How is it already Monday again? I somehow feel like this weekend was both incredibly long and incredibly short. Is that even possible?

We spent most of the weekend outside trying to whip our yard into shape. It’s bad, y’all. I mean this is what we started with…

Evidently the previous homeowners didn’t believe in raking or putting plants and trees in proper places. We currently have an apple tree, a Japanese Maple and a cherry blossom tree all growing under our deck. Yep, under. As big of an undertaking as it’s been, it’s really rewarding to see things start to come together. It didn’t hurt either that Justin surprised me with a fancy date night on Saturday to break up the hours of digging and hauling. I love surprises.

We’re hoping to keep moving along with our outdoor projects this week so I’ll share more about that later. Today, I want to show you a quick and easy project that can help to add value to your home.

Take a minute to think about your door knobs in your home. If you live in an older home, chances are they are brass, scratched or just plain ugly. In our case, it was all three. Here’s what we were dealing with…

Ugly right? Well the fix is easy and affordable! After searching around for inexpensive door knobs, I discovered Lowe’s has them for around $10. Not bad considering similar ones online were at least $15. That $5 can add up quickly! I used a coupon (of course!) and bought enough doorknobs to replace the one on every bedroom and closet door. The best part of this project was that you can slowly do it over time. Buy a few each month and soon you’ll have them all replaced!

As far as installation goes, it’s a piece of cake. If you can use a screwdriver, you can install a new doorknob. We installed 10 of them in under an hour so quick is an understatement. Here’s a { great video } to show you how to install one. And finally, here’s our before and after.

What a difference! We chose to go with a darker bronze doorknob that really pops against the white door. A silver satin finish would look great as well! Whenever you do a home improvement, you have to think about what a potential buyer will think down the road. Updated hardware on your doors is an easy way to add a modern touch to an older home. Here’s a close up,

We’re really happy with the change and loved it even more because of how budget and time friendly it was. What about you guys? Any ugly doorknobs in your home or were we just the lucky ones?

I love to paint.

I love that it’s the cheapest and easiest way to completely transform a space.

I also hate to paint.

I hate when I’m covered in paint drips and hunched over from painting baseboards for hours.

It’s a double-edged sword if there ever was one. As I type, I’m still finding smears of paint of my fingers and toes and wondering how much money I waste on accidently painting myself. Does this happen to anyone else?

I had been looking for the perfect shade of gray for our master bathroom for months and, drumroll, I finally found it this weekend! I’m still not sure who was happier, me, or Justin who no longer had to answer the question “which sample is your favorite and why” every night. Every, single, night. I’m nothing if not thorough.

I decided to start with our dark and gloomy hallway that looked like this…

And after two coats of paint it turned into this!

I still have to paint the trim, but look how much brighter it looks already! We love it. When you have a long hallway without any windows, it’s important to use a light color to perk up the space. Light = bright.

Well I’m off to paint trim and get started on the master bedroom. I have a LONG day of painting ahead of me. Like the guy from P90x says, “I hate it, but I love it”.

P.S. Don’t forget you still have all week to enter the giveaway on my Facebook page { here }. It’s the easiest way to get $25!

If you thought yesterday’s project was easy, just wait until you see what I made with just three items. Yep, THREE!

You’ll need a long dowel (the white rod in the photo below), a couple of screw in hooks and a few plastic anchors. I have to say, the dowel was actually pretty expensive. It was $0.97 at Home Depot AND they cut it to size for me. I had enough to do the entire project with just one $0.97 dowel. The hooks were only a couple bucks as were the plastic anchors. This entire project costs under $10.

Interested yet?

Use the plastic anchors to attach the hooks to the wall (so you don’t have to hit studs) and you have the perfect custom sized rod to display all of your jewelry! I painted my rod white, but you could do any color of the rainbow.

I LOVE that I can see everything I own in one quick glance. It also looks so dang pretty! If I want to grab something, I simply unclasp a necklace or lift up the bar for a bracelet. Easy as pie.

I also made room for a few pieces that wouldn’t work well on the wall, like my stud earrings and perfume. That’s where the shelf came in handy.

I can’t tell you how fun it is to have such an organized (and girly!) closet. In fact, I think I’ll start calling it a dressing room. Put a box of Thin Mints and a chair in there and I’d be happy for weeks!

So there you have it, my wall of jewelry. The entire project–shelf, earring frame and jewelry rods came in at around $30. Not bad for a completely custom wall!

I still have a few more details to share, like how to easily paint stripes and how to turn an item from sale to clearance, so check back this week for more easy ideas!

{ The Shabby Creek Cottage Link Up }

Somewhere along the line of planning out my closet, and in a desire to put my husband’s carpentry skills test, I decided I wanted to build a shelf. The shelf was a smaller part of what you’ll later see turns into a wall of jewelry.

That’s right, a wall of jewelry.

Before I get to any of that, here’s how we built a shelf for the corner of my closet. I wanted something strong enough for me to put a few trays for earrings, as well as give me lots of room underneath for added storage. Luckily, Justin was on board so we got to building!

We started with a piece of plywood that they cut to size for us at Home Depot and a couple of 1×6 boards.

The first step was finding the studs and nailing the first board into the wall. The top of the board was going to hold the shelf, so we made sure to measure the height to exactly where we wanted it. Next, we did the same thing with the remaining board.

Once both boards were up on the wall, we double-checked that our brackets would fit snugly underneath the shelf. One bracket got screwed on the right side of the shelf and one in the middle. The picture below shows the bracket after it was screwed into the back board, but before we screwed it into the front of the shelf.

Meanwhile, I prepped the plywood and trim pieces. They each got a coat of glossy white paint. There’s nothing a coat of glossy white paint can’t fix. Amen.

Here it is after the brackets have been affixed and the trim has been nailed in place. For some reason the right side looks like it wasn’t painted, but it’s actually just a shadow. We chose trim that would create a lip around the edge of the shelf in case I knocked over a bowl of jewelry. It’s not like I’m clumsy or anything *cough,cough*.

Once everything was up on the wall, I took some white caulk and filled in any seams like you can see in the picture below. A friend told me to tape either side of the crack before you caulk and pull it up right after. It worked perfectly!

The last step for making this shelf was to create a fabric skirt to add a little more closed storage. I laid the fabric on the table and cut it to the correct length.

Next, I broke out one of my favorite inventions ever, no-sew tape. This stuff is great! It gave me crisp, clean edges without ever having to break out the thread.

And finally, the finished product! You can even see a sneak peak of the rest of the jewelry wall. I love the bright white paired with the dark fabric. It has such a fun texture, but since it’s black it doesn’t compete with the rest of the colors and patterns in the room.

Not too shabby for two people with very limited building experience. What about you guys? Build anything lately?

When I was brainstorming ideas for this closet, I wanted to make sure that everything had a place. I’ve learned from experience that,

1) If you don’t see it, you won’t use it.

2) If it doesn’t have a home, it tends to roam.

Yes, I actually made that last one rhyme. It’s true though! How many times have you walked around picking up your home only to find a few miscellaneous items that you then toss into a nearby drawer or basket? How long was it before those items saw the light of day again? If you’re anything like us, the answer is pretty embarrassing.

Given that tendency, I was determined to make sure every last item had a home. When it came to my purses, I was a bit stumped. Usually, I kept them all stacked in a clear tote on a closet shelf. Technically they were organized, but I ended up forgetting what I owned and sticking to the same 2 purse rotation. When I came up with the solution, I was shocked I had never though of it before.

Purse Collection, I’d like you to meet a curtain rod.

YEP! A curtain rod. What a perfectly simple way to easily display all of my purses! (Yes, I’m aware I have quite a few. I’m an organized hoarder.)

Now I can see what I have and easily lift the rod to gain access to any purse my heart desires. I also love the pops of color it adds against the dark gray wall. Who says purses can’t be decor?

Here’s a bit further back. You can even catch a glimpse of the “secret” project for later this week. I can’t wait to share that one with you!

The great thing about using a curtain rod to organize purses is that it’s incredibly adaptable. You can easily find one as narrow or as wide as you need and it would also mount easily to the back of a closet door if you’re short on space. Just make sure to use the correct screws!

And finally, the best part of this project was the price. It was only $6 for each curtain rod! For under $15 I got a customized storage solution. Gotta love that.

What about you? Is there a need for purse storage in your life? I’m all about the pressing issues here.

Obviously.

I am beyond excited to share with you the first completely designed and renovated room in our house…my closet!

I’m really fortunate to not have to share a closet with my husband. I love the guy, but I need all the space I can get. This is the first time in years that I have every single piece of clothing and all my accessories in one place and I have only one word to describe it, heaven.

This week I’ll be posting lots of great tips and tutorials to show you ways to make your own closet (big or small!) just as fabulous. There’s even a surprise project (not shown in the picture) that is so easy and cheap, you’ll call your husband to stop at Home Depot on his way home from work.

Here’s the transformation!

Check back this week for tips on how to paint stripes, loads of organizational ideas and the reveal for that “table” on the left side of the picture.

I’ll tell you this, getting dressing in the morning has never been so much fun.

Remember in { this post } when I hinted that the bathroom wasn’t green anymore? Well, this is what it looks like now…

SO much better! Now it’s light, bright and worlds away from that dark green cave. The color is a very soft gray-blue. It’s hard to show the exact color in a picture, but it’s a bit lighter than it appears online.

All that’s left now is curtains, a rug, artwork and finally replacing that 22 year old clam shell toilet. Yep, clam shell. Welcome to the 1980′s.

There’s still a lot to do, but it’s all about doing what you can, when you can. I know I say it a millions times but I truly believe it. Taking it slow and putting in a little hard work will help to really transform a space. All this bathroom has cost us is a gallon of paint and some elbow grease. Well worth it if you ask me.

P.S. We used the Behr paint that has the primer and paint in one and LOVED it! It only took two coats to cover that dark green and saved us the hassle of priming separately. At around $32 it’s incredibly reasonable versus having to buy a gallon of paint and a gallon of primer. It actually saved us a couple bucks!

When we first moved into this house, we knew one of the first rooms we wanted to tackle was the master bathroom. Here’s a reminder of what it looked like…

Here’s a close up shot of the offending window…

That faux stained glass insert just had to go. Along with the Kermit the Frog green. A friend who recently saw the bathroom for the first time actually said, “Oh it really is Kermit green. I thought you were exaggerating”. Nope. Friends, it really is that horrible in person.

Now the great thing about this bathroom is that is had great bones. It’s large, has great storage and lighting in all the right places. The only thing we need to do is give it a few updates. I do have a master plan for way, way down the road, but I believe you do what you can, when you can afford it. We can swing a few easy updates like a new coat of paint and a few accessories, but future plans for tiling, a new shower and more built-in cabinets will have to wait.

We decided to start with the most obvious feature, the faux stained glass window. I thought it would pop out pretty easily, but true to DIY fashion, it was a bit more intensive than that. The insert was actually being held in place by part of the window trim. I started by running a razor blade on either side of the trim to loosen it from any paint or caulk holding it in place.

Next, I used a screwdriver to try and pry up the trim. You can see where I made several nicks in the surrounding trim trying to get it off. Those holes didn’t concern me too much since I knew I would have to paint and caulk everything once the trim was replaced.

After prying up all the trim, this is what I was left with. Not too pretty, but allowed easy access to remove the insert.

And here’s the most beautiful shot in the post…the hideous window finally starting to come down. There may or may not have been a couple high fives at this point. Luckily Justin was there to help me actually remove this beast. It started to crack as we were taking it down and how it didn’t completely shatter on the bathroom floor I’ll never know. It’s currently sitting in our garage waiting to be taken to the trash heap. We’re completely fine with the fact that if we hear a loud crashing noise from the garage, it’ll be this this thing finally breaking into a million pieces. You know why? Because it’s finally out of our bathroom. Out of sight, out of mind is my current motto.

And will you look at that? There was a beautiful window hiding back there the whole time. I wish we could leave it like this but I’m not entirely comfortable with the whole exhibitionist idea. It was pretty for the 10 minutes it stayed like that, but alas I pressed on. (And evidently pressed on the picture. Please ignore my finger.)

I ordered { this } window film online and it took me about 45 minutes to add it to the window. I can’t say I would recommend doing this to a large window that you are planning to leave uncovered. You could see every seam since they don’t sell it in a wide width (see picture at bottom of post) and it was nearly impossible to get out all the air bubbles. I will say it does a great job of letting in light, while adding a good bit of privacy. It worked fine for us since we plan on adding blinds, but I’d try another route if you’re leaving it bare.

Putting the trim back up was also pretty easy. I used some wood glue and trim nails to ensure a cozy fit. For some reason, the previous owners had a flat piece of trim at the bottom of the window but an angled piece at the top. We learned from hanging blinds in the bedroom that angled trim pieces don’t allow for easy installation of blinds. We plan on adding blinds to this window down the road so I simply switched the trim pieces and put the top piece on the bottom and vice versa.

This is what we were left with after switching the trim pieces. Not a perfect fit, but nothing some caulk and paint couldn’t fix.

Finally, the finished picture! I know it’s dark, but I’ll have a better picture to share soon. (Hint: The walls aren’t green anymore!)

I still have some painting and caulking to finish up, but we’re really happy with the outcome. All we need now is 2″ blinds and a roman shade for the top! What about you guys? Did you tackle any fun weekend projects?

Image borrowed from { here }. (Not our actual closet.)

Does this closet remind you of anything? Maybe your own coat closet? This is similar to how our coat closet looked before I got my hands on it. It had one measly shelf hung up high, and lots of wasted space above and below. I’m sure back in the day when everyone wore long trench coats it was handy to have so much hanging space. But today? Well, I think it’s time to re-think coat closets. Here’s our newly re-done coat closet…

Lovely! Originally, that top shelf was the only shelf in the closet. It was hung so high up, it was impossible to have space to organize anything else. We lowered it a good bit and put in an extra shelf for added storage. The box on the left acts as a handy place to store gloves and winter hats and there is plenty of space for all our games. Can you tell we love games?

I think I mentioned how long it took us to clean this house when we moved in, but if not, it took forever. That’s what prompted us to start with the closets. Every bit of shelving had to come out, be cleaned and put back in correctly. They used tiny nails to put everything in. Not correct in the least. While we were re-doing everything, I suggested we paint as well. I picked a nice dark gray that I thought would be an unexpected surprise for a closet. We love it! Oh and ignore the beige walls…they’ll be re-painted to fit the new color scheme down the road.

Even though we lowered the bottom shelf, there is still tons of space to comfortable hang all of our coats. There’s even room for a trench coat or two in the future. You could easily add a rack for shoes on the bottom, but we didn’t need it so I left it empty. It’s all about seeing what you need in your space and customizing it to fit your lifestyle. For us, it was games and jackets. Done and done.

So to recap, here’s the easy way to make-over your coat closet.

1- Lower your shelf! Grab your longest coat and use that to determine just how low you can go.

2- Add more shelves. Home Depot and Lowe’s sell wire shelving for closets. They’ll even cut it in store! We got four shelves to fit in our closet (the extra went into the linen closet) for under $20. Cheap and easy!

3- Organize. Grab a couple inexpensive boxes and get to sorting. Figure out what you want to store and what you need the easiest access to. Items you don’t need all the time go to the top shelf, other items get out within easy reach.

4- Don’t be afraid of color! Closets are the perfect place to inject a bit of color that you wouldn’t normally put into a room.

There you have it, a quick and easy closet make-over you could do in a day and for under $50! The coat closet was just the beginning in our closet make-overs. This week I’ll share the rest of our closet make-overs along with a couple easy recipes that I know you’ll love!

Now it’s your turn…any closet organizing tips you’d like to share?

In 2010 Justin and I were nomads. I’ve mentioned it before, but we spent the year traveling around the U.S. and took a long vacation to Europe. We  loved every minute of traveling. The culture, the adventures, the food…all incredible. We learned a lot that year about who we are as a couple and how we want to live our lives. One of the biggest lessons we learned is that we don’t need so much stuff. That’s right, stuff.

When you pack what you carry in a Honda Accord, you learn really quickly what’s necessary and what’s not. If it wasn’t crucial, it didn’t go. I’ve never been much for clutter, but moving every few months amplified that to the max. Since we’ve moved back, here are a couple rules I try to live by…

Anti-Clutter Rules

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{ 1 } If it doesn’t have sentimental value and you don’t love it, it needs to go.

{ 2 } Don’t have more than 3 knick knacks on a given piece of furniture. For example, on a side table you could have a lamp, a picture frame, and a little memento from a trip you’ve taken. Any more than that and can’t appreciate the actual furniture because it’s covered with too much stuff. If you have a huge piece of furniture (like a hutch) that needs more than 3 items to look complete, try to keep all the items in a similar color palate. It’ll keep the piece from looking too busy.

{ 3 } Negative space is a good thing. Don’t feel like you have to cover every inch of a wall with picture frames/art/furniture. Most of the time, less is more.

{ 4 } Find creative ways to use paint and fabric to bring color and texture to your space. Keep reading to see a great example of this!

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When we moved into our apartment earlier this year, I was anxious to bring a lot of our personality to the space without it feeling too cluttered or costing a fortune to decorate. I wanted it to feel cozy, clean and inviting so I decided to make one wall in our living room a feature wall and do something really special there. As for the rest of the walls, I’d leave them neutral and let the fabrics and furniture add the color and texture.

For this special wall, I took inspiration from an Atlanta artist who’s blog I follow and decided to do a faux wallpaper treatment like she did in { this } post. It has the look of expensive wallpaper for a fraction of the cost! Here’s how I did it…

Step 1: Tape paint samples to the wall. Colors look completely different at different times of the day so live with them for a couple days to see if you really are happy with that particular color. Pick a main wall color in a matte finish and a darker accent color in a high gloss finish.

Here ‘s the blank wall in all of it’s glory.

Step 2: Tape off the wall. I like to run a cloth over the tape once it’s on the wall to really make sure it’s stuck on well.

Step 3: Get a handsome man to help paint the wall the lighter matte color.

(Lovely job Mr. Smith.)

Step 4: Pick a pattern as your inspiration. I chose our rug and then drew out a similar design for the wall. If you’re not very artistic, simply skip this step and use a stencil.

Step 5: Tape your inspiration pattern drawing to the wall where you can easily reference it. If you’re using a stencil, pick where you want to start and tape it there.

Step 6: Start painting! I free-handed the design on the wall with a paint brush dipped in paint and then went back and filled in the design with the darker high gloss color. If you want to use a stencil, you can use a colored pencil in a similar shade to the paint color to draw the design on the wall. Then you can fill it in with paint. I would NOT use a regular pencil to draw the design. It will smudge and won’t be easily covered by the paint like a colored pencil will. (P.S. The weird shadows on the wall in the above pic are from our ceiling fan light that we don’t use anymore because of that very reason. Lame.)

The finished product (sans weird light)! I love how cozy it makes our living room.

In person, you can really see the contrast between the glossy design and the matte wall behind.

So much bang for such little buck! Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, or want help doing something similar in your own home. I’m here to help!