The Hive Christmas Tour 2015-Family Room and Entryway

Hello friends!  Welcome back to our Hive Christmas Home Tour 2015.  Today I'm sharing our entry way and family room.  Our home has a very open floor plan so the entry way, family room, and kitchen are all open to each other as you can see by the pictures.  For these rooms I basically stay with the traditional Christmas color scheme of red and green.  

One of my favorite things is our garland on the stairs.  We use this garland to display the Christmas cards we get from family and friends.  We love getting Christmas cards each year!  This is a simple way to display them so that they are easily looked at by even the smallest member of our family.  He loves to recognize loved ones in the pictures.

Our tree has spinning ornaments that are fun. Check out my Instagram feed to see them in action!  Notice the lack of presents under the tree.  I'm so behind this year!  I better get wrapping!

I love to use Christmas books as decor. 

Tomorrow I'm sharing our front room decor.  This is where I change it up a little bit and go with a more colorful decorating scheme.  I also can't wait to share one of my favorite collections with you.  

Mantel Decor

Happy Monday friends!  Hope you all had a lovely weekend.  It's starting to feel like fall around here and I am getting anxious to start decorating!  I wanted to take a few pictures of my current decor before I completely change things for the next few months.  Starting the first part of September I put away most of my basic decor staples around the Hive and they don't come back until the Holidays are over in January.

I haven't shared my mantel yet, so I wanted to do that today.  I'm still not sure if I did the right thing by painting it white when we remodeled.  It used to be  just stained dark wood, but I really wanted a white mantel. It turned out to be such a stark contrast to the rock, I'm really having a hard time getting used to it.  I've decided to keep it white for a while and see if it grows on me. 

Two side notes about the above picture.  I waited all evening for the perfect light to shoot the mantle.  It can't be too sunny or the windows make it impossible to get a good shot.  I took the shot I needed at the perfect time and then as I was uploading it to the computer later that evening I realized that Baby Bumblebee had pulled out the top metal bar of the fireplace leaving a huge gap in the photo.  By the time I realized this it was to late to take another shot, the sun was gone. So here it is.  I'm just keeping it real and leaving the broken fireplace for everyone to see.:) Also, just for fun, can you find my heart shaped rock?  I have a big heart shaped rock in my fireplace.  See if you can find it.  

I love my metal "L"!  It's such a fun accent, rustic and whimsical!

This photo turned out to be one of my favorite things.  I had the photo actually printed on wood.  If you look really closely, you can see the wood grain at the top of the photo where the sky is.  I love how it gives the photo a soft glow and it has a rustic quality to it.

My dad, who I've mentioned before is a talented wood crafter, made the wooden star for me.  He used wood from an old turquoise shed that was being torn down.  The color was perfect for me. The white vintage wooden window pane is from my dad's house, a old bungalow that he has restored.

Books are always a great way to add a little color and texture to a space and they were the perfect thing to finish off my mantle.  Baby Bumblebee is obsessed with letters and while he and his grandma were on a walk, they found the "J" that I used for a bookend above.  He insisted on bringing it home to me.  My little guy knows a good find when he sees it.