All in Household
I sit and wonder how I let our playroom become such a disaster so often. Brad reminds me we wanted this playroom so the mess was somewhere else. But when I can’t walk in the room without stepping on a toy, it becomes frustrating. Especially since it is partially my craft room too. And it was also storage for some attic stuff while we converted the attic to a closet.
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!
Back in January, we decided to try getting our groceries delivered by Walmart. In doing so, we signed up for the free trial of Walmart+. The trial lasted 2 weeks, and you could take advantage of all the perks during that time. To date, we have only taken advantage of 2 of the 4 offered perks. After the 2 weeks, we decided to continue by signing up for the yearly subscription. It cost $98. For the entire year you received free grocery delivery, free next day delivery on most items from Walmart.com, discount on gas at Walmart and Sam’s Club, and the ability to use the scan and go feature in the app at Walmart stores. Check out my review of the service below!
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.
A few weeks ago, I saw another blogger post about making a holiday basket for Valentine’s Day. She intends to change it for each holiday. It includes plates, napkins, cups, etc. Basically all the things related to that holiday that you could make fit. I decided to recreate it myself using our things. I always have cute holiday plates and napkins, but no where to really display them. So now the problem is solved!
I thought it might be fun to take a look back on last year through some pictures. Sure, it was one heck of a year, but we made the best of it. We spent a LOT of time together as a family, and we did come out with a lot of great memories, even if they were not the memories we expected to make! Follow along below!
Our front yard landscaping needed some work after we moved in. There were way too many plants in too small of an area. Then there were just a lot of plants we didn’t love. A lot of these photos are from late spring and early fall. We intend to do more work this spring too. We basically removed a lot of the extra plants along with the plants we didn’t care for. I also did some pressure washing on the front stairs which made a drastic difference. Checkout the before and after below!
With 2020 being such a depressing year, we started decorating for Christmas as soon as Halloween was over. We tried to decorate as much as we could and enjoy it all as long as possible. Even though COVID has happened, we still managed to stay busy this holiday season. Follow along 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.
So to continue on with our quarantine projects, we decided to do a slight makeover with our guest bedroom. In the next year or two, it will look even more different, but for now this is it.
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!
This year I started using a daily Simplified planner for all of my day to day activities instead of The Happy Planner I have used in the past. Being a little over a week in, I have really liked the planner itself. I think it will become exceptionally helpful once Melody is in school. My big dilemma was now meal planning. There is a note section in the daily planner, but I found myself using it for other things and not having the room for meals. I thought about the weekly notepad I bought, but it still didn’t provide me quite enough space. One week while doing my grocery pickup, I was able to snag a weekly Simplified planner at Walmart. This is NOT a signature planner like the one I bought directly through Emily Ley. It was 1/5 of the price and not quite as nice as the other, but it provides me the space I was hoping for.
July has been full of a lot of outside time at the pool and mainly inside time beyond that! It has been a hot month compared to the milder temperatures in May and June. We have tried to make the most of the last full month before school starts!
Prior to this year, I have been using “The Happy Planner” (2018 and 2019). I have used it for many, many years. However, I started following Emily Ley about two years ago. I became really intrigued with her planners and how pretty they were and their size. Earlier this year, she offered her teacher planners for only $10 so I bought one to use starting in March until July. I really fell in love with the quality of this planner and ended up deciding to purchase one during the launch back in April.
So I made this door hanger many, many moons ago, ha. But it is super easy and was a gift for a fellow coworker. She actually hung it inside the office, so there are many uses for this cute burlap door hanger!
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 May was a busy and fast month for us! It is always a super busy time because of all the birthdays, anniversaries, dance events, school events, etc. While we didn’t have quite as much, it was still a lot when we have done no real socializing in many weeks, ha! Check out all the fun we had below!
