decorating
Building In Our Fridge: The Reveal
It’s reveal day! We’ve been working on building in our fridge and customizing it to make it look panel-ready(ish) and now I get to show you how it looks. It does make me a little insecure to release these photos into the wild because I know this is just one step in a multi-step process of making over our kitchen. There is still more to come as time and budgets allow. I hope you enjoy seeing a transformation over time because that’s what happening here. Here’s the original before photo of the refrigerator. Try to contain your jealousy. Fast forward a few years and we removed some wallpaper, painted, and…
Make A Magnetic Bulletin Board With Sheet Metal
I prefer to test out our DIY creations before I share them on the blog and the magnetic bulletin board we made with sheet metal is no exception. It is the second bulletin board we made for our Carriage House Gym and we have put this magnetic bulletin board through its paces to see how it will hold up. If it can survive being hung in a well-used gym with no heating or cooling and some moisture issues (humidity, not sweat – but a little of that too), it can survive your house or business. Why did we make magnetic bulletin board instead of a cork board? First, they are…
Winter Wreath Ideas To Get You Through To Spring
Editor’s Note: The first part of this blog post is a reshare of an idea from two years ago. The end of the blog post has a bunch of winter wreath ideas that I adored and you might too. Have you ever transitioned your holiday wreath to a winter wreath for the months of January and February? By transition, I don’t mean leaving the holiday wreath in all of its festive splendor up. Ha! Although, if that makes you happy, you do you! This year after the holidays I wasn’t quite ready to take down all of my holiday greenery, especially my wreath over the dining room fireplace. This was…
Wallpapered Stairwell – Before and After
I have the most dramatic makeover to share with you – a wallpapered stairwell with the most disturbing before photos. Disturbing might be the wrong description. Gross? Jarring to the senses? Discordant with the rest of the house? Not a place you want to be? Any way you want to wordsmith it, this stairwell had some negative juju and we lived with it for five and a half years. It’s amazing how long you can live with a space when there’s a door to keep the peeling lime green paint out of sight and mind. Why does a stairwell have a door? Two, actually. We’re overachievers. These stairs lead up…
Cardboard Gingerbread House Christmas Mantel
I don’t want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need…to do something with all of our cardboard recycling. So, I hummed myself a little Mariah Carey tune and decked out our dining room fireplace with a cardboard gingerbread house Christmas mantel. My Amazon boxes have never looked better. I’m not joking about those Amazon boxes, I used cardboard boxes and cereal boxes to make the gingerbread houses on my Christmas mantel. I cut out house shapes and then used a white paint pen to decorate the houses. A white colored pencil would have worked too. It was as easy and as tedious as that. It was…
How I Styled My Latest Thrift Store Finds: Part 8
Welcome to an infrequent, but delightful series where I show you how I styled my latest thrift store finds. It’s not always what you find, but how you use what you find that justifies bringing junk home. At least, that’s what I tell my husband. Pull up a chair and take a sip of your coffee because this is going to be fun! In no particular order, here are my latest thrift store finds and how I styled them. Wood Tray If you look closely at the below photo, there’s a wood gardening tray sitting on the bench. This isn’t technically a thrift store find. It was a free roadside…
4 Places I Use Outdoor Rugs Indoors
Fun fact about me, I have never used an outdoor rug on a deck or patio. However, I have and do use outdoor rugs indoors. I do this for one main reason…to bring the outdoors in. Kidding! I use outdoor rugs indoors in certain situations because they seem to be a little less precious than their counterparts and can withstand a tremendous amount of wear and tear. And, when something particularly gag-inducing happens (no, I don’t want to talk about it), the ability of these rugs to be cleaned with a pressure washer or hose is a godsend. Now, I know rugs of all types have their particular ways of…
The Prettiest Acorn Decor and Jewelry
Did you know that acorns and oak trees symbolize, among other things, growth, fresh starts, and potential? Yes, please to all three of those things. I’ve been crafting with acorns for ages. Maybe you have too? There’s just something about them that is so compelling for the fall season. I found some of the prettiest acorn decor and jewelry to share with you today. Maybe this will inspire your fall decorating and holiday gifting. Or maybe, like me, you’ll come away with another idea for something fun you can make with acorns! Let the inspiration begin! Acorn Bells | Etsy A combination of bells and acorns in a rustic patina?…
Fall Front Porch And The Funny Place I Buy Mums
Can we talk restraint? Restraint is experiencing the calendar flip from August to September and knowing you can’t decorate your fall front porch yet because Mother Nature didn’t get the “it’s fall y’all” memo and it is still 85 degrees Fahrenheit outside. So what do you do instead? You console yourself with an apple cider donut (or two, I won’t judge) while you wait for the weather to catch up to the commercialized hype of our existence. I waited 25 days. Twenty five! There are no prizes for this sort of restraint. I know. I checked. Some of you wise ones might say the prize is that the mums I…
A Haint Blue Porch Ceiling Of My Own
Why did I wait so long to paint my front porch ceiling haint blue? No, really. Why? If I had known what joy this simple change of a haint blue porch ceiling would bring me, it would have been much higher on the priority list. Maybe not higher than replacing rotten siding, but higher than planting those boxwoods that may or may not be growing. Here’s how our porch looked in the fall of 2023. Perfectly delightful. Nothing wrong with it. I love, then and now, sitting out here with a drink in the early evenings and watching the world go by. Pictured below is almost the same view now.…
