After a week of fabulous giveaways and turkey-eating, I thought it would be fun to kick back with a little tutorial! You can whip up this placemat in a jiffy for under $20! It’s sure to make your plates look fabulous without dishing out cash on an expensive charger set! The best part is that you can customize it to match your colors! Let’s get started, shall we? (Continue reading…)
Welcome to December: The whirlwind of holiday dinners, parties, family gatherings, cookie baking, and card sending. Christmas Cards. The thought of wrangling Steven and I up on a Sunday afternoon, getting the perfect pose, the right smile, and good lighting seems like a bear. Don’t even get me started on how expensive cards are to order! Every year I scroll through the endless pages of cards on Shutterfly or Snapfish, and decide to make my own cards—I’m not about to spend $1.50 on paper…I’m sorry, but that’s all it is! (Continue reading…)
Today is going to be a short and sweet tutorial on how to hem curtains. It’s a simple job, but a lot of people don’t know how to hem! Once you know how to do this, you’ll have the freedom to get those curtains on clearance that are just a little too long, or something that you love that only comes in extra long! So, lets get started!
When I was young, my mom received a beautiful cotton wreath from a friend that recently moved to the South. When she told us that she picked the cotton from her backyard to make the wreath, I about lost my mind and have been obsessed with this gorgeous, fluffy, perfectly colored plant ever since. I’ve found some fun ways to incorporate it into your home!
My backyard garden is so embarrassing! Wooden stakes leaning over the falling over wooden fence, posts are missing from my fight with our giant groundhog, tomatoes rotting on the ground—it’s a disaster! In my efforts to finally get the back yard cleaned up, I also learned that you should get your garden ready for winter every fall, so here are a few tips and tricks on how to protect your garden this winter.
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Today I am thrilled to present my most helpful online tool for budgeting and planing your basement renovation. It’s very simple yet incredibly helpful. It plans your renovation budget for you and even has a calculator for drywall, framing, flooring, and ceilings. I’m pretty pleased with this one, so let me show you how it works!
As you know, I’ve been hard at work on my basement. Looking back at my Basement Remodel post from back in March, I just want to pat sweet little Rachel on the head for being so ambitious…how cute! Apparently, somewhere between watching HGTV and having contractors do renovations for me, I forgot that THIS IS A HUGE PROJECT! That said, I’ve also been using my time to get some helpful tools together for you who are taking on a basement remodel: blog posts, tutorials, basement budgeting tools—all kinds of goodies! Let’s start with a recap, shall we?
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I believe it’s time for a quick, simple DIY!
This is one of my favorite outdoor DIYs so far because it’s quick, easy, cheap, and you have complete creative control! I give you: the patio rug.
We all have that one weird thing in our home: a doorbell speaker that belongs in Victorian England, built ins, intercom systems…old houses have weird stuff character! My nightmare: the telephone box. Today, we are going to take the stance of, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” I have found that by working with your home’s character, you preserve what makes it so special and create something one of a kind!
“That is the FIRST thing that goes!”
That was me, pointing at a whole bank of ivy this time last year when we were buying our first home. We couldn’t help but plan at the walkthrough—we knew this was the house for us! We got the house in the end, but the bank of ivy was certainly not the first, second, or even third thing to go! I finally got around to ripping it out this spring and realized that there is a system to pulling out ivy, especially mass amounts of invasive ivy. I thought I’d share with you, so that you don’t need to waste your time trying to figure it out (like I did)! So, here we go: the easiest way how to pull out an ivy bed.
The past few weeks have been quite an adventure: my dear uncle (an HVAC professional) came and helped us decipher some of the heating issues in our home, which looks like it’s going to be a lot more involved than we originally thought. This may or may not hold up our basement renovation plans since we are still working on a final game plan. But for now, I’m focusing all of my I-can’t-wait-for-summer energies on the exterior of our home, starting with the deck. Today I recovered some cushions on a café set that my grandmother gave to us.
It’s time for a new piece that I’m calling The Monthly Mirror! Each month, we are going to go through a very beautiful, very expensive space and help you get the look without breaking the bank. This could include product links, DIY ideas or even tutorials! I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. If you have a space that you’d love to replicate, send me a message or leave a comment on my Facebook page—maybe it will be the subject of next month’s Monthly Mirror!
Our first space is the infamous HGTV Dream Home for 2015. I hope, as I’m sure you all do, that I will win this year, but just in case I don’t, we’re going to try to achieve the look of the Dream Home’s Great Room in our humble living rooms…let’s get started!
