Showing posts with label Home Projects. Show all posts

A Tour For Christmas

I always think it's fun to see how other people decorate their homes for Christmas. Everyone's home is at it's most beautiful at Christmastime, isn't it? Everything is warm and cozy and bright. It's a chance to get some ideas and soak in all the sparkle of the season.

After seeing the tour on this blog, I thought I'd do a quick Christmas tour of our home too! We don't decorate every room for Christmas, but many of our rooms have one or two Christmasy touches. Not pictured - the kids' little Christmas trees, and the bathrooms. Their rooms were too messy, and I didn't feel like cleaning them before taking these photos, and who really wants to see pictures of the bathroom anyway? On to the photos!

Living Room

We have alot of greens and blues in our living room, so our living room tree has alot of green, blue, and brown ornaments, along with white! We got new tree lights this year that switch from colorful to white, but I like them on the colorful setting best.

Kitchen And School Room

I don't decorate very much in the kitchen or school room, just a table centerpiece, a wreath on the door, and our Thanksgiving-turned-Christmas birch tree. And incidental gingerbread houses.

Front Room/Playroom

The front room (and the master bedroom) have mostly blue-colored furniture/walls, so this is where I bring in the touches of red!

Master Bedroom

I found a few Christmas throw pillows that I loved right after we moved here a few years ago, so now I bring them out each Christmas to add a little bit of Christmas to our room. We also have white lights stringed around the top of the walls in our room, but it's hard to get them in photos. I'm contemplating adding a little tree in our room too, but I'm trying to decide if that's too many decorations for me to manage!

And that's it for the Christmas tour! If you came over to my house for a Christmas party, it would look like this, with a few kid shoes and toys and books thrown around for good measure. If you share any Christmas decorations on your blog, let me know! I want to see!

Things I'm Organizing In 2021 (+Video Chat)

Ah, January! The month when we all suddenly get the urge to organize and plan our lives.

Really though, every January I make a plan to get things organized. Sometimes my goals work out and I do make improvements, like the year I finally developed a morning routine. Other times my best laid plans for...well, planning better, fall through. Whatever happens, I will always love that fresh feeling that January brings. In fact, I am probably even more motivated to get organized after a roller coaster of a year in 2020.

These are three things I'm planning on organizing better in 2021:

Photos

For the past couple years I have been printing up the year's worth of photos in December, including the best ones of each of my kids to put into a little album for their stockings - and I take a lot of photos each year. It is a pretty huge project to sort through an entire year's worth of photos, get them printed, and get them into albums. In fact, I didn't even finish the kid's albums in time this year.

I'd like to handle photos differently in 2021 - my goal is to print up photos at the end of each month. This would help spread out the cost, and also keep me on track with only choosing the very best photos to print. (In December, I found myself getting a little lazy in the 2020 photo sorting and selecting too many to print - I was just tired of staring at a screen and wanted it to be over!)

Home Management

This year in my everlasting quest to find a planning system that actually works for me, I am attempting to organize my own home management binder. One thing I hate about planners, and that has hindered me from finding a planner that works for me, is that I hate wasted pages. I hate them so much that if I feel too many pages are being wasted in my planner, I end up throwing the whole system out. I am hoping in printing up only the types of planning pages I'll actually use, I can create my own planner/organization system that works for me. I am focusing on these areas:

-Cleaning Routines

-Meal Planning

-Budget Planning

-Address Organizing

-Blog Planning

I particularly wanted to focus on getting more organized with household chores and such, because I think I've been in a "survival mode" when it comes to homemaking for so many years (with all our babies and toddlers) that I have really become dysfunctionally disorganized in some areas.

My kids are older now, and I'm realizing I don't have to be in survival mode anymore - I actually have the time and energy now to do homemaking well. I want to do that for my family - I think it will make for a peaceful and more relaxing home environment for Derek and the kids, and it'll help me be a better servant to my family, which is something I feel the Lord is calling me to focus on in this stage of my life.

The Kids' Drawings

All these years I have been putting my kids best drawings in keepsake boxes that I have scattered around the house, but I have had no method of organizing their drawings at all. I write the name of the child, and the date, on the back, stuff it in a box, and forget about it.

I didn't even really think about there being another way until Christmas, when my grandmother gave me a keepsake binder with a lot of special papers she had collected over the years. It was a very special and sweet gift, and it also made me realize it doesn't matter if keepsake papers are put into a beautiful scrapbook, with decorations and photos. They are just as special and beautiful when using a simple organization system like a binder with page protectors.

So this year I am going to sort the kids' art into binders, and create a separate one where I can keep the notes and pictures they make for me. It's a more compact way to store things, and this way those papers can be protected better while also creating a better way to actually look at them occasionally!

I am excited to have a plan for becoming a little better organized in these areas in 2021! We shall see how it goes. Are you focusing on any areas for improvement this year?

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I also made a chatty video about everything I just wrote about, but I tacked on a little mini book haul at the end if you are interested in watching!

Night Tree

For our school in December we took a really laid-back approach. We lightened up on the "have-to" subjects like language arts and math, and we did more of the "want-to" projects and books. We finished out science book, we listened to audiobooks, and we did some advent activities from this Gentle + Classical Christmas school resource.

One of the suggestions in that resource was to read Night Tree and make a fruit garland. That sounded like something my kids would like to do, so I bought some extra oranges and planned to use those dry wrinkly pears and cranberries leftover from Thanksgiving.

We finally got around to it last week! I dried out the fruit in the oven, and then the big kids and I spent the afternoon stringing them into a garland. Then we decorated a tree outside.

Apparently this is something a lot of people do, but it was our first year decorating a "night tree", and the kids loved it! They told me we have to do this project next year too, so it may become a new tradition for us.

The next morning after we decorated the tree, I noticed about fifteen deer gathered out there. Before long all the fruit was gone! The kids were happy that the animals enjoyed their "Christmas present".

Have you ever decorated a "night tree"? Do you do any other Christmas crafty projects with your kids?

The Art Of Coziness: Analyzing My Favorite Fall Show

As I type, I'm sipping on a warm chai. I hear the kids laughing and chanting a rhyme outside the window as warm beams of sunlight angle across the grass. I'm in my cozy pajamas, and the twinkle lights are on.

I figured if I'm going to write about coziness, I might as well get in a cozy mood.

This sudden inspiration for coziness actually came at the end of a pretty rotten day. I checked, and there is a full moon right around the corner, so that might explain it (there is something to that). Everything was a struggle all day, and I quickly found myself retreating into "hide" mode - meaning I locked myself in the closet a couple times to calm myself. Let's just say the atmosphere of the home was not what I wanted it to be yesterday.

After working out and taking a shower, I put on an episode of Gilmore Girls while I fixed my hair. I'm rewatching the show this fall - the last time I watched it all the way through, Wyatt was a baby, so it's been a while. And I started thinking about how many times I've referred to Gilmore Girls as a "cozy fall show". What exactly made it so cozy anyway? And could I replicate that for my kids? A little coziness would be a nice reset for everyone.

After careful analysis (ahem), I pinpointed all the elements that make Gilmore Girls so cozy to me.

Warm Lighting

If you pay attention, you'll notice there is so much warm light in the show - everywhere you look there are twinkle lights or lamps lit - and I think that's a big part of what makes it cozy. It gives you the feeling of being tucked inside a warm house. Whether it's candles, lamps (of which I want to buy more), or twinkle lights, I think that aspect would be really easy to replicate daily in our home. I already do this somewhat with candles, but I want to get a couple more good lamps to illuminate the dark corners.

Good Books

Is there anything more cozy than curling up with a good book? If you are a reader, you can't help but love all the references to books in Gilmore Girls - I don't know if all the books mentioned are actually good, but you know the characters think they are good, and that's what counts. We've been adding more just-for-fun read-aloud time to our homeschool, and it's something I want to remember as a cozy way to reset.

Seasonal Decorations

They really go all out on the seasonal decorations in Stars Hollow, don't they? I'd love to know if any real-life town is like that. All I know is that my kids are always excited when I pull out the the fabric pumpkins and faux foliage that I keep in the box under my bed. When things are starting to get stale around the house, some seasonal decorations are a nice touch to make everyone feel like staying home!

Warm Drinks

Chai, cider, hot chocolate, and of course, coffee. Are the characters in that show ever not drinking something warm? I am blessed to be able to say that every morning I'm awakened by the smell of coffee, thanks to Derek, and it's glorious! But since I don't let my kids drink the stuff yet, I've been buying extra jugs of apple juice at the store lately, so I can periodically make hot cider in the crockpot. It makes the whole house smell good, and it's perfect for keeping everyone happy while we read aloud.

Music

There is so much music mentioned in Gilmore Girls, not to mention the town minstrel, and it sets the mood for the whole show. This is something I'm terrible at, but I would really like to get better at remembering to add some music into our day. I could start something in the morning while we do our Bible time, or I could play soft music over nap/quiet time. I think music would be a really great way to calm the house a bit and boost some moods.

A Busy Kitchen

This is one I never thought about before, but as I was watching the show last night, it struck me that in so many of the episodes, there is a busy kitchen scene (usually with Suki). Even if we don't see Suki, Lorelei and Rory are always ordering in good food. There is something about just knowing that there is something good to eat in the kitchen, or something bubbling on the stove, that makes the whole thing that much more comforting - like virtual comfort food.

I would like my house to feel like that for my kids, like anytime they walk in the kitchen there might be something good to eat waiting for them. I've never been good about meal planning, and even baking (something I love to do) has fallen off in recent months. I'd like to put a little more attention back into the kitchen this winter.

A Close-Knit Community

It's sad that so many Americans have never really experienced a close-knit community, isn't it? Stars Hollow, with it's host of eccentric characters that care about each other despite their oddities, is not exactly the norm anymore. We've lost something.

I think 50-100 years ago, more people knew what a small community felt like. But if you are lucky, you've been part of a close-knit community at some point in your life. When I was growing up, we went to a really small, close-knit church that almost felt like family, Even today, my own family has enough roots in the town where I live that occasionally someone I don't recognize will ask how a family member is. There are remnants here and there.

Even as it's harder to find a close-knit community for my children to grow up within, I am trying to build our own, with family, friends, and our church family. Even if we didn't have an option for those things, there is a sense in which a family is it's own little community, and if it's a Christian family, it is by nature a small cell of a larger community that stretches around the world - the church, the body of Christ. A family can support and love each other despite oddities, and even host their own "community events" in the form of traditions - and we can connect ourselves to the larger context of the church through learning about church history and heroes of the faith. So even as Stars Hollow towns are more rare, I think there are ways to still give our families that sense of belonging to something bigger. We just have to keep your eyes out for opportunities.

Is it worth all this effort to add some coziness to our life? Does this really matter?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how we as moms can help set a good atmosphere for our home. I sincerely think it's something that is worth pouring into. For me, chaotic days like yesterday happen too often for my liking. But my hope is that, overall, when my children grow up, they'll hear the word "home" and think of a cozy, safe place, with parents, family, and friends who love them.

In a sense, a person's idea of home can even shape their idea of Heaven, and the God who reigns over all. I don't always reflect Him to my kids as well as I want to, within the atmosphere of our home (or in general, honestly). But in these small ways, I'm trying, and I'm praying the Lord will use my sometimes pitiful efforts and make something beautiful out of it by His grace.

What do you do to make your home cozy for the fall or winter? Do you feel like you are part of a close-knit community? And, most pertinently, what other cozy fall shows should I check out?

Currently | January 2019

Are you one of those people who complain every time it snows in the winter? Because I am so not one of those people. I just don't quite understand how you could not want it to snow in the winter. You could have brown ugliness, or you could have this!

I think I can rest my case.

Borrowing the prompts here this time around, I'm currently...

Choosing...things for the house. The renovation is back in full swing. Derek is planning on finishing up the kitchen details this weekend, and then the master bathroom is next on the list. I'm trying to make decisions about bathroom tile, and vanities, and decorative items, and which chair to buy for the corner of the living room to tie everything together. Also, have I shown you this flower box thing we have in our living room?

I have it filled with a garland leftover from Christmas at the moment, but I'm trying to decide what to do with it long term. We could tile it over and make it a plain old ledge, or I could try to get creative and think of something cool to fill it. Since I have a black thumb, actual plants are out of the question. What would you put in here? I'm tinkering with the idea of a fake succulent garden, but I haven't found quite the right thing yet.

Tidying...nothing. Everyone is experiencing a bout of house-tidying madness after Marie Kondo's Netflix special, and I'm over here actively avoiding starting any tidying projects. My life over the last several months has been so not normal, between church issues and moving and renovating and Christmas - I just don't think I can bear to put anything else into upheaval. So I'm hunkering down with my piles of stuff, and I'm liking it, thank you very much. I'll tidy in the spring, when my bathroom floor is no longer bare plywood.

Exploring...my unread shelf. One of my goals for the year is to refrain from buying any new books, and to read and/or make a decision on whether to read the books that I own and haven't yet read. There are a lot. I'm just warning you now. In reality, clearing my unread shelf will be a multi-year project, but I'd like to get through at least half of my books this year. Go look at my unread books on Goodreads, and tell me if you've read any of these and what you thought! You can help me know what to read and what to gift to my local Goodwill. (Also, why can't you give away ebooks? This should be a thing.).

Resolving...to actually follow through on my goal of going one week a month sugar-free. I attempted to go sugar free the first week of January, and also the second week of January. After succumbing to stress-induced candy heart cravings, I decided the third week in January was not going to be a winner either. It's just been stressful, okay! I think I'll make next week the official no-sugar week. I'm doing so great on my New Year's goals, huh?

Refreshing...my style a little bit. I've had a limited selection of things that have fit me over the last year because of baby weight, and I realized that my style identity has suffered some as a result. I'm not really sure anymore what items in my closet are things that I feel good in, and which things need to be updated and refreshed. I would like to shop my closet and figure out which things still feel like "me", and which things should go.

That sounds suspiciously like tidying, doesn't it? But hopefully a little less chaotic and a little more fun.

What are you all up to this January?

The "Master" Bedroom (Before We Move)

This house will officially no longer be ours on Friday. I thought I better get a move on and show you the last couple rooms!

This is our "master" bedroom. I put "master" in quotes because it doesn't have a bathroom actually attached, but it's the biggest bedroom in the house. It's gone through a few transformations over the years, and this is what it looks like now, right before we are about to leave it.

This wall color is a good example of how a color can be scary until it's finished, just like our house color. When we painted the outside of the house gray, we were afraid we made a mistake until we added the white trim. When I painted this room "Ice Cube" by Behr, I was afraid I had made a mistake! I wanted something that could feel airy, but could also feel cozy, and when I got this color on the wall it just felt...chilly. But I persevered, and once I added all the furniture and wall decorations back in, it hit that balance of airy and cozy and colorful that I was going for.

I'll probably go with a different color in our new master bedroom, because it's much bigger and I think this color would actually feel cold in that room. But here, I've enjoyed it!