I’ve lived in my new Arlington apartment for almost a month now—time really flies! Since I am working from home, I unpacked really quickly; it’s hard to have boxes all over the place and also focus on a million conference calls. I am glad I put in the effort since I feel really settled, and now that I’ve been living here for a bit, am dreaming up what I can do with the unfinished spaces in my apartment. In addition to unpacking quickly, one thing I also did the first weekend I lived here was hang all my artwork on the walls. I still have a lot of blank spaces and am excited to collect art I really love over time to fill those, but hanging the pieces I already have and love on my wall really made this place feel like home.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know one of my pieces of art is a framed piece of the wallpaper that famously lines The Beverly Hills Hotel—you can see it in this post. Framing wallpaper is one of my favorite decorating hacks. Wallpaper samples are usually pretty cheap and if you want to save even further, you can cut them down to a standard size to avoid the custom framing route. (We used to frame wallpaper for art all the time when I used to work at a real estate developer for this exact reason!) And, if you live in an apartment like me, it’s a great way to bring in wallpaper you love without permanently defacing your walls.

I’m sharing this hack today because if you follow me on Instagram, you know this story already, but I wanted to share it here—I framed a new piece of wallpaper for my new apartment, and it’s one that means very much to me: it’s a piece of wallpaper from the powder room in my grandma’s old house, as seen in the photos in this post!

This was the wallpaper my grandma had in her old house—the house she lived in for years and years, where my mom and her sisters grew up. We spent nearly every holiday there growing up and enjoyed long weeks in the summer there with all my cousins and aunts and uncles. When I was in high school, my grandma wrapped some of our birthday presents in this paper, so I knew she had some lying around and luckily had the foresight to ask her for a piece of it.

When I was cleaning out the drawers in my high school bedroom recently, I found it and finally had it framed a few weeks before I moved into my new place. I had it done in the Framebridge Mandalay frame without a mat, and I absolutely love how it turned out.

I’m so glad this hangs on my wall now—and whenever I walk by it, I think of so many happy memories!