Guys. It's spring. And we are living outside. Want to see where we are spending so much time on our front porch?! This springtime post is sponsored by my friends at Wayfair. Come on over, kick off your shoes, grab a lemonade and let's take a tour of our front porch and how it's looking these days.

On the far end of the porch, we've got a little side door that we call a "friends entrance" or an informal entrance (ie. not the big, double front door). The space in front of this door has been empty since we moved in, but it was begging for some chairs and a space to take off our muddy boots as we go in and out of the house. Enter these fun adirondack chairs and this mint green outdoor side table. I had big plans to stain these chairs a medium toned brown (or paint them black) but then I set them up on the porch and kind of loved how the natural vibe matched the wood tones of our porch. So I added a couple of new pillows and this adorable little mint table (which sort of matches our haint blue porch ceiling!) and voila. The perfect place to hang before you head into the friends entrance (which enters into our mudroom).

On the front side of the porch, we added these new black rocking chairs. We loooooove them. That's an understatement, actually. We looooooooooooooooooove ythem. They really make all my little farmhouse front porch dreams come true, don't you think?!

Over on the other side porch (yes, this big ol' porch wraps around half the house!), we set up a porch swing bed! Isn't it amazing?! Some of our nearest and dearest friends shared this amazing piece with us as they didn't have a home for it. Such a sweet gesture and something we remember every time we swing. We've already spent countless hours relaxing out here during the day or watching the stars at night. It's so lovely!

So there you have it- the current state of our springtime farmhouse front porch. We recently taught our kids that "front porch sittin" is a thing. On the way home from school the other day, HDawg asked me if we could go home and "front porch sit". Yes, son, I think that sounds like a great idea : )

For more information on our front porch (all sources, paint colors, etc) check out this post.

Hey friends! I've been sharing tours of the new farm house (both here on the blog and over on Instagram), but most of those have been tours of the house empty, before we moved in. I figured it was high time to photograph the house now that we've been living in it for almost four months! So let's look around!

I filled our glass front cabinets with our daily dishes, which are a sweet blue and white porcelain dinner set you can find here. We got them (almost 9!) years ago at our wedding and I still love them every day. And now I get to look at them! I also added a few cutting boards, a banana stand (looks like someone needs to go grocery shopping...), plants, cookbooks and our countertop compost bin. A lot of you have asked me about that bin, I plan to do a blog post with details and my review soon (spoiler: I love it)!

Over on the other side of this wall of cabinets, we made a little coffee station. We've got our toaster and my new coffee maker set up here. It's like the go-to breakfast spot as we're headed out the door (the mudroom is behind this wall so it really is a walk-through as we head out the door!).

Back to the opposite end of the cabinet wall, you can see a peek of our pantry door (behind the empty banana stand! Someone buy me some bananas already!). The pantry basically is a little room which runs behind the counter and stove area. On the other side of the pantry, it opens up into our keeping room.

And this is the view of the kitchen you have from the open concept living room. All the heart eyes.

Then, of course, you have our big, beautiful island with our big, beautiful farmhouse sink. I still can't believe I get to wash dishes in here every day! This looks out to our living room and our covered porch. To the right of the island is our built in breakfast nook.

Finally, can we talk about the custom vent hood? Man, I researched and researched and researched the heck out of this vent hood. I feel like it deserves it's own post? The short version is that I designed it and our carpenter built it. It's basically a streamlined, modern vent hood cover with shiplap. Super technical description, ha. And a cute little wood accent piece. Don't forget that little guy, I think that wood accent makes the hood. Let me know if you have questions on the vent hood and I'll do a separate post!

So there you have it, my dream kitchen come to life. It feels so great that it's all ours and, truly, it feels like home. We've hosted many friends and family, cooked many family dinners and had many great moments in this kitchen already. I look forward to years more ahead!

For a full list of sources on things like counters, tile, lighting and more, check out this post.

Well, folks. Pegboards. They aren't the sexiest home decor project around but man, these things are a game changer! After years of renting, David's tool organization basically consisted of a bunch of giant tool bags/boxes/buckets filled with whatever tools we could squish in. So when I hollered out, "honey! I need an allen wrench!" (okay, I never yelled that out, but work with me here), we were basically lost in a sea of tools. We could never find anything. Meaning we could never get anything accomplished around the house!

Fast forward to the new farm house... David's got a whole workshop to himself in the basement. He's got double doors, some pretty transom windows and a whole bunch of space. We basically just moved all of the bags/boxes/buckets to the new house and decided to organize from there. And how did we do it? With a WHOLE bunch of amazingly handy hooks, hangers and pegboard accessories, all from National Hardware.

Let's take a quick tour of the madeover space, shall we? We dedicated one wall of the workshop to hanging large items like our tall work ladder and power yard tools. There's also some great hooks (like these!) for hanging rakes, shovels, etc. It still impresses me that we don't have them all piled up in the corner anymore. Such baller status.

The other main wall of the workshop is our dedicated pegboard wall. This pegboard project was massive, but gave us so much organizational space! We even wrapped the corner of the wall, as you can see here. Our basement space is not finished (ie. no drywall), so all we had to do was to cut the pegboard sheets (picked up at our local hardware store) to fit our space and then (using pegboard spacers) simply drilled and attached the pegboard sheets into the studs.

The workbench space is my favorite part of the whole project. I'm not even kidding when I tell you that the organization factor here makes me giddy. Those shiny tools all lined up just make me so happy! Most of the hooks we have in the pegboard can be found here. We added a few shelf brackets to create even more storage space for small items like spray paint and reference books. The clip pendant lights are available at most local hardware stores and while they obviously provide more detailed lighting, they also provide an extra amount of style. Love. This. Space.

Here's a view of the entire space, for a full perspective.

A makeover post isn't any good unless you've got before and after photos, am I right? 

Before:

After:

Hey friends! Since you've already seen our master bedroom and closets and you got a sneak peek from my tile source post, I thought it was high time I share our entire master bathroom. This room is one of my favorite rooms in the house (I think I say that about every room?!). There aren't a lot of rooms in the house that we "went big" on in terms of splurging on size or finish. But this master bathroom? Oh, boy, we went big. Literally- it's huge. Equipped with two 72" vanities (his and hers), a powder room toilet closet, a clawfoot tub niche and the world's most gigantic shower, and I'd say this is quite the bathroom! And what's funny, it bears a lot of resemblance to the master bath we renovated at our old ranch house, which you can see here. I guess you love what you love!

A few things about this space I wanted to mention. I love the symmetry. We've got a vanity on either side and then the shower mirrors the powder/toilet closet and the tub sits smack dab in the middle. Symmetry makes my heart happy! Speaking of that tub, it's another thing I love. Like, a lot. I knew I wanted to make that niche something special, so we added shiplap and custom built-in shelves to the space. Originally, we had painted the shiplap Alabaster, like the walls, but eventually decided they needed to stand out with a soft gray. In the shower, we chose a basketweave marble tile for the floor and used subway tile for the walls and bench. That bench is so perfect for shaving my legs! And then one of my favorite elements is that we used some of the marble floor tile to trim out the edge of the shower along the glass, on the floor and in our shampoo shelf insets. It's all in the details! One detail I did leave out, though, was the vanity mirrors. I couldn't find anything I liked that was large enough, so we decided to do (super cheap) plate glass and either frame it out or replace it down the road. That's a good building tip- if you can't make up your mind, don't waste money on a choice that's not your favorite!

We're so happy with how this bathroom turned out. It's truly a dream room. Now that we've moved in, I've added some really pretty warm wooden and other natural tones with accessories, baskets and a makeup table. I can't wait to share updated pictures soon!

Sources:

all tile and grout sources listed here

wall paint color: Sherwin Williams Alabaster

trim paint color: custom color (similar to SW Alabaster)

shiplap paint color: Sherwin Williams Passive

clawfoot tub

tub faucets/plumbing (polished nickel)

vanities: Legacy cabinets in Ash color

vanity hardware

sink faucets (polished nickel)

shower plumbing by Moen (polished nickel)

Hey friends! Some of the most-asked questions about our new farmhouse so far are about sources and information for our tile and grout. So here we go! A full source list for all of the tile selections we made in our house. As an FYI, I sourced all of the tile myself (outside of the selection presented to us by our builder's tile installation company) for a few different reasons. I've got a whole post drafted which shares the pros and cons behind sourcing your own materials, coming your way! Let me know if you have any questions about the peaks of the rooms you're seeing and I'll answer them when I finish up the reveal for each room in the house. Until then, all the tile + grout sources coming right atcha.


laundry room floor tile
laundry room grout: Delorean Gray


guest bathroom floor tile
guest bath floor grout: Bright White
guest bathroom shower wall tile
guest bath wall grout: Delorean Gray



kitchen backsplash tile
kitchen grout: Cape Gray




master bathroom floor (and shower trim) tile
master bathroom shower wall tile
master bathroom shower floor tile
master bathroom grout (all): Rolling Fog



both kids' bathroom shower wall tile
both kids' bathroom floor tile
both kids' bathroom grout (all): Cape Gray

This post is brought to you in partnership with Floor and Decor.

Now that I've started decorating our new house (we've been living in it for about two months now!), I thought I'd share some "finished" (let's be honest and just call it "progress!") shots. So, yes, right now I'm jumping all over the whole wide timeline spectrum as I'm currently sharing posts from the building process, tours of the empty house right before we moved in and now photos of the finished spaces with furniture. Hot mess express over here, but I'm just so excited to share it all, so bear with me.

So today, on a Saturday morning when you're hopefully hanging around your breakfast table with your family, I thought I'd share our breakfast nook! We designed this little "L" shaped corner with a corner bench in mind, and had our carpenters build in the bench (which opens on hinges for extra storage) during construction. This space sits between the kitchen and the keeping room, so we wanted to tuck the table away in the corner so it doesn't block the flow of traffic. And now we've got an adorable, window-lined little nook for breakfast and, oftentimes, lunch! The kids love it and really enjoy having their friends over to eat with them in this space.

Two questions for you on the light: 1) is it too small? 2) should I paint it brass or ORB?) Let me know what you think and thanks for the insight! Sources below!

round dining table
vintage white ladderback chairs
buffalo check pillows (so cheap, people!)
industrial pendant light
vintage printer/typewriter letter tray