All tagged House
We have wanted a nice coffee bar for some time. And once we bought our current house, we had the perfect spot. However, we just couldn’t find the perfect one for the right price. One trip at Hobby Lobby, I saw one I loved. Brad and I measured it, and it would fit perfectly in our kitchen space, After drop off one day, Brad and I headed to Hobby Lobby and bought it!
Back in early 2021, we renovated our kitchen. We added a backsplash, lowered the bar counter, got a new sink and faucet, and added under cabinet lighting. We knew we would eventually need new appliances, but we were not in a rush to get them. However, we were having some small issues with our dishwasher, and I was desperate for a fridge with a water dispenser. After the stimulus check back in March of 2021, we decided to start researching new appliances.
I have wanted to try a meal delivery service for quite some time. My problem has been the overall cost, lack meal options that both Brad and I both like, and delivery day. Ideally I would like something that could delivery on a Monday so we can eat on it all week, but that has been near impossible to find. One day while listening to a podcast, I heard about Green Chef. The meal option sounded good, and they delivered on Wednesdays. Price was not great, but I did have a decent discount to at least make it reasonable to try.
At the beginning of the summer, we made a bucket list of items we wanted to try and accomplish during Melody’s last summer before kindergarten. I wanted to share an update to how much we really accomplished before she started school earlier this month!
Something we have struggled with in both of our homes is our lack of attic space. More specifically our lack of storage space. And while we actually have tons of attic space in our current house, it is not super or easily accessible. One space that was extremely accessible was a space off of Brad’s office. There was a lot of space, but it just wasn’t utilized very well. There were no floors, and it would get really, really hot in there. So after some talk with my dad, we decided to convert that space into a storage closet that has heating and cooling. It took us almost four months, but we now have a great space to store those things we do not want to get too cold or too hot.
Projects are never ending in our house. We literally finish one thing to start another. Most of the time we are planning our next project while working on the current one. Well our most recent completed project was Melody’s bathroom. It was actually our quickest and easiest project. It didn’t require a whole lot of work, so that helped. And we let Melody get super involved which she loved. It also ended up being the most Melody bathroom there is, ha.
Our kitchen is probably one of the most used rooms in our house. We don’t just use our kitchen for cooking. We spend time doing crafts, playing, dancing, planning, blogging, etc. I mean I could go on and on. As I am writing this post, I am sitting at our kitchen counter with my coffee, water, and computer. We LOVED our kitchen remodel at our old house. One of my biggest desire when searching for a new home back in 2019 was finding one with the perfect kitchen. Unfortunately you can’t get everything you want. But I was sure to find a kitchen that had potential. And ours did. The cabinets are beautiful (at least to us). Sure they are not the off-white cabinets we had before, but this have so much custom detailing and are a great color nonetheless. The layout was ideal too. I even had my double ovens I always wanted. But like I said, it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have a backsplash, and we once again had a very hightop bar. I also hated the faucet. So we knew when buying this house we would eventually re-do parts of the kitchen. We finally finished this renovation about 2 weeks ago, so I wanted to share with you all about it!
A few weeks ago or so, I saw a story on Instagram where someone had “stripped” their laundry. I decided it was worth a shot to try on both our towels and Melody’s towels. We have had our towels since we got married back in 2013, and Melody’s towels since 2016. I figured if nothing else, they may come out smelling a bit better overall. Check out my results below.
I love decorating for Christmas. Last year I even was able to buy my dream 12 foot tree for our foyer on clearance after Christmas. So today I wanted to share all of our decor this year! Next year we will need to add some new things as well as replace some of our current things (more on that below).
I bought these prints for Brad for our anniversary from Etsy. I actually only bought two, but the seller sent me a third (the Epcot one). I wanted to get them framed, but I was unsure of how Brad would want them framed or where he would want them. Late this summer Michael’s had a deal where you buy one wall frame, you got two free. So we bought some and had them framed!
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know I go to Publix weekly to check out their BOGOs. My back stock has been hard to store over the years. I usually just make it fit in the pantry and utilize the space at the top of my pantry for what won’t fit. But this makes finding stuff really hard. For sometime now, I have wanted to utilize our coat closet for some storage shelving. My original idea was to only use this for paper products, but I was able to get shelving tall enough to accommodate our food back stock too. I also blame The Home Edit for me finally doing this, ha.
In our new house, we have a massive master bedroom closet. And not just in size, but height. The shelves are so, so high I have to stand on my tippy toes to hang things. So the original layout of our closet kept all of my things on the bottom, and Brad took the top. But then I could never reach my purses, and my shoe situation was a mess. You can see the mess below!
So with all of our quarantine projects started to cause our garage to overflow because everything we decided not to keep ended up here. We already had little space due to all of the things we generally have and our lack of storage and shelving in the new garage.
I feel like all we have been doing the last three months has been renovations. Being at home we have constantly seen all the things we want to do, and thankfully we have had the resources to do them since we are home and not spending money as we usually do. One of the small things we wanted to do in our kitchen this year was to change the light fixture. We hope to do a big kitchen project next year, but our original kitchen light fixture was awful for how we used it. It was too low, and people would constantly hit their head on it. And we really loved our kitchen light fixtures in our previous house and wanted one for our new one. So we contacted our local light company and they delivered it to our car. Then we hired an electrician to install it since our ceilings are too tall for us to do it!
So last year we got a new patio set since our new house had an actual covered patio. We used it some but not as much as I would have liked since our yard was still a disaster, and we traveled a lot in the fall. Well even though we didn’t use it an incredible amount, it still had some mildew like stains on it. I tried numerous things to clean it until I found a perfect solution. Check it out below!
One of our big projects we planned this year was tackling our back yard. I love the room we have back there, and our covered back porch is AMAZING! However, the flower beds just were not our cup of tea. Don’t get me wrong, if this is your thing, great. It just isn’t ours. I would MUCH rather have that space for Melody to run free, and we plan to eventually use that space for a grilling area. Well since we have been home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had the time to really devote to doing things all around the house. And that includes our backyard! LOTS of pictures ahead!
One of Brad’s Christmas presents last year was a 3D printer. He has found lots of things to print, and I wanted to try and find something he could print as decor in our newly made over playroom/craft room. I searched and searched, but I could not find anything I loved. That is when we decided to just put letters on the wall and work with that. Brad came up with the letters himself, and we decided to spell out “CREATE” above my craft table since I do a lot of creating there.
One of the things we added to our playroom when we did a makeover to it last month was a dress-up storage solution. Melody just recently started getting into dressing up, but that is even still not super often. But she does have a few dresses from Halloween, last year’s dance recital, and a few gifts. So I wanted a better place to store them than on the back of a door. She also has lots of accessories like jewelry, wands, tutus, etc. So we needed room for that too. My best friend, Emily, recently came up with storage for her daughters dress up, and I decided to copy it! All you need a 9 cube storage system, a tension rod, and storage bins to fit the cubes if you want. Follow along below for the changes I made to the instructions.
So to start, I have used a purple crayon to show you what you do NOT want to install. Follow all the steps in the instruction manual unless noted below.
This week has been a really good week as far as school goes. Melody has actively participated, and we were also able to repurpose my old computer so that Melody can watch her videos on that without using mine. We accomplished a lot of crafts including some for Mother’s Day and a few “miss you” ones too. We took a break from dance on Thursday. I think Melody may be getting burned out doing it twice a week. So we may back down to the usual once a week and see if that helps her eagerness. Daddy was teacher one morning while I had a checkup at my doctor. We also had to rearrange things on Friday because we had to make an urgent trip to the local urgent care for Brad. A few stitches later and he is good. And we were able to finish the day up!
The playroom/bonus room/craft room has always been a difficult room for me. When we bought this house, we loved the size of this room. It offered us a space that both Melody and I could easily share between her toys and all of my crafting supplies. It even has a nice big closet with shelving installed. Well once we finally moved in and got everything up there, I realized we have a LOT of toys and we are lacking in the organization department when it comes to all of these toys. Christmas did not help this either! We did try to spread the toys between her bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the playroom. However, we found that doing this some rooms just were left out during playtime. So now she doesn’t have any toys in the kitchen (she has a cabinet with arts and crafts for downstairs), and we have reduced the number of toys in the living room and her bedroom. So now we have a majority of the toys upstairs in the playroom. But this has caused even more organizational issues.
