New Kitchen Hardware

Can you believe that we started building our house ten years ago this coming May?  

A lot has changed in home decor trends in 10 years.  As a blogger (Can I even call myself that anymore? Maybe I'll just stick with "someone interested in home decor that shares too much on the internet"), it's hard to stay content with your home.  It's hard to stay happy with your almost 10 year old choices while "everyone else" is moving on to new builds/different homes, gutting their 3 year old kitchens, etc

Total first world issues? Am I right? (I'm right.)

Stepping away from blogging has given me some perspective on enjoying our home.  By not continuously tearing it apart, I've come to appreciate how nice our home really is.  It's provided the perfect backdrop to start our family and make some wonderful lovey-dovey memories.

But (there's always a but, isn't there?), where's the line of contentment versus calming those twitchy things in your head that say "FIX ME. MAKE ME PRETTY."?

After a fairly difficult morning potty training our toddler, I spent nap time sipping iced coffee staring at our kitchen and everything wrong with it. (Normal people do this, right?)  Ugg. The cabinets don't go to the ceiling.  Ugg, our granite has that weird 4" backsplash lip.  Uggg, our island is bar height instead of counter height. Uggg, the hardware.

After I finished my coffee, I gave myself a pep talk. 

So what do you like about your kitchen?  Well, I like that's white and I still do really like the black granite.  I'd totally do a subway tile backsplash again.  Our kitchen is a great size.  It's perfect for entertaining/meal prep.  Beings I picked all of this out almost 10 years ago (when I was 25 and had zero clue what I was doing), I actually did fairly decent.

What would be something easy to check off your "uggg" list from above that might calm your twitchy brain that doesn't involve a gut job (because that would be expensive/wasteful/dumb)? Hmmm.  The cabinet height and island are things that are fixable but not exactly easy.  Hardware! Hardware I can do! (Nate was on board as long as I did all of the work myself. Mainly because he thought I wouldn't do it. I'LL SHOW YOU, HUSBAND!)

I spent the rest of nap time searching for new hardware.  My options were slightly limited because I wanted to work with my existing hardware holes. (I was afraid filling/painting holes would look cheap and messy.)

I settled on these pulls for the doors.

And these pulls for the drawers.

After they arrived, I spent the next two weeks installing them.  My lack of patience and short attention span limited me to about 4 per night but I did it all myself. (I'm pretty sure Nate thought it would take me a year to complete.)

Making one fairly small change to update our elderly kitchen has given me fresh perspective. 

Now if only I can figure out how to keep it this clean.  I want to blame the toddler, husband and/or dog but I'm the one that spilled an entire pot of pasta across the room last night. #makingmemories

I hope I've encouraged some of you to take a fresh perspective on your home.  Room updates don't have to be dramatic to make a huge impact. What's a small change that you could make to your home?

Other Christmas Scenes Around the House

Last week I shared our living room decked out for the holidays. Today I'll share a few other spots that got some holiday touches.  Our theme is slap lights, garland and wreaths on it. Boom. Christmas decorating done.

Let's start outside.  We need a few more lights.  Nate is sad that most of these strands are on their last leg. I'm happy because we can switch to warm lights!  The mixing of cool and warm makes me twitchy.

I bought a big strand of fresh garland and chopped it up and threw it all over the house. Our house smells amazing.  And there are pine needles everywhere. (Thanks goodness for the Roomba!)

Our dining room gets our family memories tree. I love it so much. There are ornaments from Nate and I's childhood, our wedding and now Clark's ornaments. It makes me so happy.  And sappy.

I always try to keep the decor to a minimum during the holidays because our kitchen takes a holiday baking beating and I don't need anything else in my way!  

Here's a large sneak peek of a project we completed this year in our basement.  I told you, nothing is safe from garland. 

Lastly, here's our tree all lit up at night. We're actually going to have to turn the house lights on again in January.

Did you get all of your decorating done? How about shopping? And baking?!?  I'm good to go except for the baking!

Holiday Home Tour 2017 (Living Room)

It's Christmas house tour time!

We've had our halls mostly decked since the weekend before Thanksgiving.  It's been our tradition for the past 5 years or so.  We travel for Thanksgiving so we decorate the Sunday before and just pretend it's not there until we leave mid-week (because who wants to overshadow Thanksgiving? Mmmm, pie.). And then we come home to a Winter wonderland!  

(Do you spy the dog looking for leftovers in Clark's booster seat?  Nothing but professional photos around these parts.)

Part of couch buying decision making process included making sure we had room our Christmas tree.  It works really well in this spot.  First holiday crisis avoided.

We've got the decorating of the 12' tree down to a science. We did have a fuse issue that left the top half of our tree dark for a few days but all is well again. Phew. Second holiday crisis avoided.

The ornaments are nothing fancy and there's a concentration of them unevenly spaced at the bottom. Everyone asks how we keep Clark out of the tree.  We have a few kid friendly ornaments picked out that Clark is allowed to move around. He's a rule follower like his parents so this is working to our advantage. He keeps repeating "Mine decorated that. Hang the ornaments."  It's pretty darling.  He is quite bossy though and demands the lights on during his awake hours.  No arguments here.

We splurge on fresh garland for the mantel.  The smell is worth every single penny. Nate and I both agree it's not Christmas until there is pine smelling garland in the house!  And a mess of pine needles on the floor.

I really hate clutter so I replace a few items that normally live on our bookshelves with some vintage finds. Like that elf.  He's not one of those hipster trouble making elves. He's old. And doesn't move and has zero magical powers. I will not succumb to elf peer pressure.  (This is more of a pep talk for my future self.)

Ike is dreaming of dog bones and day where he isn't bossed around by a toddler. 

I'll share some other spots around the house later this week or next. Until then here's a peek into our kitchen. 

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I hope you enjoyed the tour! I'll be back with more once I'm done watching like ten terrible Christmas romance movies on Netflix (Hit me up with your recommendations)!  I'm clearly terribly busy so this post may need to wait until next week.