Tidy Brown Wren, bringing order to your nest

Our home is a work in progress.  Actually, my whole life is a work in progress! Ha! Big projects in the house aren't in the works right now since work on the greenhouse is still continuing.  Here it is in it's half painted stage.  Yes, it really is green!  Anyway, as I was saying.  . .  Small projects are all we can handle in the house right now.  One of those projects was tackling the lack of towel bars in our main bathroom.  We haven't done much in the bathroom except pull out the dropped ceiling and add a few lights.   For a temporary fix, I added a quilt rack to hold our towels. I felt like it was always getting in the way and tended to be top heavy when holding wet towels. I picked up some hooks from Hobby Lobby (when they were 50% off) and hubs attached them to some leftover 1 by 4s.  Then the wood was attached to the wall studs for stability.  The wood was already stained to protect it - but ...

Our utility room is finally finished and I couldn't be more pleased with how it turned out. We hired a contractor to remodel our kitchen last year but our budget just couldn't be stretched enough to work on the connecting utility room.   When asked what I wanted for Christmas last year, I asked if we could work on the utility room/pantry this year.  Poor Hubs, I think he would have rather purchased a gift from the mall.  Even with a very limited budget and schedule, we worked on it steadily all year and just finished last week. It took several months of planning to figure out the layout but my Hubs is a genius and is very good at space planning.  He was so sweet to carefully consider all of my storage needs.  He measured all of my containers to make sure everything would fit. Some of the walls and all of the cabinets and the ceiling were torn out during our kitchen demo.  We hobbled along with our little torn up utility room for almost ...

 I'm so glad that red is my favorite color - and that shades of green can be found all around my house.  Why?  Because for the first few weeks of December, that was all that decorated my house.  Touches of red and green with one half-lit Christmas tree standing halfway between the family room and the dining room.   It's been such a crazy busy summer, fall, and now winter that I barely had time to clean my house let alone decorate for Christmas.  And decorating for Christmas is something I love to do.  I managed to find about 20 minutes a day for a whole week and finally got some decorations set out around the house.   Like I said before, the red and green colors I already had in our home really came in handy - all I had to do was add to it.   Ready for a tour before I have to take everything down this weekend? Here is the front porch.  My son found the old firetruck and refurbished it.  It is perfect to hold some ...

Our little playhouse is finally finished.   It's been a real labor of love and a challenge to keep the budget low and use what we already had on hand. Click on A Playhouse Story if you want to read about our little house.   This was how it started out (minus all of the junk we hauled out of it). And now I'm proud to show off our little playhouse all gussied up and ready for some visitors.   After all of the demo and painting, we only had a few more projects to finish up.  One of the projects was adding a new (old) window to brighten the interior a bit more.   Then the fabulous duo known as Son & Hubs put in a remnant of carpet that our oldest daughter was getting rid of.  She donated it to the cause. A coat of paint on the outside made the two non-matching windows look like they were meant to be together.  By the way, all of the old windows we use in our projects have either been found on the cu...