old house, new ideas.

Hi. I'm Elizabeth.

I never ever ever thought I would start a blog.
Reasons not to blog:
1. I don't do a lot of super interesting activities.
2. I don't have time.

However, as Patrick and I have been working on our house the last couple of days, I keep wanting to post things on Facebook that we're doing. I was going to start an album about fixing up our house and the crafts and recipes I've been attempting (thanks, Pinterest). Then I realized...this is what people blog about. People don't (well, they shouldn't) make Facebook albums of this magnitude.

So, blogging it is.

You should probably know some things about our house, because I'll be talking about it a lot. It's a townhouse located in west Nashville. It was built in 1972, and not much has been done to it since then. We have a main floor with a living room, dining room, kitchen, and half bath. Our upstairs has 2 bedrooms and 2 baths. We also have a finished basement that is really cool with lots of potential, but it kinda creeps me out when I'm home alone. Oh, and we have an extra fun little patio courtyard. It even has a small tree. We share a yard and pool with our neighbors, but that's ok with us since we don't really have time for yard work these days anyway.

We moved into this house in late July/early August, and even though it doesn't feel like we've done that much yet, we really have. We had to replace the HVAC right away. We replaced all the yucky, fire hazard kitchen appliances with pretty stainless steel ones. We've also re-routed the dryer vent, installed an alarm system, and a few other various "need to do" projects.

Now it's time to make this place look pretty.

We're tackling the half bath first. Here's what it looked like when we moved in:

Meh.

I don't mind the white tile/hardwood combo. I also don't mind the black marble counter. I can work with those things. I like that they give it character. The faucet and light fixtures, however, have got to go. We're painting the walls light grey, and I'm using yellow, white, and black accents. This will (hopefully) end up tying in really well with my color scheme for the rest of the house (I'll post about that later).

Anyway, the spackle is still drying from the removal of the big 80's style mirror, so while we're waiting to paint I'll show you the craft I made. I wanted a yellow piece of art to hang in the bathroom that was (a) cute (b) cheap and (c) preferably meaningful. So, when Home Goods and Target did not have a satisfactory decoration, I decided to make something on my own.

I took a plain, $4 canvas from Hobby Lobby, applied some self-made letter stickers, then painted it yellow-golden-ombre. Peeled off the stickers, touched up any mistakes with white paint, and voila! Home-made art. How does one make letter stickers you may ask? Well. Let me tell you. I couldn't find any letter stickers at Hobby Lobby that were big enough for this project. So, I bought some full-page labels at OfficeMax (it's basically a big white sticker the size of a sheet of paper), printed big letters on them (like, size 200 font), cut them out and there you are - custom stickers.

I loooove how this turned out! In case you don't recognize the quote, it's from one of mine and Patrick's favorite hymns, "Come Thou Fount". The last verse is:

"O to grace how great a debtor, daily I'm constrained to be.
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,
Take my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above."