Christmas Home Tour 2016 {Part 1}

Hello everyone!  I am really excited to do my first (of hopefully many) Christmas Home Tour.  This has been a post in the making for a while, but I can finally say that I am done with all of my decorating.  I know that Mr. Wonderful is thankful about that too!  🙂  There ended up being A LOT of pictures so I decided to break this into two posts.

Entryway

I ended up going with a red, black and white theme for the decorations which is similar to what I did last year.  Since I was not yet blogging, I decided to do a similar theme again.  Also, I found some great buffalo plaid items at Target this year and they fit in perfectly with my theme.

Our entryway is not very spacious so there is not a lot of decorating that goes on in here.  We have a entryway table that Mr. W made and it is flanked by some little trees in olive buckets.  I kept the decorations simple on the table.  I did mention that we love Disney, right?  Lol.  Mickey hangs out full time on our entryway table.

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I decorated the lantern with some buffalo plaid ribbon and sleigh bells.  The lantern is filled with some red beaded garland and a Luminara candle.  These candles are the best!  They look so real but there is no danger of starting a fire.  They are battery operated and even come with a remote control to turn them on and off.

We like to hang our stockings on the stairway railing as you can see in the background of the above photo.  These stockings were handmade, originally from Mr. Wonderful’s grandmother.  She made him a stocking when he was a kid, then after we were married and had a child she made one for us too.  Unfortunately she got too old to knit ones for the rest of the clan so we only had three out of the six that we needed. Eventually, she handed on her knitting supplies to me.  I would love to say that I knitted the rest of them but I can’t.  My knitting skills only go so far.  🙂  Luckily I have a sister in law who is a wonderful knitter and she finished the rest for us.  It is nice to carry on the tradition.

Here is a close up of the stockings without the names for privacy, we don’t like to share too much information about our kids on the internet.  The names go in the blank white spaces as you can see above.  They are great stockings for stuffing a lot into because they stretch!

We have had this carousel for many years.  We got it shortly after we were married and I love to bring it out every Christmas.  The kids have always loved it too.  Now after our many Disney trips, it also reminds us of Disney.  🙂

Living Room

Our living room is by far the most decorated room in our house.  This is the space that we hang out in the most and I love changing up the decor for the seasons.  These cute Christmas pillows were an easy DIY project.  They were actually made with spray paint!  Here is the tutorial if you are interested.

 

This lumbar pillow was made from 2 Target dollar spot table runners!  Click here to see the tutorial for that.  I also got a cloth ribbon out of them as well.  You will see that in the family room in Part 2 of the home tour.

One of my favorite DIY projects is our faux mantel.  Unfortunately we do not have a fireplace and I have always wanted a mantel to decorate, so we made one.  I love it!

Isn’t this Santa super cute?  I got him last year at Target.  Our red phone booth fit in perfectly next to him.  It almost looks like he could hop inside.  If only it was already taken up with another Luminara candle.  🙂

I love the little red lantern in the wreath.  We found it at an antique shop but it did not work anymore.  That is okay though, I doubt I would light it anyway.  We did want it to look lit up though so we inserted some battery operated snowflake lights to do the job.

This buffalo plaid bucket is filled with some evergreen branches and wooden candy canes.  We had an old artificial tree that we do not use anymore, however I did not want to get rid of it so that I could use the branches for decorating.  This is an easy way to add some Christmas greenery.

My favorite part of the mantel is this Merry sign that corresponds with the buffalo plaid flip banner.  I have seen some other wooden signs similar to this and wanted to make one for our house. This sign could be cut out with a jigsaw or scroll saw, but luckily we have a friend who has access to a laser cutting machine, which made it a thousand times easier.  I picked out a font I liked, sent the file his way and he cut it out for us.  If you are interested in making your own sign, here is the PDF file for it.

The flip banner was one that I previously made for our Thanksgiving mantel.  As you can see it is easy to use for different seasons.  You can keep all the pieces on there and flip them to the correct season.  Here is the tutorial with printables of the buffalo plaid letters.

Our Christmas tree continues with the red, black and white theme.  I love mixing various sizes and textures of ornaments such as the red ones.  I strung on two different kinds of lights to add some dimension.

The “chalkboard” ornaments were made by spraying some old ornaments with flat black spray paint and writing some Christmas words on them with a Chalk marker.

I bought these snowflakes at the Dollar store.  They come as clear snowflakes but I wanted them to be white.  We sprayed them with white spray paint and sprinkled some fine glitter all over them while the paint was still wet.  Of course, by the time we were done, the glitter was also all over ourselves and the house.  🙂

I love the look of the ribbon cascading down the outside of the tree.  To get the spiraling look to the ribbon, make sure to use wired ribbon.  Just roll the ribbon up all the way to the top of the tree and gently let it fall back down.  I topped the tree off by making a bow with the black and white ribbon.  Here are some awesome nights shots of the tree.

I found some coordinating buffalo plaid wrapping paper at Target to finish off the theme.  Score!  The other paper (including the cute plaid one) came from Menards.

Isn’t this reindeer adorable?  He is another oldie but goodie that we have had around for a while.

Well that is it for today, check out my Christmas Home Tour {Part 2} where I share our dining room, kitchen and family room.  I hope you enjoyed Part 1 of my Christmas Home Tour.  What kind of a theme did you use this year for your Christmas decorating?

Kimberly