Yesterday I just had to get out of the house. I needed a break from unpacking and writing check after check to repair people. Luckily, we live close to a Super Target and a TJ Maxx. I wasn’t expecting to find anything, but then again, I always manage to find great stuff when I’m not looking. Never when I actually need it. Isn’t that life for ya?

Introducing my new office chair! I’ve seen variations of this chair before in TJ Maxx and shared it with you guys { here }, but I absolutely adore this version. It’s graphic and yet subtle, elegant and yet fun. It will make the perfect jumping off space for designing our home office!

My favorite part is definitely the nail-head trim. And the zebra pattern. And the dark wooden legs. Who am I kidding? I’m obsessed with it all. And the best part? Oh, that would be the price tag. It was on clearance for $99. I can’t figure out why they marked it down, but I’m guessing it was just to make my day. It worked.

I also snagged this cute little bowl to hold our keys by the entryway. It was also on clearance, for $3. I didn’t even realize it matched the chair until I was in the check-out line. I guess I had a thing for gray zebra print yesterday.

I have to say, as crazy as we’ve been with all these house repairs, we still love it. Every step, even buying a small bowl, takes us closer to making this place really feel like home. Cheers to that!

Tomorrow I’ll share a couple easy projects that can help you better organize your home. The first step to a well designed home, is to have a well organized home!

Hope you all had a wonderful Holiday! We spent the last couple weeks spending time with friends and family and working on the house.

And I do mean working on the house. Has anyone ever seen the old Tom Hanks and Shelly Long movie “The Money Pit”? Well, looks like we bought it. (Full disclosure: we didn’t look quite as happy as they did this week.)

In the past two weeks, we’ve had to deal with…

- putting in a new water heater

- having a spigot outside repaired (that we thought the seller had fixed)

- finding out that two toilets have to be replaced (again, something we thought the seller fixed)

- finding out one bathroom has to be completely re-drywalled

- two of the granite tiles they used on the kitchen countertops have cracked and are close to falling off

- our fireplace needed to be cleaned

- the washing machine leaked

- our dryer overheated causing us to find out a completely new dryer vent pipe to the outside needed to be installed

- the house leaked in FOUR places when it rained so bad a week ago…we’re still waiting on a contractor to tell us how much that’s going to cost

- my mom and i spent almost a week just cleaning the kitchen, and again, the seller had a “cleaning person” come clean the place

- on a walk one morning, Justin discovered a sewage pipe leaking in the back of our property…they are digging up part of the yard this morning to repair the damaged line

Is that enough to make your head spin? It definitely has ours. And that’s not even everything. Last week we took all of the wire shelving out of most of the closets and had to clean and properly re-hang every shelf. We’re learning that everything in this house is going to have to slowly be repaired and re-done. Cue, nervous laughter. I mean, seriously?

Even with all the drama, we still love the house. We met all the neighbors this weekend and are blessed beyond belief. Everyone was SO nice and we have a contractor, cabinet maker and electrician just on our little street. Something tells me we will be calling them all.

Even with all the repairs, we did take on a couple fun projects that I’ll share with you guys this week as well as a few pictures of the house post move-in. What about y’all? Did you tackle any fun house projects during the Holidays?

Christmas came early at the Smith house…

Isn’t she gorgeous? I fully admit that I’m in love with an appliance. Now, this is one big fridge. At 31 cu. ft. I’ll have plenty of room to store all the delicious food I plan on cooking in this kitchen. For anyone who’s interested, it’s a Kenmore that we bought from Sears. I researched just about every fridge on the market through Consumer Reports and this model best matched everything we were looking for.

Today, I want to share with you a couple tips on buying a big ticket item. We got this fridge for 50% off the manufacture’s price just because of these few tips.

1. Stalk your prey. 

This isn’t just limited to the jungle. In order to judge when an item is at it’s lowest price, you have to know what it normally sells for. I’m not talking about the manufacturer’s price, I’m talking about the general-every-day price. For this fridge, it hovered around $2,600. There was NO way I was paying that much for a fridge, so for a few weeks I watched the price to see if it fluctuated.

2. Don’t be fooled by a “big” sale.

We bought this fridge a week before Black Friday. Sears wasn’t having any blowout sales at the time, nor had they released their Black Friday prices. I knew not to wait for a Black Friday sale because I had been watching the price for weeks and when it dropped to below $2,000, I knew it was a good buy. The cheapest I had seen it before was around $2,300. Sure enough, when the Black Friday ads came out, it was on “sale” for $3,000. I’m sure a lot of people thought they were getting a great deal, but we paid over $1,000 less with tax and delivery and didn’t even have to fight the crowds.

3. Even after you buy, keep checking prices.

This is THE best tip so even if you don’t do anything else, do this. A lot of stores have a price guarantee. If you buy an item and it goes on sale within a certain amount of time, they’ll refund you the difference. We bought our fridge on a Sunday. A couple days later I happened to go onto Sears.com to check the price of the fridge. It had dropped another $140! I grabbed my receipt and headed straight for Sears. A hour later I had $140 back in my pocket!

The bottom line is, take your time when making a big purchase. Check back every couple days for a few weeks and you’ll start to learn what a great price is and what a “sale” price is. With the internet, I’ve seen prices fluctuate several times in a day. Also, look for coupons you can stack on top of each other to get an even better deal. Lowes and Sears both give you 5% off if you have a credit card with them or if you join Ebates.com, you’ll get money back every time you order something online. There are lots of ways to save if you just keep your eyes open!

What about you…do you have a great tip that’s saved you money? Or did you get a great deal that you’d love to share?

Well, we finally closed on our house and moved in! To say we love this house is an understatement. We adore it.

It’s such a quaint area to live. When we were moving in, a few kids set up a lemonade stand across the street. I mean how sweet and neighborhoodly is that (and yes, that is a word). We really feel at home here and it’s only been a couple days. God is good!

As promised, here’s the “grand” tour. I had planned on snapping pics once the previous owners moved everything out, but moving was so crazy it just didn’t happen. The stuff you see in these pictures is NOT our stuff. They have a few *cough* interesting decor ideas so I just want to make sure you don’t think that’s our style. Ok, good.

First up, the foyer. The stairs you see to the left go up to the kitchen/sunroom/office/full bathroom/laundry room.

Here’s the view from the front door. Those french doors in the back go out onto a patio that also has stairs up to the deck.

Another view into the living room.

Looking back on the entryway. The door you see under the ceiling fan is actually a hallway that leads to two bedrooms, a guest bathroom and the master suite. The stairs you see going down on the left lead to the garage and an extra bedroom.

Here’s my favorite part of the house, the kitchen! It’s even bigger in person than it looks in this picture. We have LOTS of plans for this space. The door you see on the right is the laundry room. To the left of the laundry room is the office and to the right is a full bathroom.

And here’s the sunroom. It really feels like you’re living in a treehouse here.

More sunroom…

and still more sunroom.

Deck.

This is the bedroom right off the kitchen that we’re going to use as an office. It has such a great view out of those windows.

Here’s one of the guestrooms. There is another one almost identical to this one.

Guest bathroom.

Master bedroom with an incredible trey ceiling. The door you see to the right has already been replaced with a window. We’re not big fans of doors in our bedroom.

Master bathroom. It needs a complete re-haul but that will be years down the road. Until then, we hope to paint over that green ASAP. Who paints a bathroom Kermit the Frog green?

This is the extra bedroom downstairs and that door leads out to the driveway. It came in VERY handy when we were moving stuff in. I’d show you a picture of it now, but you can’t even see the floor with all the boxes. Oh, the joys of unpacking.

This is a side view of the sunroom and deck (obviously). This is only about 1/4 of the yard. We’re planning to re-fence the entire yard down the road. It’s actually a really big lot.

See? Look at all that un-fenced space just begging to be cleared out and adorned with a hammock. On the to-do list it goes.

There you have it, our first home! I’ll show you a few updated pics later this week. It is so much fun to actually have an entire blank space to design. So many possibilities!

A couple weeks ago I spent the day hanging out with a friend in Atlanta. After lunch, we ended up at the Habitat Re-Store. If you’ve never heard of it before, it a huge warehouse were people donate old/new building supplies.

I’ve been there a couple times and it’s pretty hit or miss. They have furniture, but I can usually find better prices at a thrift store. If you’re looking for actual building materials, like tiles or door locks, they seemed to have a decent selection. As we walked around, I did find a couple good finds…

I LOVED these rustic lanterns. At $59 each, they would make a great statement flanking a mirror in a bathroom.

Here’s another great fixture. I was surprised to see the original $510 price tag, but I’ve seen lots of versions of this piece for several different price ranges. Again, a nice light to place in a guest bathroom.

I love the details of this glass table. It’s light and bright because of the glass, but the richness of the metal creates a great contrast. Perfect piece for a guest room nightstand.

We also found a great selection of windows (and a VERY awkward drawing of a pumpkin head bikini girl??). There are so many great uses for old windows, a few of which can be found { here }.

The best find of the day was………linoleum tile. Yep, it’s true. My mother-in-law gave me a great tip a couple weeks ago about lining cabinet shelves. I’m planning to line the kitchen cabinets in the new house with contact paper, but under the kitchen sink, my mother-in-law suggested using linoleum tile. It’s thicker, waterproof and much easier to wipe down than contact paper. Such a good idea! The best part, I got 8 tiles for under $1.82 total. I found the exact same time { here } for $2.21 per tile. Sweeeet!

After I bought the tile, I realized it was the FIRST purchase for our new house! How appropriate that our first purchase for the house was under $2.00. Let’s hope I can keep the rest of the purchases around the same price (yeah right). Here I am (below) with the tile, and my second purchase, fabric to make a pillow for our future guest room. It is SO fun to finally be able to have a house to buy for!

What about you? Do you have any special stores you go to for great deals? Have you gotten a great deal lately? If so, I’d love to feature you on here!

Last night I was pulling up the listing for our house (squeal!) and noticed something different. It now says “Sale Pending“! I don’t know why, but it made this whole process seem more real to me. Justin had already seen the “new” listing and being a typical guy didn’t see the big deal. For me, it was exciting!

The past couple weeks we’ve made a couple purchases for the house (that I’ll share later this week), but it didn’t really feel like we were buying it for an actual house. For those of you who’ve been through this process, you know that you’re crazy busy finding the house and getting the mortgage set up, but after that it’s a waiting game. I’m not an incredibly patient person so any progress, even a “for sale” to  ”sale pending” makes me feel like we’re moving forward. 

For those of you who have patiently been waiting for me to update this blog, here’s a sneak peek of a couple reasons why we fell in love with this house. I won’t give the full tour until we move in, but here’s our favorite room in the house…

which leads out to this…

It feels like you’re living in a tree house when you’re there. Only a few more weeks now!

What about you guys…any fun projects in the works for Thanksgiving week or are you just planning to stuff yourself silly on Turkey? All I have to say is thank heavens for Pilgrims. 

I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I kept saying this was THE best birthday I’ve ever had.

Well, it’s because WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

More specifically, we had our offer for a house accepted on my birthday. In the past week, we’ve been through the inspection, re-negotiated and have moved on to all the joys of mortgage paperwork!

To say we are excited is an understatement. We are completely in love with this house. It was actually the first house we went to look at and we just knew it was right for us. Some call that crazy, we just call it luck. We’re both pretty picky about what we wanted in a house, so when we saw this place we jumped!

We are confident this is where we’re supposed to be (40 min North of Atlanta for those of you who are curious) and can’t wait to start moving in. We have lots of ideas for projects we want to do that I will of course share with you guys on here! On a sidenote, I seriously can’t stop watching the DIY network and going to Home Depot to look at things like door knobs and tile samples. It was bad enough when I was an interior designer but add to that being a homeowner…I’m in trouble! I have a feeling I’ll be DIYing in my sleep…

I’ll share a tour of the house as soon as we officially get the keys in a few weeks. Just curious, what was the first project you tackled when you moved into your new home? Did you put up a fence, re-paint or do something crazy like renovate your kitchen? I’d love to know!

While we were up in North Georgia, we hit up a few thrift stores and flea markets. We found some really fun stuff!

I loved these old $35 drink pallets. How fun would it be to use them at a party?! The yellow one was specifically calling my name…

Keeping in line with the soda theme, Justin tried convincing me to get this grill for tailgating parties. It was so cute, but the $90 price tag just wasn’t in the budget.

Speaking of not in the budget, this $110 fan definitely didn’t make the cut. I LOVED it though. It would make a great accent piece in an office. Sadly, it was left behind.

When I saw these large $125 wheels, my immediate thought was to use them to create a light fixture. (Albeit a very heavy one.) I loved the rustic look that could be paired in a really modern space.

Anyone know what this basket was made to hold? If you guessed eggs, you would be correct! I loved the pop of yellow and thought it would look great hanging in a kitchen to hold fruits and vegetables. At $40, it was still more than we wanted to spend. (I told y’all I’m cheap!)

Old vending machine anyone? I would love to have one of these in my house to dispense snacks. I’d definitely be the coolest parent on the block with this baby.

One of my favorite finds of the day was this old pump. I’d retrofit it to work as a bathroom or kitchen faucet. If I was allowed to have red anywhere in the house (it’s a tough life being married to a Yellow Jacket), I would have snapped it up in a heartbeat. At  $85, it would make one heck of a conversation piece.

I snapped a picture of this sign because I think it would be really easy to DIY one at home. Nail a couple boards together, add some paint or vinyl cutouts, and viola, new art! I think it would look particularly good in a little boys room.

Change the colors up a bit and cut a space in the top for a sink, and this would make a terrific bathroom vanity! I can’t seem to remember the price…

When I saw this chest, Justin and I both said we wanted it. What we didn’t want was the $550 price tag. It was an absolutely gorgeous piece that I’m sure someone snapped up shorty after we left.

I loved the colors of these place mats. Put them in a simple frame and you have a great piece of art for a kitchen!

And lastly, we found a great selection of large sticks. The rustic ones would make a great unexpected curtain rod. Just don’t run out to your yard to find a stick…chances are you’ll be bringing in a few buggy friends along with it. Instead, look to buy one that has been treated or dried to get rid of unwanted pests.

There you have it, our North Georgia finds. Did you find anything you like? Or maybe have a different idea for how to use something we found? Share, share!

On Sunday I turned the big 2-7, or as I like to call it, three-years-from-30. Yes, I know I’m crazy. I cried when Justin and I turned 16 because I thought we were getting too old. (Again, yes I know I’m crazy.) However, I have to say this was THE BEST birthday I’ve ever had. Here’s a quick peek at my birthday weekend…

On Friday I had a rollerskating party. I used to LOVE to rollerskate and thought it would be fun to relive a little bit of my childhood. We also decided to dress up. If you know us, you know how much we adore the show “The Big Bang Theory“. Here we are as Penny and Howard. (And yes, that is a dickie Justin is wearing.) Thank you Goodwill!

We had so much fun! Here I am with one of my best friends, Megan! We even convinced them to play a couple 90′s songs. Best moment: we asked the teenager running the music to play an older song. Someone jokingly said, “Achy Breaky Heart”. Her reply, “I LOVE Miley Cyrus.” Welcome to old age.

 Justin also surprised me with tickets to see this lovely lady in a few weeks. I LOVE me some Reba!

On Saturday, my Dawgs beat those Gators,

and Tech pulled out a win over Clemson. Great day of football!

On Sunday, we went here…

and ate ALL of this.

I made a new friend (isn’t he cute!),

and we bought me this. Yesssssssss!

We had a few other fun things happen this weekend that I’ll share later this week. Tomorrow, I’ll show you all my fun finds from thrifting in the mountains this weekend. They had tons of great stuff! What about y’all? Did you do anything fun this weekend? Maybe tackle a home project or two?

Last weekend a few friends got together to throw my friend Meghan (third from left) a baby shower. Her sweet little girl, Jocelyn Selah, is due the end of January and we can’t wait to meet her! I was in charge of decorations so here’s a few pics of what I came up with…

Meghan’s sister-in-law Lisa was so sweet to host the shower. Isn’t her “green room” gorgeous? I used her black and white table cloth as a base, and then added lots of color with tissue poms and cute baby clothes hanging everywhere. I stuck with the colors Meghan is using to decorate the baby’s room…pinks, yellows, oranges and corals. LOVE that color combo!

As part of her gift from the hosts, I made this framed artwork to hang in the baby’s room. Meghan and I put a lot of thought and collaboration into the design and I LOVE how it came out. It’s so fun that I got to make something for the nursery! I’m telling y’all, this little girl is going to be SUCH a Southern Belle. She already has a silver bracelet and a pearl bracelet. I do declare.

I also had to share a picture of the cute cupcakes Lisa made. I mean really…who needs a bakery? And yes, they tasted just as good as they looked.

To add some functionality to the decor, I strung up baby clothes on either side of the food table. They seriously have the cutest stuff for little girls. In the mix were a bunch of cute summer outfits, two tutus, and this adorable birthday girl shirt.

And we can’t forget the shoes. It would have been a sin to not buy these for Josey. An absolute sin.

And finally, here I am with my favorite girl (and soon to be favorite little girl!) Meghan. I love this lady SO much. She just gets me. That can be hard to find so when you do, you rejoice every day for finding a friend like that. Can I get an Amen?

Peace, love and baby showers.

P.S. To see more of the baby shower, check out this post { here }.