Our Family’s Puzzle of Life, and a $100 Personal Creations Giveaway
Thank you Personal Creations for sponsoring today’s hour-or-less home decor project and giveaway!
So, we’ve been in our house for almost exactly a year, now. And do you think I’ve been on the home decor bandwagon? Nope. Only in my head. I’ve been struggling to find something unique, something “us”… and something that will fill our living room area wall, without getting lost. My husband is a HUGE fan of decorating with photos. I think I’m lucky – we really don’t butt heads when it comes to decorating. But I just have a really hard time pulling off that “gallery wall” look. Can anyone else out there relate? Am I the only one who feels a little unskilled at balancing a photo gallery?
So when we saw Personal Creations’ Puzzle of Life pieces, we were both instantly excited. My husband LOVES personal. I love easy. And this is a project we could do together in under an hour that we will enjoy for a long time.
The way the Puzzle of Life works is you can start with a kit, or design your own interlocking pieces. We started with the wedding kit. It’s been 5 years since we got married (where does the time go??) but we don’t have any wedding photos up… which seems weird, when you consider that’s really the starting point of our family. So we embraced it! I hopped onto the Personal Creations site, and started personalizing.
The hardest part of designing is deciding! The actual personalization process is easy. The basic kit starts with 3 pieces, and I ordered a few more to add our kids into the mix, too. As our family celebrates more milestones, we can add more puzzle pieces – and move the existing ones around, too. There are 4 different pieces you can choose from to add to the top, bottom, or sides. We laid it out to double-check our placement before we began. The pieces interlock smoothly and perfectly, and the engraving and finish are beautiful! They’re handmade by Amish woodworkers. We chose the wood veneers for our puzzle, but it also comes in a painted black-and-white theme if that better fits your decor.
For now, to fill out the wall space, we placed one piece on top and one on the bottom. We can move the bottom piece up later, and add more of our kids’ achievements and celebrations near their pieces later on!
Kevin was enjoying going through the pieces. I knew he would. He was really excited about our puzzle.
That’s why when I placed our order, I decided to design a surprise piece for him. After all, since we were doing a wedding theme as our center piece – I thought adding a touch from our wedding would be sweet. I picked out a few of the lyrics from our wedding song (which is uncharacteristically sentimental of me, I know – don’t laugh!) and I added it to our order. He loved it! The only dilemma was – what photo do we put in there?
And he had a great idea – to every year, put our new anniversary photo in there. Our anniversary isn’t until September, though, and we didn’t have a great one from last year. So he surprised me right back, and while we were up north last weekend, he packed our honeymoon sweatshirts to take a new photo in the town where we honeymooned. :)
Yeah. He’s a keeper.
We have had so much fun not just putting up our living room decor, but also planning our future pieces. The kids’ first days at school. My first ArtPrize competition. Honoring the special members of our extended family. I think that’s the coolest part about it, we can update our puzzle pretty much until we run out of wall!
We’ve got quite a bit or space over the couch, and this was a great starting size. We also added some personalized vinyl to help fill in the space for now, as we get started with our puzzle.
Let me offer the following tips for designing your puzzle:
- Measure your space. You can design your puzzle to be a vertical or horizontal layout, but choose before you begin so that you can select the interlocking pieces that fit.
- With 4 different shapes to choose from, you can make any layout you like! Just be sure that the pieces you choose will fit together the way you envision. You don’t want to end up with 2 tabbed sides or two port sides if you’re planning to interlock them.
- Consider other add-ons for your gallery. Personal wall plaques, or vinyl like we chose can also make for a great touch.
- Start with a central theme for your design – wedding, family, whatever you like! But don’t feel limited, because you can always leave space for the future, and add pieces on for future family milestones.
- Design your puzzle on the Personal Creations site by filling out the personalization fields, and before you check out, enter code PCSM20 for 20% off your Personal Creations order!
Personal Creations is also offering a great giveaway to a Happy Hour Projects reader – a $100 gift card to get started on YOUR Puzzle of Life! US & Canadian readers may enter (void where prohibited) and fulfillment is by Personal Creations. Rafflecopter will walk you through how to get your entries in through July 24, 2014 at 11:59 pm EST. Good luck!
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Personal Creations.
