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living room reveal
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…
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building a cabin for Airbnb
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…
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diy: low-cost update to basement office
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…
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diy: creating built-in bookcases
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…
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living room: designing for traffic flow and conversation
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…
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adding caning to louvered closet doors
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.…
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replacing window screens
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been cleaning and fixing up our screened-in porch, a glorious spot that our whole family loves. It’s been neglected for a long time, so we have a lot of work to do! We need to fix the screens, clean out the cobwebs, fix the jalousie windows, and touch up…
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Last-minute Easter table
Easter is one of my favorite holidays, full of lots of family traditions. It’s a low-stress holiday for us (unlike Christmas!), plus the birds are singing and the flowers are blooming. We go to church in the morning and then come home for a leisurely, relaxed Sunday dinner. We pop some champagne, sit outside, and…
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from scary basement to cozy family room
Our basement has been such a LONG work in progress! When we moved into the house in August 2017, the basement floor was filled with asbestos and there was mold inside the walls. So unpleasant. We quickly paid for mold rehabilitation and for someone to cover the asbestos floors with a concrete-like substance that sealed…
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refinishing an outdoor patio table
Last year we bought a patio coffee table from Article. It was pretty expensive, and I was very disappointed when the finish quickly started to peel off the top of the table. We called Article several times, and they refused to refund our money, claiming that the table wasn’t intended for outdoor use (despite the…
