Decorating Adventures, Wine-o Style

What do you get when you mix a house in the Santa Barbara wine country with one crafty wife and one absent husband? Lots of quirky kitsch and a strange abundance of turquoise. 

As silly as it may be for me to decorate our house in Santa Ynez before we live there full-time, it's nearly impossible for me not to do it. It's like an addiction. It's like a wonderful blank canvas that I just want to keep painting and repainting (I recently rearranged bookshelves in the hallway 3 times and intend to do it probably 5-100 times more). I cannot help myself. And the fact that Mr. W isn't there to steer me makes it even worse.

For example, when I was up at the house a couple weeks ago with my sister and her daughters, I bought these AMAZING vintage lucite grapes at an antique store.

My sister and nieces (and Mr. W) thought I was crazy to pay $39 for these suckers, but look at how much something comparable sold for on One Kings Lane! I think I'm in the wrong business...

Once I had those gorgeous puppies up on the mantel, the little picture I had hanging above them just didn't cut it. So Friday night, I set out to create a new piece of art to put above the fireplace. I started by tracing some printed cardstock letters and sketching out a wine bottle.

It took for freaking ever to get the whole thing painted. Much longer than I anticipated. But I guess this is what people do when their husbands are in foreign countries. They sit on the couch drinking wine and painting and watching Say Yes to the Dress on Friday nights... Here's what it looked like when the job was done: 

It probably won't last up there once we move in permanently, but it makes for a fun conversation piece now. And it's a good indicator of life right now. I didn't have Mr. W with me this weekend as I painted molding, scrubbed floors with a toothbrush, and lined some more shelves in the kitchen with contact paper, but I did have a tall, dark, handsome bottle of Tobin James 5.

I also had a sort of neat "local" moment when I went to one of the local tasting rooms where we're members—it was my first time going in to pick up our wine club shipment instead of actually having it shipped to our house. I was excited to be able to just walk in, and was even more delighted when my favorite little wineista (Wine barista? What do you call tasting room servers?) greeted me by name and wished me well when I told her we were in the process of moving to the area. 

Hopefully living up there won't cause us to become to one-dimensional. Or wine-dimensional. Maybe it doesn't matter. Que Syrah, Syrah, right?