Stained Beams and Engagement Party Ideas

I have spent the last 4 days staining the beams in our great room, you can see the before and after below. I used Minwax "Dark Walnut", it really brought out the true beauty of these 150 year old beams. 

We are going to lay plank boards on the top of the beams,  I am going to paint the planks white, I wanted a big contrast between the dark beams and the white planks. Sort of like in the picture below from 1900farmhouse.blogspot.com, except I think our planks will be a bit wider. 

Image from 1900farmhouse.blogspot.com

Neal finished up all the electrical on Saturday and we started hanging the drywall last night. As my son and husband hear me say quite often when we are making progress, I feel like "we are getting somewhere"!


I also wanted to show you some pictures of my sister's house. She put on an absolutely beautiful engagement party for my niece two weekends ago and I ran around with my camera snapping some shots before everyone arrived.

She lives in a turn of the century Victorian that she has impecably restored. I love the banner that she made and told her I wanted one ASAP:)

She had so many cute ideas for the party, and like I said I only had a minute to take some pictures so these are just some of them.

My sister is super duper talented, she had hand made signs and banners everywhere you looked.

The room she had the party in is absolutely beautiful and I plan to show you the whole thing one day. We clearly have different decorating styles, I don't know if there is a single white piece of furniture in her house actually. But we are both unceasingly obsessed with decorating and love seeing what the other one is currently working on and bouncing ideas off of each other.

Okay well it is back to staining for me, as I was typing this I noticed how lovely my hands look....they are black from the stain, not a good look:)