LOFT-y Goals!

So, OOPSIE!
It's been over three months since I've updated the blog with all of our home happenings!  And boy, are there lots!

We are coming up on our ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of being homeowners!  I seriously can't believe how quickly a year goes by!  And, we've been busy!  Naturally right now, we have Reds baseball happening so that pretty much consumes our time. But, we try to keep busy with house projects and such.  And, we have several going on right now, and more that are finished.

And one of those finished projects is the loft!

We ADORE our loft.  We love the gigantic space we have up there!  The plan has always been to make that into a "travel" themed area, as we LOVE LOVE LOVE to travel and have quite a few mementos from our travels so far.

A few blog posts ago, A Pop Of Color, I showed off some of the painting that we had done in the house.  That was the morning room, the "mud room", the foyer wall, the loft wall, and the basement {red}.

Here's a refresher of what the loft wall DID look like:

And now for the travel theme!

All of my internet/Pinterest browsing landed me on this super amazing and GIGANTIC world map {click it}!  The measurements were perfect for this super huge wall.  I asked for it for Christmas, and Santa thought I deserved it!

I'll tell you this:  I'll never ever ever do wallpaper again, hahaha! That's what this was.  4 HUGE panels of wallpaper.  I love the finished product, but nope. No more wallpaper.

Our wall is like 14-something feet long, and 8 feet high.

I never measured the HEIGHT of the wall and assumed it was larger than that.

The map measures 12 feet long and 98 inches (or 8.2 feet) high.  OOPSIE!

I also didn't take the baseboards into account.

So, when we put this gigantic world map up, we had to trim several inches to make it fit the wall.  It's by no means perfect, but hey.  I love it.

Check out some of the photos!

An idea of how big the panels were.  There were 4 total! 

All put together!  Tape holding some spots up just so it could dry.

All finished! Looking at the finished product from our bedroom door.

Finished product!  Looking from the loft windows towards the map/wall

Looking straight on (standing at the opposite wall)

It's amazing, right?!?

So my thought with this space:  I want some kind of display shelves to go up against this map to display all of our mementos and such (monument statues, shot glasses, books, etc).  I got SUPER lucky that IKEA had just what I wanted, and they put it on sale! Stack that with a coupon they had for $25 off of a purchase of $150 or more, and we struck gold!!

I wanted the Kallax shelves to go in front of the map.  I knew I'd need 2 of these based on measurements.  This is the one I wanted: IKEA Kallax Shelf

But, on one of our last trips to IKEA, we both agreed that we loved this particular shelf, also a Kallax, just a bit different:  http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60294622/

We have one of these in the kitchen area that holds cook books, some kitchen stuff (crock pot, misc. plates and wine) as well as a few other odds and ends.  So when we saw that they made this one in white, we knew this was the shelf we'd want in the loft!

So they were on sale for $20 off each! And we had the coupon for $25 off!  We got two of these for just a little over the price of one regular one :-)

And here's what it looks like up against the map!

Sorry for the weird angle!  It's hard to get the WHOLE wall in a photo!

And here's some photos of the decorations we have so far.  We THOUGHT we had tons, which we really do, but we just need to go on more trips and get more goodies!!!

And no blog post is complete without a Crosley appearance!  Cody doesn't like being in front of the camera.  And while I was building the shelves, Crosley was "helping" {along with his hedgehog, haha}.

So, that wall is finished for now!  My daddy is sending up some of his furniture in the next month or so that will go on the opposite wall of this.  We also have some stuff to hang up, and walls to paint in the rest of the loft.  We are going with a lighter gray for the rest of this area, as well as the house.

But seriously. I just LOVE LOVE LOVE how this space has turned out!  Our full bath at the top of the stairs is also travel themed.  We'll be painting that room soon as well, so I will be able to show that off!

I'll be posting more later! We have a few other completed projects that I can't wait to show off! I know most of y'all follow me on Facebook or Instagram, so this is nothing new.... but I had to document it!