One old house. Two young people. Plenty to do.
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Guys, I did it. I broke out the sewing machine to make something for Clara’s third birthday. It’s a little tradition of ours to make her something instead of buying it since she gets a ton of store-bought presents from family and friends. I even used her big ol’ stash of monthly photo fabrics, which have also come in handy for making her a quilt, a table runner, a beanbag, and even a birthday banner (remember that epic battle of woman vs. sewing machine?). It all started when I saw these fabric tea bags on Pinterest and thought they’d be really fun for Clara’s play kitchen since she’s so into making food and pretending to eat it and have tea parties with her stuffed animals. And really, what’s a tea party without tea?...
read more at This Young House Posted 1 day 6 hours ago.
Yup, we finally called it. The old floral curtains couldn’t last another day. So we made a few jokes about Kim Kardashian’s Met ball dress and got ready to say goodbye. They looked pretty fancy, but they just weren’t our style, so it was time to take them down and make a nice little donate pile for Habitat for Humanity. The funny thing is that when we got up on chairs and lifted them down, we discovered that these babies were pinned and even screwed right into the window at times! Cracked us up. I mean, we’re no strangers to using fabric remnants and wood braces screwed into windowsills, but seeing white pushpins sticking out of the blue molding was pretty unexpected...
read more at This Young House Posted 2 days 6 hours ago.
Um where did April go? The shower-iest month seems like a distant memory by now, but it was filled with outdoor makeovers, bathroom updates, shades a plenty, and even a bit of rapping. So we’re taking a moment to appreciate all the things that we checked off of our list as a motivator to hopefully make the coming months just as productive. Oh and you can catch superlative recaps of the last 2+ years here (in 27 easily skimmed posts instead of nearly 900 long ones!). Plus, we’ve got a little clue about what’s happening next week in the mix below… Most Photogenic: Next Monday’s giveaway, which should make all of you fellow Instagram addicts pretty dang excited. Most Foolish: Us, for kicking off the month with a faux rap video in honor of April Fool’s...
read more at This Young House Posted 3 days 1 hour ago.
If we’ve made one thing clear about our new house, it’s that we’re not crazy about the trim colors… Somewhere between the Williamsburg Blue and the Muddy Mauve, our painting hands began to quiver with excitement. Or was that dread? Not sure. We reasoned that while all of the carpet was up and before the new hardwoods went down, we should take advantage of the can-get-painted subfloor and go ahead and tackle the upstairs trim. Correction: trim and doors. Sixteen doors to be exact… which we removed and de-hardwared first for easy painting. Attempting to quickly paint four bedrooms and closets worth of trim along with a long hallway plus nine windows (with tons o’ mullions) and the aforementioned sixteen doors seemed like a job that warranted a paint sprayer...
read more at This Young House Posted 3 days 5 hours ago.
Who smells smoke? Don’t panic, that’s just Clara’s dragon party, rollin’ into town (er, the internet?). Note: you can’t really smell this party through your computer, so if you smell smoke, please look into it. This year’s party was lower key than our last two (here’s her first birthday party, and her worm party from last year) and even though it was rainy and wet outside, eight kiddos and twelve adults jammed out inside. It was fun. And Clara made me cry. She’s just so big and sweet and hilarious and I’m the luckiest mom in the world. Plus, dragons. I mean if that’s not a trump card for a party, I’m not sure what is...
read more at This Young House Posted 4 days 6 hours ago.
***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** Our lucky random winner is… RLR (who jokes her wardrobe could use some modernizing, but says “seriously, I would love to do some work on our master suite”). Congrats! InStyle Modern sells modern furniture at prices that make it easier on your wallet to deck out your dining room with a full set of chairs or give your kitchen island an upgrade with a new trio of stools. And not only are they giving this week’s winner a $500 gift card, they’re offering up free ground shipping and a special 15% discount. Check out the details below… PRIZE: $500 to InStyle Modern TO ENTER: Comment on this post with the words “Modern Me” and tell us… BONUS QUESTION: … something in your life that could use some modernizing...
read more at This Young House Posted 5 days 1 hour ago.
Exciting times guys! Operation Ditch The Blue Trim is currently in progress! So while we sweat our way through un-blue-ing things on the second floor – that’s four bedrooms, a nice long hallway, and at least 10 doors – we thought it was high time we shared our master to-do list for the new house (and for anyone jonesing for trim-painting info/photos, we hope to finish up and be back with a full report for you on Wednesday). These posts came about when people asked how we organize all the stuff we have on our to-do list. We explained that we basically have one long run-on document that we update as we go. Folks kept asking us to share it and it turned out to be a good time for us since public proclamations help keep our momentum up, and crossing things off gives me a nice mom-buzz...
read more at This Young House Posted 5 days 6 hours ago.
Clara turned three on Tuesday (Threesday?) so we’ve spent the last few days marveling at this wonderful little lady before us and wondering where the heck the time went. And just like we did for her two previous birthdays, we marked the end of another 12 months by customizing the fabric backdrop for her photo project...
read more at This Young House Posted 1 week 1 day ago.
Let’s talk about wood, shall we? As we mentioned on Tuesday, we decided to go with solid oak hardwoods for the four bedrooms and the hallway upstairs since many rooms downstairs along with the stairs themselves have a nice medium toned oak already (pretty similar to the hardwoods in our first house that ended up being super dog/kid friendly). As for where to get it, first we looked on craigslist to see if anyone had a large quantity of something in the right tone/amount (no dice) and then we headed to Lumber Liquidators, since we’ve had luck with them when it came to buying hardwood floors for half of our first house back in 2007 and it’s also where we got the cork flooring for our kitchen in 2011...
read more at This Young House Posted 1 week 2 days ago.
It’s time for our monthly moment of thanks to the sponsors who make the other 30+ posts possible. Without them we might not have food on our tables or clothes on our backs (and hungry, naked blogging doesn’t make for good DIY morale). So feel free to check out some things that caught our eye this month, and peruse our usual round-up of discounts at the bottom of the post – plus a hint about Monday’s $500 giveaway! This “Splatter Stacks” print from Hoot Design Co...
read more at This Young House Posted 1 week 3 days ago.