So I finally have the office reveal post finished, but I can't just dive in and show you the finished product without addressing the elephant in the room. Ummm....what he heck is life these days? I feel like I'm living in a history book. My kids school is canceled, Adam is working from home, everything is closed, I can't see my friends or family, and I'm on week three (Four? Seventeen?) of being at home with my kids. You would think these circumstances would lead to me cranking out the projects …
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Mudroom Reveal – Where Form Meets Function
IT'S MUDROOM REVEAL DAY!! Let's just skip the forced introductory paragraph and get right to the good stuff. Here she is!
I don't think I could love it more. It's so satisfying to have a blank space and a vision, and then watch that vision actually come to life!
From start to finish the mudroom remodel (makeover/finish out/whatever you want to call it) took us almost exactly six months. That definitely isn't a short amount of time, but I think it's realistic for a DIY family …
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Design Plans for our Farmhouse Laundry Room
I was almost finished writing my post about the painted shiplap in the laundry and mudroom when I realized I've never actually shared my plans for the laundry room. So let's back up and dive into that before forging ahead with the makeover.
As a reminder, here is the floorplan for the laundry room ...
About two years ago (when we were starting to design and build cabinets) Adam sketched out the plan for the laundry room. I can't find the paper anymore, but thankfully I posted it on …
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Installing Shiplap Over Drywall + Brick Flooring Samples
Progress on the mudroom and laundry room is well underway! The shiplap and trim are finished and I'm loving the way the room is headed.
As far as installing shiplap goes, this isn't our first go around. Adam and I added the same wall treatment to the kitchen and dining room back at the previous house, way back when before all planking was dubbed "shiplap". For that room we did a very budget friendly faux version out of strips of cheap plywood.
We installed the plywood planks right …
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Plans for our DIY Mudroom
The first project of 2018 is going to be the mudroom, and I don't think I could be more excited about it. I'm ready. I'm ready for some storage and organization, ready for something new and pretty, and mostly just ready to have another finished room in the house. As a reminder, here is what our mudroom looks like at this exact moment.
At first the plan was to custom build something like the below photos - six wooden lockers, built to take up the entire wall. They would have individual …
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2018 House Goals
I've never been big on setting New Year's resolutions. I don't like making commitments if I am not 100% certain I can stick to them, and New Years resolutions have like a 99% failure rate. Plus I figure that if you need to make a change in your life you should just do it, no need to wait until the new year. But 2017 felt particularly crazy, mostly because I'm the opposite of type A, lack a routine, and have four kids. The combo of those things led to an uphill battle all year, always REacting to …
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DIY Reclaimed Wood Ceiling (so cheap, so pretty)
I don't think I've been THIS excited about showing y'all a project in a long time. The reclaimed wood ceiling in our kitchen and dining room is finished and it is just SO GOOD.
It's cozy and warm and I just love it. The house feels so much less like an unfinished white box and more like the home I have always pictured in my head. Also, the whole thing only cost $322. That's a deal in my book.
A wood ceiling in the kitchen and dining room was on the "must have" list from the …
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The Reason We Have Sealed Concrete Floors
Whenever I post pictures of the inside of my house I get questions or comments about the concrete floor. I’ve never talked about it before, and just like most things there is a story behind it.
So why did we choose concrete floors for our new home? Was it because we love the look? Because they're indestructible and easy to clean? Budget friendly? No, no, and sorta.
The only reason we have sealed concrete floors in our new house is because we can’t afford to put wood …
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State of the House, 2017 – Bedrooms, Bathrooms and Loft
Alright, time for the final part of the 2017 house tour! I’ve already posted about the exterior, and the main living areas, so keep reading to see the bedrooms, bathrooms and the loft.
Let’s start with the loft...
There it is, truth...I bet you weren’t expecting to see a giant mess right off the bat were you?
The loft is the only thing upstairs (besides the attic) and it serves as the kids playroom. It’s perfect, because every single toy the kids own is up there and I can’t see any …
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State of the House, 2017 – Main Living Areas
Alright, who’s ready for an interior house tour? Fair warning, this is not some beautifully staged, perfect house tour that you find all over home blogs, this is a very unfinished and unpretty tour so you know exactly where the house stands. Today I’ll show you the main living areas (areas in red below), and in the next post we’ll do the bedrooms, bathrooms, and loft.
Just as a recap for any newbies, this is a custom home that my husband and I designed. We hired a builder to …
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Six Months of Landscaping
For the past six months the big project around here has been landscaping. Its been labor intensive and expensive, but the final product has been completely worth it. So let’s dig right in....here is our house in November of last year (at this point we had been living in it for about three months).
Our property is slightly sloped, so drainage is something we needed to address, and Adam and I also wanted a lawn. Real legitimate grass...not something that comes easy in hot, dry, …
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The State of the House, 2017 – The Exterior
I feel like I need to give y’all an honest-to-goodness overview of the whole house. The entire thing, not just the pretty parts that we have finished, or the parts we are currently working on, but the whole house in all its unfinished glory. So today I’m starting with the exterior, since blogging about that part is quite a bit less intimidating that blogging about the entire inside.
So here we go, this is what the house looks like right now, May 2017. I didn’t clean it up for the internet, I …
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Simple Faux Leaded Glass and Our Rustic Pantry Door
There's nothing better than character in a house. Old houses are unique and tell a story, and my goal is to make our new house look anything but new. I think the pantry door and transom accomplish that goal pretty well.
I bought the door from the antiques fair in Round Top a few years ago (not the failure of a trip I blogged about, but a previous one) and paid $80 for it. Even though the green on my cabinets and the green on the door don’t match (or maybe because they don't) it works …
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The Most Organized Pantry in the World
Okay, that title might be a biiit of a stretch, but either way...the pantry is complete! I posted the first part of the pantry redo months ago, and even though we finished a majority of it soon after I refused to post it until it was 100% complete. Adam and have a problem of only finishing things 90% of the way and moving onto the next project (I even wrote a post about it years ago) and I’m breaking the cycle.
So as a refresher, here was the before...
(Yes, my house is messy. It’s …
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Planning and Building a Pantry (Part I)
A few months ago Adam and I finished our master closet, which became the first finished room in the house. It was so organized and amazing that we decided to skip some of the bigger projects we had planned and instead pick another tiny room and finish it 100%. We debated doing a bathroom, the office, or the pantry, and eventually landed on the pantry.
The pantry is 3 ft by 7 ft and is situated under the stairs, which means one of the walls is shorter than the other. It’s a tiny little …
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Master Closet Reveal!
It’s master closet reveal day! I showed y’all the fully installed but empty closet over two months ago, then I had a baby, the holidays came, things got crazy, and the final reveal has been a long time coming.
First and foremost, I am so in love with it. I’m not usually one to gush over things, but I’m also not used to awesome organized spaces. It’s always a goal of mine, but it never really fully happens. Not only is the closet really pretty to look at, but it’s also extremely …
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Planning and Installing a Closet System
*This post is sponsored by EasyClosets...and by that I mean that I received the closet system for free in exchange for blog posts about the closet and my experience. All thoughts and opinions are 100% my own.*
When we bought our last house, the master closet had a single rod and shelf around the whole thing. From day one we planned to rip out that rod and build an actual closet system that utilized the space and gave us the storage we needed. A couple of months ago we sold our house after …
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The Search for a Vintage Farmhouse Sink
From the time I started sketching up our new house on graph paper nearly two years ago, I knew I wanted a vintage farmhouse sink for the kitchen. Not a modern apron front farmhouse sink that are popular today, but an antique one from the 20’s or 30’s. Those weren’t my only demands though, no...I also wanted it to have a single basin, high back, and double drainboards. I was basically searching for a needle in a haystack....a very expensive needle, as it turns out.
SOURCE - $2,695.00 + …
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Kitchen Progress – Dark green cabinets, a rustic wood countertop, and lighting
Last time I did an overall kitchen update we had just installed the cabinets and it looked like this....
Well now we have not only moved in, but I’ve painted the cabinets, we poured our concrete countertops, added a wood island top, bought appliances, and installed our island lighting.
First thing first, the cabinet color. I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how I went from wanting a light airy green to something dark and dramatic, and I have to say that I’m pretty pleased …
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A Corrugated Metal Ceiling
I know I keep talking about the hailstorm that hit earlier this year, but that dang hailstorm seems to have led to a lot of other things...like rustic beams instead of fake ones, a quick sale of our old house, and now a practically free metal ceiling in our living room.
Since day one Adam and I have planned to put a metal ceiling on the living room and master bedroom of our house. We have always loved the look, and we were so sure about it that we even had the sheetrock crew leave the ceiling …
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DIY Concrete Countertops, Part III – Sealing
If I’ve learned anything about DIY in the last 5.5 years of writing this blog, it’s that it’s all about the sealer. You could do the most awesome job ever on a project, and if you don’t seal it correctly it’s all for naught.
I knew I needed an amazing sealer for my concrete countertops, for three reasons....
Concrete is a porous material, so it’s susceptible to stains
Not only are our countertops concrete, but they are also white
I’m messy
So even though Z Counterform sent …
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