This computer is old, slow, and very outdated. The Mr. gave me the go-ahead to buy up a new laptop and I didn’t blink before clicking “buy”. The new laptop has a super ginormous hard drive and to add to that, I purchased a large external hard drive as well. Since both devices have huge capabilities for data storage, my plan is to keep the full set of photos on both the computer and the external hard drive. If one goes out, I have a back up. 

I am also going to supplement these hard drive devices by adding my photos to the infamous cloud. In the unlikely event that my laptop and my external hard drive go down at the same time, I’ll have a digital back up of my photos. If the internet explodes and takes my laptop and hard drive with it, well, I think we have bigger problems on our hands than to worry about where my photos went.

I researched some free photo storage options online and decided to go with Shutterfly. They offer free and unlimited photo storage with the capability of printing directly from the site. Easy enough for me.

Once I decided where to save my growing number of digital memories, I needed to decide how. Sure, I could just keep them all in a "Pictures" folder, but if I ever need to go back and pull out a photo from, say, Christmas 2010, I’m not sure I’d ever find it.

The first step was to sort my photos by year. Since I have photos saved from 2008 through the present, I created sub folders within my Pictures folder; one for each year.

Next, I plan to go through each year and sort the pictures by event. I say “I plan” in future tense because this step is not yet complete. I am working on year 2011 though, so that’s progress right? So within each year's sub-folder, I will have multiple sub-folders for each event. For example, within my 2008 folder, which is not visible in the picture above, I have sub-folders for Christmas, Summer, Fall, etc. 

Once the photos are divided by event, I will go through each photo and decide which ones are keepers. I don’t think I need the four snapshots my brother took of his nose at mom’s birthday three years ago. 

Why would these photos even be on my computer, you ask? Laziness. I have no other excuse. When my memory card got close to full, I’d dump all the photos on my camera into my picture folder on the computer and move on. There is no use in storing photos that I don’t really need. So each event folder will be pared down to only the necessary, good, quality photos.

My next step will be to re-name the photos so that when I am looking for that great Christmas family shot from 2010, it is easy for me to find. I plan to name my photos the following way:

YEAR EVENT SUBJECT.jpeg

For example: 2008 Christmas Family Photo.jpeg

What if I have more than one family photo from Christmas 2008 I’d like to keep?

2008 Christmas Family Photo 1.jpeg, 2008 Christmas Family Photo 2.jpeg, etc.

Each keeper photo will be saved as a jpeg file in a 4 x 6 print size. If I ever need to print larger, I can resize the photo in my photo editing software.

Having my photos arranged in the manner above will make it easy for me to find what I need when I need it. It will be a bit time consuming on the front end since I’m five years behind, but I’ve already started this process for any new photos I take so once I get caught up, it will be a breeze.

I’m also considering putting together a hard copy photo book for each year of photos to create a volume for each year of our family. We’ll see about that in the future!

If you’re motivated to get your own mess of digital photos in order and backed up, here are some links:

Online Photo Storage

1.) Flickr
2.) Photobucket
3.) Snapfish
4.) Shutterfly


External Hard Drives

1.) WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB
2.) WD My Book 4 TB
3.) Seagate Expansion 1 TB
4.) Toshiba Canvio Connect 2 TB

If you’re already a pro at organizing your digital memories, I’d love to hear your secrets!

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