If I had One Thousand Dollars

Spring break is over and we're back to work.

I've been thinking lately about how much I love my house.  (YES!)  I love the house itself, the layout, the light.  I love the choices I have made and the way the rooms feel layered but uncluttered (well, except the office/playroom), personal, and finished.  This summer marks five years in this house, and in the past that has been the moving-on time.  But I have no interest in moving, no itch for a new space, no desire to start all over again.

I do continue to see small bits and pieces here and there that I want to upgrade or complete.  (Here's the list!)  And I have some birthday dollars burning a hole in my pocket.  When starting out in a space, I always advise clients to put money where the impact is.  I've done that here, too, but now I get to focus on details.

Possibilities:

The upstairs hallway is looking good, with grasscloth and a slew of black and white family photos in red frames on the accent wall.

I just need to upgrade the builder-grade flushmounts (not pictured!) to bring a bit more polish to the space.  While I love these, I don't want to blow the whole budget in one place.  So I'm thinking these:

Our kitchen cabinets have nickel pulls, and I would love to switch them out to black.  While hardware can get expensive, I just need 8 drawer pulls (no knobs) so it's manageable.  

I'm loving these:

Or these

(We have a $50 gift certificate at Restoration Hardware from our wedding that we never used!)

And then I think, why not something more like these?

Love them.

Those are both projects that are still a relatively low investment, and with a little more play I think about buying art or reupholstering my grandmothers chairs.

I am not usually an abstract art kind of a girl, but I love the pieces by my fellow blogger Jenny Andrews Anderson at My Favorite and My Best, and just fell down dead over this new piece (and love the story behind it):

Hot Air Balloon Fail

Here are my Nonny's chairs:

The fabric is a white quilted pattern and I love it, but they have seen better days.  I've always thought about a print like this:

Or this:

Sister Parish Burma

But realistically I would probably find something interesting and cheap at the local discount fabric warehouse.

Or, climbing up the scale of expense, there is always the stair runner.

What to do...what to do....