Why I'm Glad I Waited to Buy Hypoallergenic Carpet for My Kids Rooms

This tale of my epic search for loveable hypoallergenic carpet is brought to you by Mohawk Flooring Air.o Unified Soft Flooring.

When we bought our house two-and-a-half years ago, one of the things we wanted to replace immediately was the carpet (you can see all of the before pictures of the house here). It was sixteen years old, stained and stretched out - in two of the rooms the carpet was so stretched out that it formed giant ripples big enough that you could pinch!

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My Farmhouse Style Pantry Organization Makeover

There are few things nicer than a newly organized space. If you are looking for some pretty and practical farmhouse style pantry organization ideas, stick around! My pantry had been a hot mess and I needed to get it under control. After looking at some different pantry organization ideas on Pinterest, I had an idea of the direction I needed to go but I needed to execute it farmhouse style!

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Tips for Designing a Small Living Room / Dining Room Combo

This post is brought to you by Cost Plus World Market.

When we moved out of "The Townhouse" and into "The Farmhouse", we actually moved into a smaller home. Our four bedroom home is only about 1400 square feet and the great room where we spend most of our time serves as the living room, the dining room AND the corridor to the back yard. There's a lot going on in this 20' x 14.5' space!

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My Builder Grade Patio Makeover on a Budget

When we bought "The Farmhouse" two winters ago, we had big plans for the backyard. Last year we had our first summer here and the only change we made to the outdoors was digging a French drain to keep our sideyard from flooding. Necessary but not very exciting.

Now that the weather is warming up, I am ready to get outside and make my space more enjoyable! When Lowe's asked if I would like to partner with them to show you guys easy budget backyard makeover ideas I was all over it! I had big plans for an easy way to make my patio more livable and I really love how it turned out!

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Craft Room / Home Office Tour & Makeover Reveal

Like most full time professional bloggers, I work from home. What I call my studio is a combination of craft room, home office, photography studio and writer's office. That's a lot of things to cram into one room! I need a place to sit (or stand) and work on my computer as well as store my huge stockpile of craft supplies - plus a place to photograph or make videos of everything. 

The color scheme is light and bright - with a rainbow of colors (because "rainbow" IS my favorite color). Come take a look around!

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How to Make a "Be Creative" Pallet Sign

I'm about 90% of the way done with getting my home office / studio / craft room put together. If you'll recall from the "Great Big Before" tour the room looked like this:

And now (at least the wall by my desk) looks like this:

SO MUCH better! I removed the wallpaper border, painted the walls with my favorite zero-VOC paint from Colorhouse in the Bisque.02 color and got my desk put together. I'm planning on writing more about how I put my office together later - for now I want to teach you about my awesome sign.

It was inspired by a set of printables available form The Girl Creative and turned my vision into something more 3-D and more farmhousey. I love it above my desk! 

Here's how to make it:

Supplies

• 30" x 11.5" white pallet board
• 4" tall paper mache letters (the 'b' is 4" tall, the 'e' is 2.5" for reference)
• Cursive chipboard letters
• Martha Stewart Craft Paint in:
• Wedding Cake (white)
• Amaranth (pink)
• Habeñero (red)
• Marmalade (orange)
• Chamomile (yellow)
• Pea Shoot (green)
• Beach Glass (blue/green)
• Pond (blue)
• Purple Yam (purple)
• Gold metallic 
• Paint brushes
• Push Pins
• Yard stick
• High temp hot glue gun (this is the gun I use)
• Professional strength hot glue

Some of the links in my supply lists may be affiliate links. All of my supplies except the Martha Stewart Paint and Hot Glue Gun came from Craft Warehouse, a local craft chain in the Pacific Northwest.

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How to Paint a Ceiling - tips to do it the fastest, easiest way!

This post is brought to you by HomeRight.

Do you have a ceiling that needs paint and you are absolutely dreading the job? Do you need tips and tricks for how to paint your ceiling without killing your arms and getting paint everywhere? I am here to help! 

Welcome to ceiling painting 101!

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The Great Big Before: Meet the Farmhouse

Earlier this month, I did a full and proper tour of the Creative Green Living townhouse. We sold that house at the end of September and moved into our new house in the next town over in October. So while I've been calling the old house is "The Townhouse," the new house is being called "The Farmhouse." Not because it came with a farm (it didn't) but because I've got big plans for our backyard to turn into a microfarm. That and "modern farmhouse" is the aesthetic I'm going for in the makeovers and decor.

And boy-o-boy will there be makeovers!

We basically bought this house for two reasons:

1. I desperately wanted a yard
2. I need projects to work on and write about for the next few years. 

So, let's meet The Farmhouse shall we?

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My Suburban Townhouse Home Tour

Have you ever seen a blogger do a home tour? I totally have and you know what I thought?

I thought: I could never do one of those. 

Because the truth is that I'm a mom and I also work full time - and I have two tiny roommates (that would be my children) that make keeping my house tidy really really hard. So when you see pictures of a clean, neatly styled room in a post I wrote, it's probably because I cleaned that room only solely for the purpose of photographing it. In fact, a friend of mine came over one time and said "you know, from your website, you'd never know that your house actually looks like this." This, of course, meant like a 5 year old and a baby had "helped decorate" and several days of dishes were piled in my sink. Sigh.

But then we decided to sell our house

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How to Make a Chrysanthemum Style Sunburst Mirror with Plastic Spoons

I have been working on this project for what feels like forever. Perhaps because I started it a year ago and then hung it on my wall (unfinished) to get it out of the way. And then I finished it this week. Finally. Two weeks before I move to a totally new house. Ha!

The move was my incentive to finally get this thing finished. Since I worked so hard on my dining room makeover and since I'm moving away from said dining room in two weeks I figured I had better actually finish it if I want nice pictures, eh? Ain't no minute like the very last minute.

Supplies

• 2 sheets of foam core board
• 3 yard sticks
• White duck tape
• Straight pin
• Pencil
• Yarn
• Jig saw
• Hot glue gun
• "Pro Strength" hot glue sticks (got mine at Jo-Ann's)
• 14" mirror
• 300 plastic spoons
• Fiskars shop snips
• Pearl beads
• Beading string
• Krylon plastic fusion spray paint
• Masking tape
• 3M hanging strips

Some of the links in my supply lists may be affiliate links. 

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Tiny Bathroom Makeover on a Budget

There's nothing like a deadline to make you stop procrastinating, eh? When we bought our house more than 6 years ago, a really ugly cabinet that goes over the toilet came with the house. I vowed to get rid of it. And then one year passed. And two years. And three years. And, well, you get the picture. Cabinet was still there. Then last month, we decided we were really serious about selling our house so we needed to get serious about de-uglifying the bathroom!

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How to Make Washi Tape Monograms

When I made over my kids' bathroom, I wanted to replace the towel  bar with hooks they could hang their hooded towels on. To dress it up a bit, I wanted to put each child's initial over their hook. Plain monograms are so boring! I decided to dress them up a bit with washi tape to make them more fun!

The nice thing about these particular monograms is that they can stand up on their own (as pictured above) so you could also stand them on a shelf or dresser or hang them on the wall as part of a gallery display.

Supplies

• Paper Mache Letter from Darice
• White craft paint
• Paint brush
• Washi tape in colors that complement your space
• Mod Podge, Matte Finish

Some of the links in my supply lists may be affiliate links. 

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How to Organize Your Coat Closet

All of us have areas of our home that have a tendency to get out of hand. Maybe yours is behind a closed door. One of mine is unfortunately right by my front door. Until recently it looked like this:

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How to Organize Sippy Cups and Baby Bottles

If you're like me with little ones at home, you probably have your share of bottles and sippy cups. If you're not careful, it's easy for them to multiply like rabbits and get a bit out of control. Case in point?

Here is a before shot of the cabinet we store our baby bottles and sippy cups in. It's admittedly not as bad as it could be but still - it needed a lot of help. Especially since when things get crowded, my husband just starts shoving stuff place where is doesn't belong and the whole thing spirals out of control quickly. (ahem)

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How to Organize Your Bathroom Drawers in 30 Minutes or Less

There have been several articles online lately about "Pinterest Anxiety." If you have not read these articles (or do not suffer from this condition), Pinterest Anxiety is caused when moms spend lots of time trolling Pinterest, reading articles and tutorials and noticing that the photos of other families' homes look clean and immaculate.

Moms are left feeling a sense of inadequacy. How do these bloggers have time to be moms while writing blogs, taking photos and making crafts with their kids all while keeping an immaculate house? Here's the answer:

They Don't!

Okay, well maybe some of them do. I certainly don't. And I know plenty of bloggers who have the same struggle as me. The truth is before I took that picture that is making you all sad, I spent 20 minutes de-cluttering that portion of my house and shoving everything behind me. True story.

Want proof? This, my friends, is about to get really real. And really ugly. (if you're the person who sent me a message chastising me for how I let my oven get so dirty, you may want to find a new post to go read.)

Until two weeks ago this was my drawer in my master bathroom:

I did not have to open this drawer to photograph it - it is so full of crap that it won't even close!

Yikes!

Aside from being so full of stuff I can't even close it all the way, there are several problems. Among them, it had things in I had not used in more than a year, it was unorganized and in general it was just a really hot mess. And I let it be this way for a month or more (I know!) because the longer I let it sit, the more intimidating it became to tackle.

But I got my mojo on and took some pictures and 30 minutes later I had a WAY more organized drawer that not only closes all the way but now I can find things easily. Hallelujah!

Have a bathroom drawer that needs organizing? I'm here to help!

I'm going to walk to step-by-step through organizing your master bathroom drawers and free you up to do way more exciting things than try to figure out where the heck your tweezers are. Ready? Let's go!

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The Fastest Way to Paint Your Walls

This post is brought to you by HomeRight.

I let you guys know last month that I'm working on re-doing my dining room. My main goal has been to make my dining room a more enjoyable, usable space. I'm doing this by:

• Decluttering and increasing storage (see this post about how I turned an old dresser into a functional sideboard to provide pretty storage)
• Making the space feel lighter and brighter with:
• Fresh paint
• Lighter furniture
• Bright decorative accents

Here is a picture of my dining room before I got started:

Here is what it looks like now with fresh paint and my new sideboard for storage:

The paint changes it SO much! It feels like a completely different room and I'm not even done.

In tackling a big painting project like this I had two hugely important requirements:

• I had to do it fast. My husband hates when I want to do big DIY projects. Hates it. To help make it less painful, I needed to be able to do it while he was gone at work. In fact, I didn't even tell him ahead of time I was going to be painting the dining room.
• It had to be non-toxic. Traditional paint contains high levels of VOCs (VOC=volatile organic compounds). VOCs are toxins that are released into the air inside your home both while you are painting and for up to five years after the paint is dry. Luckily, there are now lots of options available for VOC free paints. These paints will be clearly labeled as being VOC free and usually cost a little more than high quality hardware store paint. Am I willing to spend a little extra money to help protect the health of my family? Absolutely!

To help make my project go quickly, I partnered with HomeRight to try some of their painting tools. 

The QuickPainter Edge Painter & The PaintStick EZ Twist

 

I loved both of these - especially the PaintStick EZ Twist. Using both these tools together made it possible for me to pull off a huge DIY project by myself in a lot less time than if I'd used traditional tools like tape, paint brushes and standard rollers.

To avoid VOCs, I used paint from a company called ECOS. Their paint is not only VOC free but non-toxic, too. This made it possible for me to do this whole project while six months pregnant without worrying about poisoning myself or my baby with toxic paint fumes. It also will protect my family's health for years to come because it will not continue to off-gas VOCs like traditional paint. It's just as beautiful as traditional paint.

Supplies for Fast Painting

• HomeRight QuickPainter Edge Painter
• HomeRight QuickPainter Corner Pad
• HomeRight EZ Twist PaintStick
• Extra Roller Cover
• Canvas Drop Cloth
• VOC free wall primer (I used this one from ECOS)
• VOC free paint (I used this eggshell finish paint from ECOS)
• Sponge
• Damp rags for cleaning up spills 
• Ladder or step stool as needed to reach top of walls
• 5 gallon bucket for cleaning up paint tools

Some of the links in my supply lists may be affiliate links. 

Did you notice that my supply list does NOT include traditional painting supplies like paint trays or edge tape? That's because I didn't need them!

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How I Transformed a Curbside Dresser into an Elegant Sideboard

This post is brought to you by Annie Sloan Unfolded.

My current project at home is upgrading my dining room one small project at a time. In addition to being rather unremarkable, one of the big issues we struggle with in our open plan townhome is lack of storage space.

Here is what the dining room looked like last month:

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How to Organize Under the Kitchen Sink

I'm currently on a de-cluttering and organizing binge. This, of course, might have everything to do with it. After living in our home for almost 5 years, we've got some stuff to clean out. And I'm loving the results! 

The truth is, I've always struggled with decluttering in part because I felt like if an item still had some apparent use left to it, it was wasteful to discard it. If you struggle with this as well, let me tell you what really helped me:

If I'm not actually using it, keeping it is just as wasteful as getting rid of it.

If does not matter if an item could be used again later. Or if I could use it once I run out the stuff I like. If I'm not actually going to use it, it is better to give it to someone who can, or to just get rid of it all together.

So, in the spirit of making it easier to know where to get started, I'm going to walk to step-by-step through organizing the cabinet under your kitchen sink. Ready? Let's go!

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