Putting In A Pool: The Process, The Cost, and All The Before & After Photos

It’s been a full year in the making, but OUR POOL IS DONE*! Here’s where I imagine someone saying “and the crowd goes wiiiiild” (and the crowd, in this case, is the five members of our household – including Burger shaking a tiny pom-pom). Today we’ve got one HUGE post full of info about the entire process, the budget, and, of course, the finished result....

5w

Before & After Photos: 14 Months In!

Note: This post was born from an updated Before & After page that we heard people were having trouble finding (since it wasn’t at the top of our blog feed). So here it is, forever immortalized as a chronological post. And now, since we’ll continue to update our Before & After page over time, we have this post frozen in time, which is nice to...

Jul 2021

Building An Easy Privacy Trellis (With 2 Pieces Of Wood + 1 Planter Box)

BRB, just changing the name of this blog to “Solving Problems With Plants.” And I know we promised a huge pool post, but the pool is still very much in progress. Hopefully it’ll be done next month and we can write one big breakdown with approximately 473 photos. But back to how plants can not only hide ugly stuff, they can also offer some pretty great...

Jun 2021

A Simple DIY Outdoor Plant Shelf To Disguise Ugly Utility Boxes

When we shared pictures of our front porch last fall, we said that our decorating strategy out here was basically “plants and more plants.” It helps visually connect the porch to all of the greenery surrounding our house and – as we’ll show you today – it’s also helping us hide some less-than-pretty parts of this outdoor area. Let’s call them wall warts....

Apr 2021

Our Bedroom Ten Months In (Houston, We Have A Closet!)

Long story short, instead of having 8 doors that lead outside in our bedroom (yes, we really had that many), we now have 6. And spoiler alert: it’s still plenty. We really just use the middle set along this huge wall of doors to go in and out, but the view and the light that the other doors let in is truly a room-making detail. We love the view in here...

Mar 2021

How We Created A Cozy Fire Pit Area In Our Formerly Boring Side Yard

We’ve been enjoying this fire pit hangout spot for months now, but it hasn’t been on the blog… until today. This is basically a lesson in how a fence can make a HUGE difference in defining an area, which can lead to adding some simple outdoor furnishings (in this case, it was four adirondak chairs and a fire pit – which hit the ground and instantly...

Feb 2021

How To Hang An Outdoor Daybed (On Video!)

Last week we shared how we built the DIY outdoor hanging daybed that we installed on our front porch. And as promised, I’m back to share how we hung it since, if you’re like me, hanging things that are meant to support the full weight of a human body (or two!) can make you a little nervous. It was actually extremely easy to do. So easy that we did...

Feb 2021

How To Build An Outdoor Hanging Daybed

Back in October we mentioned our plans to add a hanging daybed to the covered portion of our front porch and our entire family couldn’t be more excited that it’s finally done. Hanging daybeds like this are super popular in our area, and we’ve always had a soft spot for them. Is there anything better than reading/napping outside on a lazy Saturday...

Jan 2021

A Loveseat For The Sitting Room

A bunch of you got a sneak peek at this change thanks to Instagram Stories right after the holidays, but here’s a quick update about the new loveseat we got and what the sitting room is looking like these days. We got the loveseat on Overstock, and of course now it’s out of stock – but I did find it here and here in the darker color (ours is the “light...

Jan 2021

Updating A Covered Porch With Floor Paint & A Hanging Tent

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about living here, it’s that we do a ton of living outside. Between each at-home learning break the kids are out there running around, we make s’mores at our fire pit every week or so, we sit on our front porch and watch the neighborhood dogs go by, and we often eat or hang out on the second-floor deck (we even work...

Jan 2021