Neighbor's Yard Waste = Lovely Home Decor!

This is my kitchen. We've lived in this house for almost 9 years now, and to be exact, it's the 4th incarnation of our kitchen. It's not that I'm obsessed with redecorating....it's just that the kitchen was ugly when we moved in, so it had to go immediately. Then we had a nice kitchen for about 7 years and I just got sick of it. Kitchen #3 was a very unfortunate decorating mistake that looked great in my head (bright green, terra cotta & watermelon paints in a sort of "Fiesta Kitchen!" theme), but did not translate well to reality. So after 6 months of Ugly Kitchen, calm beachy kitchen was born. And you get to hear all about it.

The house is like 50 or 60 years old, so the kitchen has soffits above the cabinets. I liked the paint color we picked, but those big empty soffits were mocking me, so I had to put something up there. Since I'm not a senior citizen, hanging plates and baskets was out, and I had never actually seen any other decorations used for such a thing.

But one day, inspiration hit. I wanted it to look beachy, and what could be more beachy than scraggly branches? (Somehow that made sense at the time.) So I went to a friend's house, hacked down her grapevine (it was fall, so it was all good) and brought all the branches back. I laid them down in the backyard on some newspapers and spray painted them mostly white. I wanted some of the natural color to show through, so they're not crazy fake white. If you don't have a friend with extra vines growing in her garden, I think most craft stores sell grapevines.

Then I pounded nails into the soffits every 12-24 inches, depending on where the branches bent. I wired them, one by one, on to the nails, just using regular thin wire that you'd get at Ace. I just kept layering them and wiring them to the nails until it resembled something Martha might make. If you really look you can barely see the wires, but the nails are completely covered up because I wired a few branches in front of each one. By the way, no need to go crazy with the nails...grapevine branches weight almost nothing, so it doesn't take much to hold them up there.