flea market finds...

+a rug for our bedroom

+a stool for our bathroom that i recovered with vintage striped fabric i also got at the market

+a picnic table for the backyard

celebrating 1 year of owning our lovely house. we ate dinner on the porch surrounded by lots of fire flies and reminisced about all the hard work we have put into the house in the last year to make it our home. when we were looking for houses, i found it to be a pretty stressful process and always wondered if people were exaggerating when they said you will just know when it is the right house. we must have looked at the inside of our house for only ten minutes before walking outside, sitting down on the porch and then it totally happened, i knew it was our house. it was always my dream to have a big front porch for people to gather and hang out on just like when i was a kid. i was so happy recently when our good friends came to visit and all ten of us were eating dinner on the porch and laughing the night away.

+a very happy birthday to my wonderful mother!

sunday mornings are the new friday night.

it has really started to feel like spring around our house despite the rainy weather outside (click on the photos for more details). i can't believe how long it has been since my last post, but i had to take a little break from blogging to catch up on a few things like taxes and unexpected home repairs. we were all set to finish the home renovations, but ended up having to do a bunch of additional plumbing work in the bathroom. that lead to us having to cut a huge hole in the wall of what was about to be my studio. we finally got it all patched up and repainted the room a nice white. i found this rug a while back that turned out to be perfect for the space so now i just need to find a new desk. it feels so amazing to finally have a room all to myself. i am excited to get working on more regular shop updates and blogging more often.

life lately...

+fine line issue two

+i went shopping in chicago and picked up this knit dress from zara. hoping spring comes soon!

+my favorite new plant...it feels so good to finally know how to care for plants instead of always killing them.

+a sneak peek of our renovated bathroom. this has been our biggest project yet so i can't wait to share more details soon.

a peak at our renovated first floor...a few before shots here. today we have been living here six months and i am so excited to finally start making it feel like a home. we don't have much furniture so it is going to take a while to fill up all this space. my goal is to only bring in pieces we love and try to keep things minimal and clutter free. one of the best new additions so far has been the record player my mom gave us for christmas along with a box of records from her amazing collection. we always had music playing in our house when i was growing up and i plan to continue that tradition with our family.

400+ hours of labor and over 20 trips to home depot, we finally finished remodeling our second story. you can see some before shots here. we never intended this to be such a big job, but it all started when we ripped up the lovely pink carpet to refinish the wood floors. it turned out they were old attic floors that couldn't be refinished so we had to install new wood floors instead. this is when things got interesting since we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. since the floors ran underneath the walls and we didn't have a subfloor, we had to carefully cut out the old ones and build in new supports underneath all the walls. our friend helped us install and refinish the new wood floors and then we spent countless hours removing wallpaper, digging out cracks, spackling, sanding, caulking and painting. the upstairs is going to be our bedroom and guest bedroom so we decided to keep it light and painted everything white. a lot of people thought i was crazy for wanting to do it all white, but i love how it turned out. i am so excited to finally be at the point of moving in and decorating!

today we have been living here a month and i still can't believe it is ours. the front porch and backyard have become our little refuge while we work on the inside.

last week we finally closed on our house and got the keys! i thought it would be fun to document our first day in the new neighborhood with a cheap disposal camera. we went out to dinner at the little italian restaurant down the street, took mancha on a big walk through the park and stopped by our local bakery the next morning. we already started working on the house and i can't wait to make it feel like our home!

a little sneak peek of the house...everything went great at the inspection today and now we are so excited to make it our own. the house has so much character with lots of original wood work and the best part is, it is across the street from the park. we plan to do some updating, but i wanted to get a couple photos of how it is now. the woman we are buying it from has been there for 30 years and we are only the third owner.