Our Home. My Canvas.
I thought my level of stress about the kids would decrease as they got older. Silly me. Little did I know that stress is like matter. It never goes away. It just moves through different states … Solid. Liquid. Gas. When the kids were still little and new, I stressed about everything. About them getting hurt. About how we needed more locks on our doors … and why, for that … [Read more...]
Did you ever feel like someone was watching you? And I don’t mean in some stalker-ish hiding behind a bush or watching through binoculars kind of way … I mean right in plain sight. Sitting across a conference room table from you in plain sight … In the company of other people in plain sight … And, admittedly, looking straight at you because you’re talking … … [Read more...]
I subscribe to the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ club. I also believe the ‘you can’t build a better mousetrap’ theorem. Unfortunately, I have personal experience with this one. And let me tell you, hearing that snap and that squeal is one of the most unpleasant sounds. Ever. But it works. Effectively. Efficiently. Quickly. Oh, and I’m a card carrying member of the ‘why reinvent the … [Read more...]
I’m not a scary movie kind of gal. A fact I discovered a very long time ago. At the Friday the 13th movie. The original. I watched that movie through parted fingers. And I spent the next year checking under my bed before going to sleep. And then there was Jaws. That was the summer of no swimming… not even in a swimming pool. And never, ever at night. And Aliens? When that thing burst out of … [Read more...]
I can’t believe I’m going to air my dirty laundry here -- but up until a few weeks ago my front porch looked like this … I know, it was pretty embarrassing. A well-traveled path to the front door had splintered the wood … Even Ernie the beagle looks embarrassed … columns were missing end caps … … and the bottom post bases were riddled with rot … In my own defense, I … [Read more...]
Happy Halloween! One of the many things I love about my neighborhood is the number of kids who show up to trick-or-treat at our house. I also love that my neighbors embrace Halloween and get creative with their decorations. Ernie the beagle and I took a walk around the ‘hood' and snapped pics of some of our favorites . . . I love this webbed fence that our contractor neighbor constructed. Very … [Read more...]
Seems like each year at Halloween I add a few more elements to my house décor. This year I came across this fun door decorated with bats … Country Living … and thought I’d add it around my front door. I started with a bat stencil I found here on marthastewart.com. I wanted the bat dimensions to be varied, so I made two additional sizes of the stencil. On black poster board I used chalk to trace … [Read more...]
Woke up the other morning and found this on our front porch: Turns out we’ve been “ghosted.” This is a Halloween tradition that started on our block about five years ago or so. (Mike and I are 99% sure we know who starts it each year – but I won’t “out” her on the blog). It’s fun to watch as it spreads around the neighborhood. As the instructions state, it’s our turn to “ghost” two others so I hit … [Read more...]
Hi there! My name is Linda and I’m a Jersey-born-and-bred Midwestern transplant who lives in Chicago with my husband and two children. We've lived in our home since 1995 and over the years our style has changed and evolved. I wouldn't call my home a work-in-progress -- more like a rework-in-progress as I refresh and remodel things around here ... one room at a time.
