DIY wall decorations

We arrived in San Francisco with a crate full of necessities, including a bed, clothes and pots and pans. We promptly bought a couch, dish towels and a bike rack. We even built a kitchen counter. Then we bought a motorcycle, took a road trip and forgot all about the remaining home improvement projects. We haven't regretted skimping out on some of those projects (it's not hard to get by without a bed frame or a media cabinet). But some of our remaining tasks weren't so easy to forget, particularly those related to our dark and poorly decorated living room.

Our bedroom is purely functional with just a bed, dressers and our bikes. Our kitchen is beautiful. We have our handmade counter, our refinished table, a wine rack and photos. But as our kitchen, dining area and living room are one big space, it was hard to ignore the fact that the living room needed a few improvements. First of all, it had no lighting, and second, the huge wall over the TV was totally blank. We have one more poster we want to hang but it just looked lonely on the wall.

The photos in our kitchen.

Then a few weeks ago, as I was waiting for the ever unreliable and late MUNI to show up, I found an abandoned window frame / trellis sitting on the street. Ben let us take a detour on the way home to claim it before the garbagemen took it away, and it's been sitting on our porch as I pondered how to make use of it (see pinterest inspiration here). Last week I found some pretty, patterned paper at an arts and crafts store. Ben helped assemble everything and it came out even better than I had hoped!

Total cost: free trellis, $2 for the paper (err it was really $9 for paper because I couldn't decide which five pieces I liked best so I bought 10, but a more decisive person could easily avoid that additional cost).

Now our wall isn't empty, there's a beautiful splash of color in our living room and a new floor lamp arrived from Amazon. Our one remaining problem: how to light our kitchen counter. We considered LED lights under the top shelf, a small desk lamp on the top shelf, or a simple floor lamp next to it. Readers: Ideas? Suggestions?

- Steph