We finally have our finished photos from the beach place, and I’m so excited to share each room with you! First up is one of the easiest transformations — the fireplace. As you can see in the photos below, when we bought the place, the fireplace was pretty blah. It just wasn’t my style at all. And I felt like the black metal was pretty depressing, especially when compared to the beach decor. I was itching to do something . . . anything! Once we decided on the colors for the condo, I used the couch color and the…
We have this weird little room in the front of our house. We’ve never really known what to call it (except “the little room”), and a few years ago we began calling it “the conservatory” in a very high-brow accent. This very small room has stumped me for years. How could we use this space most efficiently? How could it be part of our living space? The previous owners used the room as an office. That never worked for us because it’s just so small. And we couldn’t add…
A few weeks ago I was chatting with the guy who works in the framing department at Michaels, and I complained about how expensive it is to get things framed (despite the frequent sales at Michaels). He leaned across the counter and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “You should buy frames off the shelf and spray paint the mats.” Light bulb moment!! What a fantastic idea. I’m happy to report that this hack works really well! I painted the mat on the lower left in the picture above (Deep Forest by Rustoleum), and the final result…
When we bought the beach condo, one of the worst spaces was the interior stairwell. It was dark and dingy, and the stairs were covered with blue, smelly carpet. It was depressing! And the previous owners had painted ivy down the hand rail. Under some circumstances I find that charming (we inherited a similar feature in the basement of our home, and I love it), but in this stairwell it felt like lipstick on a pig. We decided the stairwell was an easy place to bring in fun, crazy color. And we figured we’d save money by not…
We’ve been dreaming about this living room for years and working on it for about twelve months. You can follow our progress here and here and here. And, now, we’re finally finished! Here’s what the room looked like when we bought the house 6 years ago. There was a LOT of sea green! And the seating was awkward because the chairs were too far from the couch for a comfortable conversation. Plus there weren’t many places to set a drink, and there wasn’t any place to prop up your feet…
If you follow me on Instagram, you know that this past summer we sold a rural cabin we owned in West Virginia. We’d operated it as an Airbnb for about two years, and the business was going well. But the property required a lot of upkeep, and every time we needed someone like a plumber or an electrician, it was a huge pain to find someone to drive to such a rural location. We decided to switch things up and used the proceeds from the sale to buy a condo in Bethany Beach, Delaware. More on that later…
I mentioned a few months ago that we’ve been working on our basement (like all parts of our house, progress happens very slowly!). But now I think we’re finally done. We recently put the finishing touches on the desk area in the basement, and it feels whimsical and cozy. As a reminder, this is what the basement looked like when we bought the house. Ugh. After four years, lots and lots of bleach, new flooring, and new paint, the basement now looks like this. But the desk area was still a little sad. My parents added…
We’ve been dreaming for years about adding built-in bookcases on the main level of our house. Both of us love books, and we had boxes and boxes of books in our storage unit . . . just waiting for this project to be completed! And we specifically wanted to add the bookcases to the wall below because we wanted to balance the living room. Directly opposite these new bookcases are two big windows, a window seat, and a glass door to our sunporch. There’s a lot of energy on that other side of the room, and we needed…
Over a year ago, I told you that I planned to redo our living room. In the five years we’ve lived here, that room has never felt exactly right, and I wanted to make it shine. Plus, our house is small, so we need all of our spaces to be cozy and functional. Because that room never quite worked and was usually pretty dark, we almost never used it. When we bought the house, the room was painted sage green. The previous owners’ long sofa was against the wall, facing the fireplace, and two chairs flanked the…
When we renovated the second story of our house in late 2019, money got a little tight toward the end of the project. So when it was time to make one of the last purchases for the renovation — doors for my new closet — I bought very cheap bi-fold, louvered doors from Home Depot. I figured I’d be forced to do something creative . . . and now, more than two years later, I finally did it! I have to admit, this project took us months to complete! We started in early spring and finished a few weeks ago…