At first, all we had there was two bowls for our cat. Don’t you just love how she has to make her way into photos?! I guess she’s just wondering what I’m so interested in and has to see for herself :)

After measuring the space, I realized shallow shelves would fit just perfectly there. We had about 10 inches from where the door swung open to the wall and so I bought 7″ x 24″ shelves at Ikea and they were perfect! I was so glad I didn’t have to do any trimming whatsoever!

I could have added one more shelf close to the floor but I had visions of our cat knocking everything off and watching as the items made their way down the flight of stairs. To be on the safe side, I just went with four shelves :)

And then the fun part, I got to fill them up with stuff! I mostly have baking items in here like flour and sugar and, of course, the cat food for our little buddy.

All usable space, is good space :) And the cat made her way into another photo…

The good thing is that I can reach all of the items on the shelves except for the top row. But the top row is mainly small appliances that we don’t use often and then I just get a stool.

Another small space utilized!! Now I’m on the hunt for more…

I chose black and white with touches of gold for the theme. Originally, I was going to do black and white stripes but I had a hard time finding enough striped things (who knew?!) and so I threw in polka dots as well. I loved the simplicity of the color scheme mixed with the patterns. Super fun!

I made a striped runner from fabric I found at Ikea. I have been wanting a chance to make a runner like this and it was the perfect opportunity! I found the small gold frames at the Dollar Tree and labeled all of the foods on the table. This shot was taken before all the food was laid out but you get the idea.

I ran a length of gold ribbon down the center and added some gold confetti that I punched out from gold paper in two different sizes.

For the cups, I bought plain white paper cups and drew on them with either a black sharpie or a gold paint pen using all different patterns. I made 80 different cups and it was rather fun :) The polka dot napkins are from Hobby Lobby and I used gold plates also from Hobby Lobby.

The party was at a friend’s house and they have a super long table which was perfect for the food. For the candle jars, I bought them at the Dollar tree and sprainted the gold stripes/polka dots onto them.

I made a bunch of paper flowers and hung them in the chandelier. This was my favorite part of the whole party decor!! I used kraft mailing paper for the petals, black tissue paper for the center along with some moss. Then I gave them a light dusting of gold spraint for a bit of sparkle which you could see IRL but it’s hard to tell in the photos. I followed this tutorial to make them and they were super easy.

More flowers :) I free handed the letters for the banner, cut them out and strung them with baker’s twine.

I made a bunch of flags to wave for when she arrived. They all said different things like party, hooray, celebrate… you get the idea :) I made them out of fabric attached to a skewer and drew on them with a gold paint pen. Can you tell that I love gold paint pens?!

I also made a bunch of blank cards and people wrote on them for the birthday girl. I used glitter paper and made it into tape to secure the card to a piece of cardstock.

For the favors, I bought polka dot tissue paper and cut squares then folded them to make an envelope. Then, I put a cookie in them (I put them in a plastic bag first) and sealed them with a glitter heart.

And last but not least… the cake! I did not make the cake, a very talented friend did. But isn’t it gorgeous? The gold layers sparkled and the effect was perfect. The paper flowers were made by The Paper Pimpernel.

So there you have it, a black, white, and gold birthday party. I love how the decor turned out but even better was that it blessed our friend and that we pulled off the surprise. It was a success :)

I left off with the floors done and the cabinets put back in place awaiting countertops and such. Before we could get to the countertops we wanted to make a few changes to the layout. Nothing big, just small changes that would make a big storage difference. Thankfully they were easy changes because I have a cabinet maker for a Dad and he did it all for us. Easy peasy :) At least for Jason and I!

At the end of the cabinets there was this weird shallow cabinet tucked in. We thought it was cute and could have made it work but we decided to take it out instead and create a bit more storage. It would also mean we could extend our countertop a bit further. In a kitchen with only 2.5 drawers (I say 2.5 because one is only 5″ wide), we could use some more drawers and it was the perfect place to put more. And the last reason to make a new cabinet was for a place to put our microwave. I really don’t like having my microwave on the countertop so if I can tuck it away somewhere it makes me really happy :) Here is a photo of the little cabinet before we made any changes:

And here is the new cabinet my Dad built for us right after it was put in. You also get a glimpse of the countertops because he put those in for us too :)

Awesome, right? Look how much more space we get!! Another reason we couldn’t have done this without my Dad is because there is an air vent directly under the cabinet so he had to make it special with a register in the toe kick. There is always a way to get around these crazy problems if you have a genius Dad :)

He also made us another cabinet that surrounds the refrigerator but I will show you that one in a little bit, let’s talk countertops first :) My ultimate dream for countertops would have been Carrara marble but it wasn’t in the budget. We talked about a few different options but decided to do wood and now that everything is done, I’m really glad we went that direction. Since the kitchen is white, it really warms up the space and brings some depth to the room. Not only do they look awesome but they are cheap!! Because they were inexpensive (we got them from Ikea), we got to do a bit more than we would have if we had gone with a more expensive material… we got to add a waterfall edge.

A waterfall edge is when the countertop extends all the way to the floor. I love it! Since the new cabinet came all the way to the opening of the doorway, it was a nice way to finish it. Also, by the sink, the stove is free standing and so we added the waterfall edge on that side as well so the countertop boarders the stove instead of the side of the cabinet. It’s not quite as dramatic in these photos since the cabinets haven’t been painted yet but you just wait…

Once my Dad put the countertops in, we sanded them all and applied a food safe finish which we also purchased from Ikea (sorry, can’t find a link). Another note, we didn’t really like the Ikea finish. Every time we applied it, it raised the grain and so we would lightly sand and apply again hoping it would get better with time but… it didn’t. So we are planning on sanding it again and applying a different brand of sealer, one that we have used in the past and liked. Wish we would have done that in the first place :) At least this is an easy fix, we just have to get around to doing it :) We also don’t cut on our countertops because we don’t like the look of them being all beat up even though they are technically meant for that. We always use mats to keep them nice.

One of my favorite parts of the wood countertop is where it meets the sink. Oh la la! I love that chunk of wood! And the sink? We love our sink! We found it on Craigslist for $60, brand new still in the box. We were especially excited about it because it is a Kohler enameled cast iron sink and a similar one sells for $700!! Yay for Craigslist!! I’m so glad my Dad cut the sink hole out for us or it wouldn’t have look near as nice :)

Once we finished with the countertops around Thanksgiving, we took a break from working on the kitchen for about a month. It was nice to have a functioning kitchen again even if it wasn’t completely done. We were able to actually cook meals and enjoy the holidays :) But, as soon as Christmas passed, we got right to it on the 26th and broke out the tiling supplies. It was time to begin our next project.

Like seemingly everyone else in this country, I wanted white subway tile. And since we had a relatively small space, I wanted it to go all the way to the ceiling. Even though I had to buy more tile to go all the way up, it was worth it. Especially since I ended up finding the tile at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore for 1/3 of the price that Home Depot sells it for. Another major score in our budget. It made for one happy girl!

After calling my Dad to have him help us again :) we covered all of the newly finished countertops with plastic and got to work. This was only our 2nd tiling project (the first being the bathroom which I will show you another time) we were still novices. Thankfully, my Dad is not and has a bunch of experience with tiling. We mostly were a little nervous about working on a wall instead of on a floor. Going up and keeping it straight sounded a bit harder and we wanted some expertise.

My Dad helped us for one day and then the rest was up to us. Really though, once we got started, we realized it wasn’t that hard. It was actually kind of fun… for me. Poor Jason had to use the wet tile saw out in the cold weather which wasn’t so fun for him but I was nice and dry inside positioning the tiles and so I enjoyed myself. Since I still won’t call us tiling experts, I’m not going to give tutorial, I’m sure there are way better step by step tutorials than what I can give so I’m just going to show the photos we have of us working.

Because we only had time early in the morning before Jason went to work and then some evenings, this project took us quite a while. Plus, we tiled all the way to the floor in the area where the stove sits so we had to move the stove for a few days while we did that area. We finally wrapped this project up in February including the grout. Fast we are not :) By the way, I did the grout all by myself! I was a little nervous before I started but it actually was so easy! Now you know, tiling isn’t as hard as it seems :) We only had one mishap along the way… we took great care to measure and remeasure and check our levels as we were going but somehow one side was higher than the other so there are two rows on the right side that we had to shave 1/8′ off the tiles to make them line up. It ended up not really being a big deal in the end and you can’t even tell. I dare you to try and figure out which two rows they are :)

Since our tiling project was ongoing, I had some time to do a few other things as well. Since the whole kitchen was going to be white, I wanted the inside of the cabinets to be a fun color. Jason wanted green so I chose a minty green. I absolutely love opening the doors and seeing that fun surprise!

In the photo above you can kind of see the new cabinet my Dad built for us that surrounds the fridge. Before, the fridge just kind of hung out in that space but with the new cabinet surrounding it, it looks like the fridge is now there on purpose instead of as a last resort.

The space in this room is so small it’s really hard to photograph so I did the best I could and hopefully you get the idea :) There is a cabinet that runs along the ceiling and from wall to wall and then another skinny cabinet that runs down the side of the fridge.

Any storage is good storage even when it’s skinny! This is basically our pantry now. The cabinets above the fridge hold my decorative accessories since they are a little harder to get to. In fact, a step stool isn’t tall enough for me to reach the top shelf, I need a ladder! But it created a lot of space and put to work a previously unused area.

Now things are really heating up!! Next I painted all of the frames of the cabinets with my super duper paint and then I painted the doors. Since we added a few extra cabinets and because we didn’t really like the style of the old doors anyway, my Dad made new doors and drawer fronts for us :) I know, I’m totally spoiled. He’s the best :) So painted them, let them cure for 7 days, and then he came back over and hung them up for us. And since he’s the professional, we let him put the pulls on too :)

And that is how far we have made it! Here are photos of what’s done and I will clue you in on what we have left!!

Woohoo!!! I love it!

I love the whole thing but there are a couple of things that I especially like. One of them is the new cabinet that houses the microwave and I adore the waterfall edge of the countertops. Love :)

The house came with a dishwasher but it didn’t work so we had to get a new one of those too. This one was another Craigslist find.

The door hardware I found at Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $1 each! I really wanted brass hardware but the practical side won out when I found this hardware for so cheap.

I told you it’s fun to open the doors!

To the left of the sink we will be hanging two open shelves. I’m really excited for them because that is when I will be able to add some personality to this kitchen. Right now it’s pretty stark but soon, there will be some color added back in.

Oh stove, how do I love thee? The back piece and shelf came with it too. There is a hole in the ceiling and holes in the tiles because we still need to hang the range hood. Since the original one was too big, we bought a new one. First, Jason has to crawl into the attic to work out the venting for it. No biggie. That might get done sometime in the next 5 years… haha! Once that gets hung I won’t be able to keep the tall things on the shelf, just the spices. But for now, it’s nice to have some stuff up there.

The runner I got on clearance at Target for something crazy like $8.

Ahhh, my faucet. I really love my faucet. I really wanted to incorporate brass and stainless in this kitchen. My faucet helped me bring in some brass (and my light fixture will too once it gets hung up). In our previous kitchen we always had a bottle of dish detergent sitting out because it got used so much. I really didn’t want that this time so we added the soap dispenser and I’m so glad. The faucet is by Delta. I went back and forth about faucets. I knew I wanted a good quality but I didn’t want to spend a ton. I also wanted the brass but not shiny brass. That really narrows it down. Once I found this one, I was sold on the style and color but not the price. So I did some digging and it paid off. I kept finding it for about $350-$400 (even on Amazon!) and after I spent a ton of time researching the best price I found it for $285 which I was stoked about. I really love the brass with the wood. So happy :)

Just a close up of the waterfall edge. Isn’t it great?! And yes, I have dropped things down there between the range and the cabinet. But so far, nothing has been hard to get to :)

On to the mudroom. I love this little light filled area!

Yay for storage!!

This is the back door and we use it all the time to enter the house. You can see now why the fridge makes for a tight fit.

On this side, I spray painted a little shelf in brass and hung it up. My purse hangs here along with our keys and sunglasses and such. We still need to put up the light fixture in this room and the kitchen area. It needs some rewiring before we do that which means more time for Jason to spend in the attic. Poor guy :) We also need to put up the baseboard trim on this wall and paint the door and door trim.

What do you think of my little island? I got it at an antique store and added the castors. It comes in handy. We use the drawer as a junk drawer of sorts. I got the knob for it at Hobby Lobby. I’m thinking about painting the base of it a fun color. What do you think?!

I use these magnetic clips for our towels. They seem to work pretty well for us. I’m also thinking of sprainting these a color. Just trying to decide which color :)

One last photo… Just to show the waterfall again :) Can you tell how much I like it?!

Whew!! Did you make it all the way to the end? That was a lot of pictures! So basically, we add a couple of shelves, range hood, lighting, and a bit more paint and trim and we will be done! I’m especially excited to add some touches to make it feel lived in and some color and pattern. Right now it’s pretty stark and needs some life. It will get there. And I’m still just enjoying having a kitchen that actually functions. That might just be the best part :)

Thanks for hanging in there and enjoy your weekend! Have a happy Easter and celebrate what our Savior did for us!!

Before I jump into the kitchen, I have a favor to ask. I entered my bedroom into Apartment Therapy’s Bedroom Retreat contest and they accepted my entry! Now, to get into the finals, I need votes. If you liked my bedroom, go to my entry page and make it one of your favorites. I admit, I still need a lot of votes :) Voting ends on March 31st so there are only a few days left!

Okay, now that I’m done begging, let’s move onto the kitchen… This is how the kitchen looked when we bought the house way back in August. Yes, it has been that long!

We keep laughing about what we called our “move-in ready house” and that it has taken us 6 months of working on it to get it this far and we still aren’t done :) Yes, it was move-in ready. We just didn’t want it to stay the way it was so we started altering things a bit. And then the projects started building up and we thought since we were already doing one thing… let’s just keep going. The snowball effect. But we don’t regret diving in headfirst because we love it.

Another photo, this time a little closer…

So here’s the deal. We know the house was redone about 5 years ago. When it was redone, it just wasn’t done in our style. Vinyl floors, laminate countertops, oak cabinets, basic appliances, pressed tin backsplash… There was nothing wrong with any of it. It just wasn’t us. At all. I knew that a little paint would go a long way. But who wants to stop with paint? Why not just rip it all out and do it all over? So we did just that! Oh yes we did :)

First things first, we ripped out the upper cabinets. That a made a huge difference in opening up the space. I keep saying that in a tiny house we need all the storage we can get. But in this case, taking out some storage was totally worth it to make it feel bigger. I was instantly happier.

Next, we ripped everything out. Yes, everything. We were really hoping to find the original wood floors underneath in salvageable condition but no such luck. Under many layers of old flooring we found some of the original but not enough to save it. We thought about trying to repair it but decided against it for many reasons. Ripping up the old floors was a nasty job. I’m glad it was the boys who took care of this one! Thanks guys! You see, while the boys were working at this house, I was still back at the previous house getting it ready to sell. We were really busy at this time. Overwhelmingly so :)

Next up, the boys started laying the floors. Choosing floors for this kitchen was the hardest decision for me and the one I regret the most. Like I said, we were hoping to be able to salvage the original floors. When we found that it wasn’t possible, we knew we had to lay new floors over the original and that means they would be higher than the existing floor in the dining room and rest of the house creating a little lip which we weren’t thrilled about but decided to go with it anyway. Since the rest of the house had wood floors, I didn’t want to even try to match it with something similar because you can always tell that they don’t really match. I also didn’t want vinyl or tile. Don’t ask me why, I just didn’t :) I have nothing against tile, but we had just gone from a kitchen with dark floors and I wanted something lighter. What a really wanted was wood. So, we ended up settling on painted wood floors. One thing to keep in mind was that because the house is tiny, we can’t put expensive things in this house or when it comes time to sell it, we won’t be able to sell it for as much as we put into it. The painted wood floors were the most economical and the option that sounded the best to us. Seriously, we talked about everything! And this is what we both could agree on. So, we bought unfinished wood flooring and painted it white.

So, why do I regret it? I don’t regret the white. I regret the style. I so wish I could go back and pick something else!!! Why? Because of the grooves in the wood. We originally were going for wood flooring like in the rest of the house with no seams. When we got to the flooring store, Jason liked the look of the wide plank better. I didn’t really care that much as long as I could paint it so we picked it up. Big mistake. We never should have changed our minds in the store instead of thinking it through first. But we did and now we’re stuck. Our previous floors had a groove line too and it didn’t bother us but these are way deeper. So they are always dirty. And you can’t sweep them because everything ends up in the grooves. The only thing to do is vacuum them, groove by groove. At least it’s a small kitchen :) And really, it doesn’t even take that long it’s just annoying.

I must say though, for all that we dislike, I actually really like how they look. And the paint that we used is amazing. Seriously, I couldn’t be happier with the paint. It took 7 days to cure which was a commitment (and we didn’t live there yet) but it is the toughest paint I’ve ever had. I tried to find it on the Sherwin Williams website but couldn’t. It’s called Industrial Enamel and it’s an oil based marine paint. It’s super durable. With all of the projects we’ve had going on this house, this paint hasn’t showed any wear and tear at all. It’s so great that I painted all of my cabinets with it too. Previously I have always been a Pro-Classic girl, and still am, but this paint is even better. Especially if you have 7 days to let it cure :)

Having said that… it leads me to mistake number two. Let me start by saying that I love, love, love Sherwin Williams. They are so awesome there and they have always given me great advice with every project I have. So when I told them that I was painting unfinished wood floors white and wanted something durable and easy to clean they suggested this industrial enamel. Again, I am super happy with it. What I’m not so excited about is that when I asked what primer I should use, they assured me that because it was oil based, I didn’t need primer and it would cover well. I have never not painted raw wood without primer but I figured if they said I didn’t need it, then I didn’t need it. Plus, I had the manager and the assistant manager both agreeing that I didn’t need to prime first. They were wrong. We did two coats and was ready to do a third when we realized that yellow spots from the knots were showing through. So I headed back to SW and told them the problem and they suggested I rough up the spots with sandpaper, paint a couple coats of primer on just the spots and then paint all of the floors again. So that’s what we did. As time has gone on, more spots keep showing through. Arg!!! I would just sand all the floors and repaint them but remember how I said it takes 7 days to cure?! How can I not use my kitchen for 7 days? I’m about ready to rip them all out and start over!! Just kidding but… if you have any suggestions… I’m all ears!

Okay, enough ranting, back to the kitchen…

They do look pretty though, don’t they?

Next up, we threw the cabinets back in the room and temporarily set the previous countertop back on. Oh, and somewhere in there I painted the walls :) We weren’t quite ready to do the new countertops at this point because we wanted my Dad’s help and he was unavailable for a bit longer so this is what it looked like when we finally moved into the house. No stove, no fridge. We were really ruffing it :)

So, for about 2 weeks we didn’t have a fridge. It. was. not. fun. at. all. This blue cooler became our fridge. For reals. Some of our refrigerator items we kept at my parents house and we would go grab a few things every couple of days but really, since we didn’t have a stove either, we didn’t cook. Amazingly enough, we still didn’t eat out. Somehow, we managed to eat almost all of our meals at home. I think we ate a bunch of sandwiches :)

This little hut is at the end of our street. It became our new best friend :)

Everyday, one of us would go to the ice hut and get some ice. Then, I would empty everything out of the cooler and fill up ziploc bags with ice and salt. Then I would systematically pack everything back in laying the items with bags of ice. I became really good at this :)

We had ordered our fridge a few weeks before we were supposed to move into the house but because of Hurricane Sandy, shipment was delayed. With so many lives lost and people without anything because of the hurricane, I tried not to complain too much about the inconvenience of being without a fridge for a couple of weeks :)

And then it came!!! Yay!! To save money, we ordered our fridge from Sears Outlet. The fridge is in a really tight nook in the mudroom of the house. Just for reference, here is the floor plan again…

See the little mudroom? It’s a really tight squeeze and a regular fridge stuck out so far into the space that it looked really funny. So we decided a counter depth fridge would do much better. Instead of being 30″ deep, it’s only 24″ deep. That six inches makes a big difference!

Back to this saving money thing… when we started looking into counter depth refrigerators, we realized they were expensive. If you get a cheaper one, then they are small. We had plenty of width, and I would rather have a normal amount of cubic space than opt for a tiny one just to save money. Then we found Sears Outlet. We got a $2500 fridge for $800 plus $200 shipping. Awesome! It had a couple of small dings on the sides (you can see them in the above photo and I knew that before ordering) but I just touched them up with appliance paint and you don’t even notice them anymore. Major score!!

Want to know our other major appliance score? Our range…

First of all, I show you this photo to show you what we lived with for months. While our kitchen was being worked on, we didn’t have anything in the cabinets and no place to put anything else so we set up some storage units in the dining room and put everything there. It was a crazy disaster. And it just about drove us crazy because it always looked messy. I’m so thankful this time has passed!

Back to the range… Early one morning when I couldn’t sleep (we were still living at the previous house) I was browsing Craigslist and came across this range. My dream range. Seriously, if you had asked me what my dream range for this house was I would have said a Viking 30″ range in white. And guess what I found? A Viking 30″ range in white plus the range hood! If the range alone had been brand new it would have been about $5000. We got both for $800. It’s not new and the hood ended up being too big but we didn’t care and the stove is one of our favorite things we got for the kitchen. I’m so happy with how it looks and I still thank the Lord for giving me this added blessing. It’s another piece of the puzzle to our tiny dream house :) I will show a better photo of the range in pictures to come tomorrow as it’s not even completely assembled in this photo.

Our new range is gas while the previous range had been electric. Thankfully, at one point there had been a gas line to the house. So we just called our plumber and he ran a new line under the house and hooked up some gas for us. I had never cooked with gas before but now that we have it? We love it! I’m still learning how to bake with gas though especially coming from a convection oven but I’m getting there. And I haven’t ruined anything… yet :) And our old appliances? The refrigerator was sold on Craigslist and our old stove made it’s way to Oregon in my parent’s vehicle when they took a trip out and is now at my brother’s house. Their stove was on the fritz and so it was a win for everyone!

While I’m talking about appliances I thought I would explain our reasons for choosing white instead of stainless. We had stainless in our last house and loved them. In this house, I wanted everything to be white. The floors, the cabinets, the walls… everything. So naturally, the appliances should be white too. Especially in that crazy little mudroom. If there was a stainless fridge in there I felt like it would stick out like a sore thumb. But the white would just blend in. And that is exactly what happens. Plus, we have gotten some really good deals on our appliances because they aren’t the “it” thing. Besides, I think white is making a comeback. Soon it will be all the rage again. Especially the white ice version. It just looks so cool! But that’s just my opinion… Hey, House Beautiful used the white ice appliances in their kitchen of the year last year and you just can’t argue with that :)

Okay, since this post has been exceptionally long, I will close there for tonight and wrap it up tomorrow. Man, this whole post was just demoing, floors, and appliances. I still have a long way to go!! Hang in there!!

And please… don’t forget to vote, if you want to that is :)

I really, really love our bedroom. It feels so bright and airy to me and I love waking up to the crispness of the white walls and bright light coming in through our window.

So, our room is tiny. I mean, what do you expect with an 800 square foot house?! It’s only a 9’6″ x 9’6″ space (not including the closet area) and that means there isn’t room for much else beyond a bed. But that’s okay, it’s just for sleeping anyway.

This is my side of the bed. I created this little nightstand with some leftover wood from our counter tops and some shelf brackets from Ikea. It works really well because it’s shallow enough that the closet doors can still open all the way.

The room is small, the closet is small. So far, only my clothes fit in it and Jason keeps his in the guest room closet. We hope to fix that someday by have a better system in the closet but for now, it works.

I still am in love with our duvet cover that we got last year from West Elm. I like it even better in this room with the white walls than in our previous room with its dark walls. The lamps and the plant made the move with us, I had them at our previous house in various rooms.

And check out our library now! Before we had a room that we called the library and while we’ve never been ones to have a ton of books around, now we’ve really pared down. What you see on that shelf is literally all of the books we own! I even have my cookbooks up there now but they will eventually be in the kitchen. Crazy!! The shelves were from our old house, they used to be in the dining room.

I got the dark gray pillows on clearance at Target. I also added the new throw pillows which were another Target clearance find. I love the clearance isles at Target, can you tell?!

Just throwing this in there for fun… I betcha didn’t know that my cat was sleeping here the whole time I took these photos! It’s one of her favorite hideouts. Either there or she burrows under the duvet cover when she’s really cold :)

The wool army blanket came with us from our previous room too. I had been searching for a gray one for too long to leave it behind. Plus, come summer, the duvet will have to go and the army blanket will be our only covering.

On Jason’s side of the bed I used the end table I had in our old house in the living room. I had found it at a yard sale for $5 and put a fresh coat of white paint on it and brought it with us. The painting was also a thrift store find and again, it used to be in our old living room.

I love the curtains, they came from Ikea. I love that they add just a subtle stripe to the room. Our bedroom faces the backyard. Thankfully, we don’t have any neighbors behind us for miles so we are able to live without a window blind. We keep our curtains open all the time and I love it!

More Target clearance finds: the basket, which we use as a hamper, an the runner which I think I got for $11! Just small amounts of color in this room make me happy :)

I also added the wall rack which used to be in our old guest room and I found at a garage sale for $.50! It works great right now for our hats and scarves. But I only hung the black, white, and gray ones. The rest are in the closet :)

The vintage pendant light I found at an antique store for $35 and I was originally going to use it in the bathroom but I found something else for in there and then this one ended up in the bedroom and I really like it in the the room. The train rack used to be in our old master bathroom. For now, I have a few of my neutral purses on display.

Do you see the strip of teal on the door? I covered it with Washi tape. Super easy, and super removable.

And that sums up our new room. Overall, even though it’s tiny, I love it way more than our previous bedroom. The wood floors are what I’ve always wanted and along with the white walls… ooh la la. Throw some ikat chevron stripes in gray and you pretty much have the room of my dreams :)

What do you think? Could you live with all white walls or do you need some color? What about the size? Is it something you think you can manage? Do share…

I knew that for me to put on jewelry most every day (which is my goal), it had to be accessible and I had to be able to see it all. Previously, I used a jewelry box and a couple of different wall organizers. When we moved, I ditched the jewelry box because I no longer had a place to put it and decided to go in a different direction. I wanted something that could hold all of my jewelry in the same place.

We have this little space in our bedroom that was dead space. It was a tiny space but still, space. In a small house, every space, no matter how big, needs to be put to work. This is the space I’m talking about:

See, I told you this floor plan would come in handy :)

When you open the door to our bedroom, you are faced with a blank half wall that is the end of the closet. A full length mirror was on the list of wants for our bedroom and this blank space was the perfect spot for one. I have always wanted a full length mirror and in all of our 13 years of marriage, never had one. In our last house, I resorted to stand on the toilet to see a full length version of myself in the mirror that was over the sink. In this bathroom, that wouldn’t work since the sink isn’t across from the commode. And so, I found a mirror:

So, what does the full length mirror have to do with my jewelry space? Well, it’s very tricky, I bet you haven’t figured it out yet :)

My mirror is on a hinge! Brilliant, right?!

I got the idea for this and figured we would have to make the mirror ourselves. But then, I was at Ikea, and I found a mirror that already came with hinges so that if you bought 3 of them, it becomes a three way mirror by turning the outside ones. It was perfect for my plan because it was exactly the look I was going for and it had the ability to open. I just added a magnetic catch so it would latch and hung it on the wall. Easy peasy!!

Next, I used a level and tape measure to mark spots on the wall and then drilled pilot holes for the little metal cup hooks. Then I simply screwed the cup hooks into my pilot holes.

Actually, I originally was reluctant to drill that many holes into the wall. So first, I purchased a ton of sticky wall hooks and they worked great… for about a week. And then, they just started to fall off, one by one. And it always seemed to happen in the middle of the night. My necklaces would come crashing down. So I had to give in and drill holes in the wall. But now that it’s done, I’m happier with it. The cup hooks are smaller and I can add more if I want to. It all worked out in the end :)

I actually drilled a bunch of extra holes so that in the future as I add more jewelry, I can just screw another hook into the wall. Really, it resembles a peg board.

My new jewelry space holds all of my jewelry except for a couple of bracelets that are too thick to fit behind the 2″ space behind the mirror. Not too shabby.

So, pretty awesome, right? A full length mirror and a jewelry closet. I love it if you can’t tell :) How’s that for creative storage?!

In the mean time, while I work on getting my thoughts in order, I thought I would draw up a little floor plan. You know, so you can get a better idea of how the house is laid out. Floor plans always help me get a better sense of what things look like and so I played around with www.floorplanner.com a bit and here is what I came up with:

Since it was my first time using it, I was learning as I went and I would still like to tweak it and make it better. I was thinking that as I start documenting the different rooms, I could add furniture and such so you can see how it is laid out better. Maybe I will even add measurements so you can see how tiny the rooms really are! All in all, I’m pretty pleased with it. I wish I would have done this with the last house. That would have been handy. But, too little, too late. At least I have one for this house!

So that is all I have for today, short but sweet. As I said before, I am in the middle of a couple of other posts, maybe I will even finish them one of these days. I guess I just need to dive in. Maybe this little floor plan was a way to get my feet wet first :)

I hope you all had a great January and here’s to an even better February!!

Christmas decorations are pretty low key around our house this year. We are living in our tiny house now but things are still in disarray as we continue to work on projects large and small around here. Important things like kitchen countertops and appliances and the bathroom. You know, things like that. So, I decided that I would just go easy on the decorations to make things simpler. In fact, we don’t even have a tree up, just the mantle got a little Christmas pizazz. But, that is not the case at the church. I still invested some time into making some decor for the church and I wanted to share it with you today.

In the past, I have always made everything on my own with the exception of having a bit of help from Jason and my mom in hanging it all up. But this year, I was busy. I didn’t have weeks to get everything together like normal. So I decided to make a party of it and invited all of the ladies at church to come for a crafting night and we made all of the decor together. I had all of the projects planned and brought everything to the church with me and we spent a Saturday assembling everything. It was super fun and we all decided to make it a yearly event. Why did I not think of this sooner?! I guess sometimes it’s good to be busy, it causes you to get creative!

Our theme was O Starry Night and because of my time crunch, I relied heavily on Pinterest. I will share the links to the pins that I copied inspired me. And so… here is what we came up with:

I jazzed up the front door by drawing on it with a erasable white marker. Everyone loved it so much they said I should keep it year round. But, even just after a few weeks, it has really gotten smeared from lots of people going in and out so it’s definitely disappearing soon. It was fun while it lasted :) (pin inspiration)

In the entryway we have a sitting area and we made a ton of stars to put on the shelf. I’m kind of in love with them. Plus, they were all super easy to make.

There are stars made of foam board and sprainted gold (pin inspiration), stars made of paper, tin, wood, and cardboard. Basically anything you can think of (pin inspiration).

Then we just mounted some of them on skewers for varying heights. I cut the base from old pallets left over from a another project (you’ll see it in a minute) and drilled a hole in them.

Then, we hot glued the stars to the sticks. Easy peasy. For this particular star (we made about 20 of these), we cut 2 pieces of kraft cardstock into star shapes and drew on them with metallic paint markers. Then I sewed around all the sides but one, sewing them together. Next, we stuffed it with cotton balls to give it some puffiness and then sewed them shut. I loved these little guys (pin inspiration).

Back to the shelf area… I also added a banner. The wooden letters were from the craft store. We just glued a little moss to them and ta-da! Instant gratification! The tinsel star garland was super fun to make. Using glittery pipe cleaners, we bent them into star shapes and fastened them together (pin inspiration). They take a bit of time but they are worth it! We made a few of these and added them in other places as well.

Another place where we used the tinsel garland in gold this time. We also made the hanging stars out of kraft paper, twine, and sprainted clothes pins (pin inspiration). The easiest project yet! You can also see the book pages compiled to made a runner on the tabletop (pin inspiration).

We added a couple of puffy stars to our coat rack too. Aren’t they cute?!

My favorite thing I made was the pallet tree. It was super easy if you can use a few power tools and I made it myself so you can too (pin inspiration). I have seen a bunch of variations of these trees on Pinterest and after looking around, I decided I wanted a big one. This is about 8 feet tall. There is a place here in town that you can get pallets that are already disassembled for free. So I just helped myself to some pallet wood and cut them to varying sizes and nailed it together. Easy and cool :)

And an up close photo because it deserves it :) I love the old school lights.

I also hung some more tinsel garland on the entry doors. I couldn’t help myself. I had more tinsel left and I had to use it!

Another book page runner on a little table. The trees were all from last year.

On the tree I hung some wooden stars sprainted gold with sprainted mini clothespins. I originally was going to hang the stars with twine so I drilled a hole and then, at the last minute, I decided to use the clothespins instead. I wish now I wouldn’t have drilled the hole!

I actually bought the wooden stars in 3 different star shapes. Another one is shown above.

We took some wooden discs and painted a star on them. We made them in gold, black, and silver.

Remember the yarn wreaths I made last year? I adorned them with stars this time to spice it up a bit. I like them :)

And for the pièce de résistance… the backdrop. We painted a large 12′x15′ drop cloth in black.

Then, I wrote the words on it with a white paint pen to make it kind of look like a chalkboard (I freehanded it but I used this pin as a guide for the letters).

Next, we hung stars from the top with fishing line. The stars were crafted using branches that I tied together with twine in a star shape (pin inspiration). I love how the stars look against the dark color of the backdrop! If it wasn’t so big, then it would make its way into my house next year but… it’s pretty large :)

And there you have it! Our church Christmas decor for 2012. I’m pretty happy with the way everything turned out especially since I only spent about half the time I usually do planning for it. I guess sometimes it’s okay to do things at the last minute!

I absolutely love the Christmas season and I’m always a little sad to see it come to an end. But this year, I’m hoping to be able to get back into the swing of things and start doing somewhat regular posts again. Besides, I have a ton of stuff to update you all on our little house. I just need some time to organize my thoughts and away we’ll go! Stay tuned :)

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Oh, the outside. There were so many ideas I had that I never did. And that’s okay, maybe the new owners will do them. We did refresh the mulch for the sale and it looked so nice. Amazing what a small thing like that does! It helps that it was a pretty time of year too. Plus, I bought some plants for the porch and the topiaries for the garage and I loved how they looked. I have since killed all of the potted plants because I have been too busy to take care of them. Sad day.

We finally got a new mailbox post. Our previous one was always leaning. One of the many projects we wished we had done ages ago! I tried as hard as I could to make it look good, but we finally just realized a new set was the way to go.

The back of the house. Look at my sparkling windows!! We did a ton of touch up painting on the outside and it was a lot of time and effort but it made it look so nice. It was worth it :)

Speaking of windows… remember my window project? Well, I finished it. It was a big job (I had been working on it since May!!) and I never want to do it again! After a few burns from the heat gun and cuts from the scraper I suppose they were worth it because they looked so nice when they were all done.

More of the backyard. You can see my little garden on the left side. It was sad to leave it because it was still producing. Hopefully the new owners got to enjoy it for a bit.

Another backyard view. The roof on the birdhouse had disintegrated and so Jason took the time to make a new roof and now it’s cute again.

Upon entering the house through the front door, this is what you would have seen. Kitchen ahead, stairs to the right, living room to the left, cat on the floor. The cat likes to follow me around while I take photos :)

Facing the front door in the entry. I loved the blue door. It was such a dark color that you couldn’t always tell it was blue. Sometimes it looked black. And actually, it started as white, then it became black, and it finished as being blue. So fun.

The living room and the gallery wall. I took most of the gallery wall with me because I still like it and I have just the perfect spot for it :) Plus, it took me a long time to collect all of the frames, I want to enjoy it a bit longer!!

We sold almost everything. Literally. I thought that it would be hard to see it go but it was actually very freeing. I only kept a couple of things from this room. I would have liked to have kept more but they wouldn’t fit in our new tiny house. And that’s okay; new treasures will be found for the new house. If you would like to see the progression of this room, check it out here.

The dining room. The table is definitely too big for our new house so I worked on some ideas with my Dad as to how we can make it smaller and work for our new space since I still love it so much.

I don’t know if you remember the pendant light fixture we had in this room previously but I wanted to take it with us for our new house so I quickly had Jason switch it out for me with this new (old) chandelier pictured above. It actually looked super cute in there and I kind of wanted to take that one with me too :) It was a chandelier that I found on the side of the road and brought it home, sprainted it white, and hung it up. So cute. And even farther back, does anyone remember the red chandelier that I had longer ago? It’s fun to see the changes. Check out the progression post to see all the changes made to this room, here.

Oh how I loved my kitchen. I really will miss this room. And all of its space! The sunny breakfast nook! And pull outs! The list goes on… If you want to see the progression of this room check out the posts here and here.

If you go up the stairs and look down, you will see the entryway. It went through several colors. Four colors to be exact. At one point it was bright red. Can you believe it?!

The famous stairway. When I posted about drawing on my walls I couldn’t believe how much traffic I got. And I still get comments about it at times. I wonder if the new owners will keep it…

I will also be missing my craft room :)

I will have to tell you about my chalkboard project in another post…

What a wonderful room it had been for me. A lot of stuff that showed up on the blog happened in this room.

On the other side of the hallway, my studio. This is where I did all of my work for Every Jot & Tittle (which is currently put on hold for the foreseeable future). I started out with my studio in the basement and moved up here last year. You can read some more about it in an old post here.

You’ve already seen the finished guest bathroom but I had to include it in the tour, right?! Plus this room has seen some changes as well. It used to be yellow. I loved it at first but ultimately, I like the mellowness of the gray better. I guess yellow isn’t so mellow now is it? At least not as mellow as gray. Haha, I’m a dork :)

The guest bath has two rooms joined by a doorway with no door. The shower and commode are in the second half. It was a nice big bathroom and I always loved that it was all white.

The guest bedroom. It has seen a bunch of changes along with the rest of the house. You can see some of them, here.

The other side of the guest room. I had to get rid of most of the big furniture. It was very sad because I loved it all.

I loved our bedroom with the dark walls. I really doubt the drawing will last on the wall for the new owners though. They have two boys and one of them will occupy this room. The drawing is a bit on the girly side.

In the new house our bedroom will have the same duvet cover but the room will have a different feel. I’m really excited about it. Again, as seen in the photo above, the cat likes to make her presence in our house known.

The other side of the master bedroom that didn’t get photographed very often. At one point I moved the colorful dresser from the guest bedroom into our room for more clothing storage. Now that feels like a joke to me because I had two closets and didn’t think it was enough and now we just have one itty bitty closet. I sold or gave away over half of my clothes for this new venture of ours. That was almost harder than getting rid of furniture!

Again, the master bath. I wish I would have painted that cabinet ages ago. But since it was wood for so long, I will always have that in my memory versus this new white (better) version.

Now moving downstairs… This is the view from the entryway looking downstairs. These stairs are located right next to the stairway leading upstairs.

This is a long narrow room with lots of doorways so it’s kind of hard to arrange. We never, ever sat in this chair. It was kind of off by itself.

Does anyone spy a kitty in this photo?!

We ended up moving our router and wireless box before we sold the house and it looked so much better. Another project I wished we had done years ago because it literally took 30 minutes to relocate it. Crazy…

I love this little black cabinet that a friend made for me. It fit so perfectly in that space. You can read a little more about it here.

The other side of the family room and a view of the fireplace. We never once used our fireplace. Can you believe that?! And see the t.v.? It is no more. We got sold all of our tv’s in the move. We didn’t ever have cable and we never watched regular t.v. Then, we aren’t even sure why, we both became more or less disinterested in movies as well. So our t.v. sat unwatched for months at a time. It seemed like a good idea to get rid of it. And neither one of us regret it.

Another angle. I carefully measured each and every piece of furniture that we had and made a small scale replica of everything so I could see how furniture would fit in our tiny house. No couches for me. Only a loveseat will work so I sold both couches we had. Whew! It’s a lot of work to downsize!

Another piece of furniture that has made its home with another family is the ottoman. It has gone through several different fabrics since we made it a few years ago. You can read about how we made it here.

On to the basement. The disaster zone! The basement is a rectangle shape but divided to create an office so the part that is unfinished makes an L shape. This is where we stored our stuff. You know, like paint cans and tools and such. Just stuff. Everybody has it, right?

This other part of our basement was our workout room. We are really missing our workout room. We faithfully workout everyday except for Sundays and so it gets a lot of use. But we have a plan for the new house and so far, it is working out (haha, pun intended!).

And yet another corner of the basement. I’m pretty sure that much of this space has yet to make an appearance on the blog even after 6.5 years of living here. This just might be its debut.

Jason’s office or as I like to call it, the library. This room is pretty much unchanged since I fixed it up last year as a surprise to Jason while he was out of town (read all about it: Before, 1, 2 3& 4, 5, 6, 7).

The other side of the library. We loved this room. It was very cozy. Especially during bad storms. We spent some time down here during tornado season :)

And the only other room to show is the laundry room which I just did a whole post about recently so I will just post one little photo to complete the tour. For those wondering, the laundry room is on the same level as the family room.

I just realized that I never took photos of the garage. Silly me! Not that it is very interesting to see but it is part of the house. That is another thing we really miss. We had never had a garage before and we got used to it and loved parking our car in there. Now that we don’t have one again, we’re scheming how we could someday add one on.

Well old friend, you have been a good house to us and we loved the years we spent there. And now it’s time to say so long, farewell…

When I was trying to figure out where to even start, I realized that I never post photos of the completed laundry room so I thought I would show them today. I showed you the progress of the laundry room (#1, #2, #3, and #4) back in January and then I left you hanging and moved onto other things. Silly me, I get easily sidetracked. So without further adieu; the room in which we wash our clothes:

If you opened the door to the room, this is what you would see. The floors are concrete and so I painted them with porch paint in black. The walls I painted Sherwin Williams Creamy. The runners (there are two of them together) are from Target and they were super cheap, I think $15 each but I got them on sale for $8 each. Our Target still has them if you are interested in having some for yourself.

The room is actually sort of divided into two rooms, the half bath and the laundry area but there isn’t a door in between. This part is the bathroom and we switched out the regular sized bath sink for a large laundry sink. I really loved having the large sink and I’m definitely going to miss that in our new house. At least we got to enjoy it for 6 months or so :) You can read more about the sink and how I scored it for free, here. The hand towel was from Target and the mirror came from who-knows-where. In other words, I can’t remember, I had it for a long time :) Way back in the day when we bought the house there used to be a recessed medicine cabinet over the sink. But it was ugly and I didn’t think it was necessary to have one in the laundry room so we removed it and I had Jason fill the hole for me. I like having a plain old mirror there better :)

The other side of the bath area. You can see these are tiny little rooms but they served their purpose well. These photos were taken shortly before we moved so I didn’t really have them styled. If we had stayed, I had some plans for curtains and other fun touches. It’s pretty bare bones at this point.

Onto the laundry area. Another unstyled room. I had big plans for it. It was going to be super cute. Oh well :) The rug in front of the washer was brought to me by my Mom from Brazil. The cabinet was made for Jason and I as a wedding present from my older brother 13 years ago. It’s gone through a couple of color changes and I think it looks pretty sharp in black. During painting, I had a mishap with one of the pulls and it broke. I tried to glue it back together but it didn’t work. In the new house, this cabinet will serve a different purpose and I have new pulls for it :)

And the inside of the door in the bath area. You can see close ups of the artwork I had on the walls in this old post.

When we started working on the laundry room in January, we didn’t know we were going to be selling the house. I’m so glad we started working on it then so we could at least enjoy it for the few months we had. And now, the new owners (hopefully) are enjoying it! It sure did come a long way, didn’t it?