Tag: home decor

Odds & Ends, vol. 4: Autumn Reads and an Easy Home Styling Hack

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Autumn Reads

This time of year always makes me want to read The Night Circus. It’s one of my absolute favorite books, especially this time of year. It’s in my top 3 all-time favorite books and is one of very few that I’ve taken the time to re-read. (Also great for fall: Caraval, Harry Potter, Practical Magic, Bread & Wine (pictured above), and Ninth House.)

An Easy Home Styling Hack

This is the easiest way to make all those random dresser-top things look nicer. (1) Get a nice looking hardcover book or two. (2) Line everything up. That’s it – I recently tried this with my dresser and think it made a big difference! Look at this before and after:

Recent Buys

Target has had some surprisingly great workout clothes recently! I’ve been working out much more often and found that I needed some new things so I wasn’t having to do laundry every other day. A few recent buys have been this workout tee (nice fit, good quality) and this tank top (cute pattern and good fabric, but runs big).

Master Bedroom Inspiration

This master bedroom by Studio McGee is so good! It’s been a major inspiration for our master bedroom refresh. I almost bought this very similar (but much cheaper) bed from Target for our bedroom, but we ended up not using it since it needs a box spring.

An Easy Meal Idea

Grill chicken for dinner and made extra to add to a salad or eat for lunch the next day. (Cold grilled chicken is one of my favorite lunches – which may sound weird but it’s delicious.) A simple but tasty marinade we’ve been using is olive oil + salt and pepper + jerk seasoning + lemon juice. It’s great with hummus and pita for lunch or dinner!

Life Lately

Nothing very new here! Jamie still runs around and talks a lot, and he is at a very fun age where he loves to “help” us work on the house. We’ve been (slowly) working on a few fun home projects; our powder bathroom is starting to take shape after a long leak-related hiatus, our upstairs linen closet has nice new matching baskets, and we rearranged our living room!

An Easy Update: Our Painted Kitchen Door

Michelle3 Comments
Photo of a muted green painted door with brass hardware: Jungle Camouflage by Behr.

When we bought our home, we knew that a kitchen renovation would be in our future. I originally had dreams of painting the cabinets, since I knew we wouldn’t be replacing them for a few years. However, they’re metal cabinets with a plastic-y wood veneer on top, so I knew they wouldn’t hold paint well. Instead, we decided to focus on more permanent changes for our “phase one” update.

Since buying our home, we’ve replaced the floors, primed all the walls, opened up the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, built a brand-new pantry (sans doors for now), replaced the light fixture, added new appliances, and – most recently – painted the door. New cabinets and counters are in our future, but we’ve totally transformed the room without even touching them yet!

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Our 1 Year House Update

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For those of you who haven’t been following along, Scott and I purchased our first home almost exactly 1 year ago! Today, I’m sharing a bunch of before and after photos (the good, the bad, and the still-very-much-in-progress). This post is going to be a little bit of a doozy, so I’m just going to jump right into things!

Since our previous house progress post back in November, we’ve gotten quite a few things done! We finished and sealed all our Pergo floors downstairs, started working on our baseboards, replaced our furnace and a/c system (just in time for summer!), completed the nursery, had our sagging garage wall fixed, and added lots of furniture and decor!

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