All You Need is…

L O V E…and a little bit of white paint.  Maybe and maybe not but with all of the orangey-wood trim in this casa, I don’t know what else to go for and I’m playing it safe! 

I do know, however, that it has been so great shaking up the living room to take it from the heavily curtained, brown, brown, brown before:

to an in-progress and better after:

For the better part of the day, this room gets the least amount of light in the house.  We debated buying a screen door to let in more sunshine throughout the day but still haven’t pulled the trigger because we’re just not sure we want to make that kind of an investment in a rental.  Either way, it’s pretty light and bright at 8 am every morning, which is when I got that above, in-progress shot and that’s when it really counts, right?  It’s nice to have bright mornings in the room you usually go straight to upon your rise, in my opinion.  Rise and shine!  If we owned this house, I’d start making plans to downsize the chimney and add a pair of french doors on either side that open either into a light and bright screened-in porch or a sweeping outdoor patio.  And we’d knock the wall to the kitchen out to let in all that light.  Make believe ain’t just for kids.  ;) 

On the docket today is a project I’ve been wanting to do for YEARS…almost six to be exact.  It all started when Sherry at Young House Love painted a few words onto a piece of art to turn up the notch a hundred levels.  She got me started on a hunt for the perfect piece of art to add some words to and I found it about a year and a half ago.  It was $15 at a local thrift store and apparently had come straight from adorning a wall in a casino.  Haha!  It’s not a real painting so don’t worry, I didn’t destroy anything original but it does have some sort of textured something on top of the screen-printed picture to make it look like it’s real.

Right after we got it, I hung it on the siding in our old screened-in porch and the day to add the words to it never came…until a few weeks ago.  And it’s kind of funny and maybe meant to be because we’ve moved on from that house to one in which we have less space and had to down-size and purge to fit into.  So, “All You Need is Love” is very fitting for where we are right now.  We didn’t need any of those things we (sometimes grudgingly) had to donate or sell before we moved.  While they were nice to have, all we really need is love.  Can I get an amen?

I know I could’ve been original and made up my own phrase to stick to the faux painting but, as cliche as it might be, I just really loved the simplicity in the truth that all you need is love and like I said above, it’s such a good reminder to us right now.

Anyway, before I started adding words to our casino art, I spray-painted the sides of the canvas gold because we weren’t really feeling the black.  I thought about adding a thin wood frame and maybe we still will but, I had the spray paint in my stash and it didn’t require spending money. 

Also, I have an alien-looking hand apparently.

To add words, I copied Sherry’s process to a T.  I took a photo of the canvas and added digital words using pixlr.com to figure out what font and what size I liked.  Five and a half inches was the magic number for me and all caps because I needed the saying to fill a pretty long space and lowercase couldn’t really do it.

After that, I printed out the “ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE” saying in the Muchacho font.  To save on ink, I printed them in at 15% color (that is, after I wrestled with my computer to get it to print lighter…the first few came out black).


I spent a very interrupted afternoon cutting them all out and got to work on placement.  Oh, and I cut a few corners with my font choice.  Muchacho has some fun curves to it that I like but I figured those curves might be way fun to cut out and even more fun to paint…wait fun?  I meant TEDIOUS. 

Because my canvas was long and narrow, I opted to have the saying go all the way across the entire thing in one line.  That meant I had to get some sort of something to help me get all of the letters laid out in a straight line.  That something was painter’s tape.
I measured seven and a half inches up from the bottom of the canvas every few inches with one hand and rolled out the tape to stick at that measurement with the other hand.  I typed out “ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE” into an Instagram story I never intended to publish to figure out where the center of the saying is (in stories, a vertical line will appear if your saying is centered), measured out where the center of my canvas was, and laid out all the letters accordingly. 

Next, I traced around each letter lightly with a pencil and then filled them all in with some white acrylic paint I pulled from my stash.

I did the placement and painting one day during Seb and Gianna’s naptime and it quickly turned into a little painting sesh – me and my canvas and the twins and their stepping stones they’ve been dying to paint for months.  :)

Right after I painted the last letter, I hung it right up before it even had a chance to dry because I’m impatient efficient like that (where else could I put this thing to dry without little hands finding it?) and now we’ve got a little reminder as we walk down our hallway and into the living room of what we really need in this life.  :)

I have a few more fun additions and diy projects in this room to share including a whole room tour and then it’s off to the other side of the wall to the brightest room in the house, the dining room/multi-purpose room.  Once upon a few weeks ago, I had no clue how to decorate that room since it serves as so many spaces-in-one for us right now but last week, I stumbled upon a few things and nailed down a plan and it is going to be EPIC! 

Am I allowed to say that word as a thirty-something?

  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯