Hello there! Yet another Heather here, I’m from Lark & Lola {my crafty/business blog} as well as Last Day Ago {my family blog}. I was somewhat stunned but also so flattered to be asked to participate in Heather’s lovely blog series, Home Made Lovely. I’m a new fan of her blog and I love it, especially since I get my kicks peeking into other people’s homes. Today you get to peek into mine!

My little family of four {soon to be five} lives in urban Denver, in a little ranch house with a white picket fence. We used to have a home almost twice this size in the suburbs, but we’ve learned to make small spaces work because we love the city. It’s also great being less than 10 minutes from my husband’s work. We’ve lived in this little white house for about 4 years now, but it might surprise you to know that we rent! It’s a challenge when renting, to make a home feel like it’s your home. We can’t change the flooring or architecture, but when we moved in our wonderful landlords said, “Paint away!” and so we’ve made ourselves quite at home, as you’ll see…

Many people I know wish to travel the world, and while a short trip to Paris might be nice, I’m actually very much a homebody myself. I think this is what drives me to put so much effort into trying to fill my house with pretty things, because I love being home more than anywhere else. I want my family to feel surrounded in loveliness, and I want home to be a beautiful place to be.

When we first moved into this home, with it’s large porch, I was frustrated that I couldn’t afford tons of big flowering hanging planters. So I made do with what I had at the time, and it turns out it’s been my favorite way of decorating our porch for years now: simple vintage blue Ball jars, hung and filled with flowers.

This is our living room. Most of our furniture has come from either thrift stores {like our couch and coffee table}, grandparents {like my slipcovered chairs}, or IKEA.

The built in shelving has caused me trouble ever since day 1. I redecorate it often, right now it’s holding some of my milkglass collection.

The TV and stereo is about as much black as I can handle in my house. My husband works in the audio/visual industry, so I can’t kick them out all together! {Well, that, and if it the TV were gone, how would I watch Mad Men?}

I love the white wash look of some shabby chic homes, but it’s hard for me not to bring in pops of color all over. I love color, as you’ll see. I’ve never been too concerned with “matchy matchy” color schemes. I just bring in what I like, purge what I don’t like, and somehow it all just comes together.

Sorting books by color can be fun though. I have a thing for buying pretty and old books at thrift stores.

Looking at this wall of our house makes me laugh, it’s a good example of how I don’t pay much attention to matching color, but it also gives a good look at my personal color palette. Apparently I like blues & greens. Mermaid colors!

This is my little secretary desk, where I’m typing up this post! I recently painted the chair a very pale green, though I’ve had it for years.

This is another area that is constantly redecorated, the top of the piano. Right now it’s pretty simple looking. I almost always have a candle burning in my home, all the day long.

I love throwing fun parties, and this door was a prop for my daughter’s ice cream themed party. After the party I brought it inside and turned it into a coat rack. I had plans to redo the chalk paint but for now I like it as it is.

This is supposed to hold our mail, but I really use it to hold only pretty mail and cards. {Why can’t they make bills prettier?}

This is a little idea for those with small homes, since we don’t have a foyer or a mud room or even a coat closet, I painted my grandmother’s old “rabbit hutch” and now it’s a “shoe hutch”. First thing we do when we get home is kick off our shoes and stuff them in the shoe hutch.



The clipboards are unfinished crafts of mine {from back when Lark & Lola did flea market craft shows} and I keep grandma’s old letters nearby because her handwriting was so pretty and no one sends snail mail any more. They make me happy when I look at them.

My great grandmother painted this and so I’m proud to have it hanging in my home. The best treasures at home are things that have been passed down within the family, I think.

The Honey Land picture is actually a cover from a book of antique sheet music. My husband and I are beekeepers, so I loved this as soon as I saw it and decided to frame it.

My girl bust wears a necklace and sits under a cloche, and I often move photos from my old photo collection around the house. I especially love old antique photos of children and babies, even if they never look happy.

My dining room is one area I’ve been working on lately, it seems our home is never “done”. Does everyone feel this way? A few months ago we found a yellow retro dinette table at an antique mall, we loved it and took it home. I’m okay mixing retro and shabby chic, so the dining room has turned into quite the hodge podge of a room.

The cane back chairs were grandma’s and I just recently painted and recovered them in oilcloth so they’d work with the retro table.

As long as it’s pretty and appeals to me, anything goes in this house!

My Pyrex collection {part of it} is also showcased in the dining room. I’ve been collecting for two years now…it’s gotten a tad bit out of control.

I love this old sand toy, the little acrobat inside flips and turns when you turn the box over clockwise a few times. I like to tuck little curiosities like this around the house.

From the dining room we move right into our little kitchen…

Oh! Look at that, more Pyrex. {There may or may not be some more in the basement and cupboards. Shh!}

I find these fun ceramic animal heads at thrift stores all the time {cows, geese, ducks, sheep, etc.} so I thought these little geese would be perfect for holding our aprons.

Our kitchen is a small hallway kitchen, but I’ve had some good fun decorating this part of our home. Good thing, since I spend a lot of time in this room.

We painted the kitchen yellow, I like it bright and cheery, and I like to bring all sorts of color into it where I can.

I keep the little coffee & tea tray at the ready, while my great-grandmother’s glass cake stand holds my recipes and things up out of the way.

Next to the stove I keep some kitchen towels, and the like. The “Eat It” sign is a page from an old children’s book.

The IKEA cabinet fits perfectly in our small kitchen, but holds a lot. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

It holds some of these things for me. As well as a mess in the lower part.

It was exciting to find one of these old kitchen stool/chairs at a flea market last summer, and in pink! My daughters love to stand on it and watch me cook, and that makes me happy.

I keep some old Fire King mugs at the ready.

Moving on to one of our two {very small} bathrooms…

When we were looking for homes in Denver, this one had me at “clawfoot tub”.

I use the small IKEA trolly to keep some bathroom neccesseties. I’m also trying to hunt down more vintage towels, because I love the way they look.

Yep. It’s the deep, wonderful clawfoot tub that makes me love this house. I use it as often as I can for bubble baths.

This bright yellow room used to be my very own craft room! When baby #2 came along a couple years ago, however, we had to turn it into a nursery. Soon we will move our girls in together and this will be baby #3’s room.

I love doily garlands. Violet loves Dumbo.

My kid’s rooms are the only places I seem to do color schemes in my house.

This vintage cart was thrifted and painted pink by yours truly. It serves many purposes at our house, but right now it’s making a nice little table in Violet’s room.

And we recently made the switch from crib to toddler bed! That’s been…interesting.

My older daughter, Eisley, has a bright pinkish purple room.

We’ve kept much of the decor from that ice cream birthday party and used it to decorate her room.



I love all things girly. Love doll houses. Love dresses. Love it all!

{#3 is a boy, in case you were wondering.}

The ABC garland was a pack of flashcards I strung up, I think they’re cuter this way. Also less messy.

Her little roll top desk is a favorite find of mine, as well as the retro play kitchen.

Finally, we’ve arrived at the master bedroom! It’s hard to tell, the walls are gray like the living room. I love gray walls, but our house doesn’t get enough light, so I went with a light gray which is hard to pick up in photos.

I’m in love with the yellow chenille bedspread I thrifted a few months back.

The bright colors of vintage suitcases cannot be ignored, I’ve actually travelled with these!

I had been on the lookout for a vanity for a long time, when last summer I came across this one at a yard sale for only fifteen bucks. I snatched it up, took it home, and showed it some love. It’s been a lovely part of our bedroom ever since. I’ve decorated around it with silhouettes.

I’ll be honest, some days I don’t make the bed until almost dinner time, but when the bed is made, everything in this room is right. I love this room.

Hopefully my vintage jewelry box collection never gets as large as my Pyrex collection…

So that’s our cozy little home! Thanks so much for stopping by and having a peek.
And a huge thank you to the talented Heather for hosting my home tour on her Home Made Lovely series—I’m so thrilled to be part of it and to be able to share our home here!


Cheers,
Heather @ Lark & Lola and Last Day Ago

This feels like a really good way to start the week.

I hope your week is off to a good start, too!

xo

Welcome to Home Made Lovely, a special home tour series.

Hello! My name is Stephany and I blog over at home is what you make it. I am thrilled and humbled to be a part of Heather’s home made lovely series. Many of the past posts have inspired me in the decoration of our home. As you can tell by the name of my blog, home means a lot to me. My husband, Ryan, and I moved from Denver, Colorado to Portland, Oregon 7 years ago. Since then, we’ve bought a house, had two kids, changed careers, and finally made our house a home. For the first four years the walls were empty. I was so focused on the BIG things that needed to be changed (and were WAY out of our budget), that I didn’t focus on the things I could change myself (that were in our budget). Oh yeah, I also had two babies, they kept me pretty busy. We love our family and friends and love to share our home with them, but I wasn’t proud of the home I was sharing. A friend of mine who I go treasure hunting with encouraged me to just start putting holes in the walls, meaning, just start hanging things up. So, I did. And, I haven’t stopped. It all started with this gallery wall in our entry way… This wall has changed, some of the frames are still empty, and there is still room to hang more, but this is where it all began. Welcome to our home. What used to be our formal living room is now a playroom. It’s open to the entry and the first room you see when you walk into our home. I’m pretty sure it screams, “KIDS LIVE HERE!” And, that is fine with me…because they do! It is also one of my favorite rooms in the house. It is bright, cheerful, and gets great natural light from large windows and a skylight. The sofa, storage ottomans, and shelving all came from IKEA. Almost everything else in the room has been handmade or thrifted. I always get questions about the huge letters on our wall. I originally bought them for photo props for a father’s day gift. They are paper mache letters that I bought at Jo-Ann Fabrics and painted black. Our vintage fisher price collection has grown so large that I needed to move the books off the shelves. This old radio flyer wagon that I bought at a neighborhood garage sale works great as a mobile library! You may be thinking, “white slipcovers in a playroom?!” I LOVE them. Yes, they get dirty, but I can take them off and clean them (and do on at least a monthly basis). They also keep the room bright during the grey and rainy pacific northwest winters. The globes were one of my first collections. They also started my thrifting obsession. I bought two from etsy and then figured that there must be a less expensive way to get a globe collection. So, one fateful Saturday morning, the kids and I went thrifting. The rest, as they say, is history. The baskets are filled with dress up clothes, balls, babies, musical instruments, and fort building necessities. The vintage fisher price collection is also all thrifted and are the toys my kids (who are almost 4 and 6) choose to play with the most. You can read more about it here. At the far end of the playroom is our dining room. I was inspired by Meg’s craft house and call it our un-dining room. I’ve written a couple of posts about it here and here. Everything on this wall and the floor below it (except the wrapped canvas photo) was thrifted…the flower tray, the embroidery, the owl, the cool metal wall board, the ball basket, and the globe banks. This corner is filled with embroidery hoops…from all over. I have purchased some from etsy, bought some from Instagram friends, been gifted some, and made some of my own. The vintage map is from Sparrow Mercantile. It’s a happy corner. The vintage school desk, typewriter, globe, and afghan were all thrifted. The antler was a shed I found in my parents backyard in Colorado that I embellished with felt flowers. This map from IKEA was the second step in my crazy decorating marathon. I needed to fill a large wall in the un-dining room and this did the trick. After it was hung, I wanted to start a globe collection…and you all know how that story goes. Our wine bar is a piece of furniture that came from Colorado with us when we moved to Oregon. My mom helped my pick it out and bought it for me. The chalkboard, scale, globe, vintage fisher price, and glassware was all thrifted. The vintage tray came from Sparrow Mercantile. The bunting is something I put together using a vintage sheet, ball trim, and a glue gun (and has since been moved to Lorelai’s room)! I hung a thrifted metal tray on the wall and put stick on magnets on the back of flash cards. It’s a fun piece of artwork that can be easily changed up. The blue frame was something I originally bought for my little boy’s room, but never used there, so I decided to add it around the tray. From the playroom/craftroom/un-dining room, you walk into the kitchen. This is one of the spaces that was on my BIG project list. However, with some whimsical changes, it is very liveable and the center of our home. The pendant fixtures were in place, I just replaced the “shades” with mason jars. You can see the tutorial about how to do this yourself here. I also started collecting vintage pyrex and a lot of my collection is displayed in the kitchen. Along with some vintage tins, recipe card holders, and more scales. The fun decor makes the oak cabinets, dirty laminate floor, and worn counters less unappealing to me. My next step is to paint the walls and cabinets WHITE! Also, the view out the kitchen window is always happy. You can read more about our backyard here, here, and here. It is my happy place. Our kitchen opens up to our family room. While this room is more “grown up” it is also quite playful. I also have part of my craft supplies stored in the Pottery Barn desk by our back door…you can see more of that here. I like chalkboards, and there is one in almost every room. I made the one in the family room from a frame that I bought and the glass broke as I was unloading it from my car. A little chalk paint and I could still use it! I have a few other collections in this room. And, although I ask the kids to keep their toys out of this room, I still have some of my own in here. The dark finish on the back of the shelves (also from IKEA) made it feel like I was staring into a cave, so one day Lorelai and I ripped out pages from a vintage atlas and put them up with double stick tape. It brightened up the whole room! We love our dogs, and this room definitely shows that. The shadow box is something I recently made. The footprint is something the vets gave us after my dog Oak left us 3 years ago. The letters are from Anthropologie. Great minds think alike…do you recall seeing a similar wall in another home made lovely post recently? We have a small powder bath off of the family room. I gallery walled the bathroom. A thrifted chalkboard, my 35 year old teddy bear, and some vintage flash card art are just a few items that cover the walls in this very small space. The subway art above came from Red Letter Words. That cute little needlepoint came from my grandmother. Most of the artwork was thrifted…mostly needle work or paint by number…or came from the artists in my family. I also used family photographs and some framed Katie Daisy greeting cards. Let’s run upstairs and take a peek at the kids rooms… Lorelai’s room came together like magic. It’s the perfect room for a little girl. The chair was a gift from a friend who used to own a booth at one of the local antique malls. I made the dolls. And, the little girl in the red bathing suit hung in my room when I was growing up. The tissue paper puffs were from Lorelai’s first birthday and hung in the playroom for a year. You can read more about the paper bag flowers here. The school desk and chair were Goodwill finds. This adorable little dress was one of my favorites when Lorelai was a baby. I bought it in two sizes, but should have bought it in every size they has available! The painted sunflower sign was my favorite find from the Farm Chick Show 3 years ago. It’s a happy, happy room. Reece’s room has been through a lot of changes in the last 5 years…Go, dog! Go!, Batman, and now hunting and outdoors…at his request. We took his bunk bed apart and he now has two twin beds. One is tucked into a nook under his windows. I put one of the globe lights from my etsy shop up there for a reading lamp. He hasn’t used it a lot yet, but I hope he does once he really starts reading. The artwork was thrifted, gifted, or pilfered from other rooms in the house. The vintage deer stitchery was a recent Goodwill find. I think it was $4. I took the roof off of a vintage Fisher Price barn and hung it up as a shelf…the graphics on the old fisher price are artwork. A vintage paint by number, a photo of our good friend (who is also our dog trainer and breeder) and a few of his dogs also fill the wall. The deer is a whitetail that my dad shot in Wyoming or Colorado. Some of my thermos collection migrated up to Reece’s room and they work perfectly. The quilt, afghan, pheasant stitchery, and Norman Rockwell print were all thrifted. More thrifted artwork. Would you believe I found most of the thrifted items for Reece’s room in one trip to one of my favorite spots for artwork? It was like a hunter or wildlife lover had donated all the items from the walls of his den. Serendipity. The plaid pillows came from our family room…I had them down there last fall and when I was ready to lighten it up I was also working on Reece’s room. Perfection. And Reece added his collection of small animals to his headboard. As much as Lorelai’s room is perfect for a little girl, this room is ALL boy. That’s all I have for you right now. Come back and visit me at home is what you make it this spring and summer…our backyard is the best part of the house! Especially for roasting s’mores, watching outdoor movies, and enjoying summer in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Thank you, Heather, for inviting me to share my home.

-I recently discovered the wonder that is Jergens Natural Glow lotion.  Which, by the way, is the only reason I have decided that shorts are a viable option this year.  And no they did not pay me, but if they would like to I will gladly take payment in the form of more bottles of lotion, please.

-We’re now less than a month away from the end of school and our church’s VBS program.  Needless to say, my brain is spinning at top speed right now.

-Using my creativity helps me to keep my head on right, so I used a few extra minutes I found the other day to create some new prints for my shop.  I like them very much.

-I also made a few prints for my dear friend Kate.  She and her family are in the midst of adopting a beautiful boy and Kate is selling prints to help with costs.  Their adoption story is full of miracles only God can orchestrate.  I’m serious, it’s an amazing story!  You can read all about their story here and pick up a pretty print here.

-My friend Hannah is hosting a special series this month on motherhood and I was lucky enough to get to participate.  I wrote a letter to my little people and you can read it here.

-I love being a mother.  What I do not love is Mother’s Day.  For me it’s a hard day, full of reminders that Samuel isn’t here to make me macaroni necklaces or sneak down the hall with his brother and sister to bring me breakfast in bed.  I know he’s celebrating in heaven with Jesus, but selfishly I wish he were here with me instead.  What makes the day even harder though is knowing that there are so many other women, for all different kinds of reasons, struggling through that same Sunday, too.  For the next few days I’ll be praying for all of us.

-I started a Summer board on Pinterest, which I’m using to compile ideas of things the kids and I can do with our 10ish weeks of Summer break.  I can’t wait until I can sit down tonight and start adding more ideas to it.

-I’m thinking about taking a class this summer, you know…with all the free time I’m going to have being home with the kids every day of the week.  I do think it would be good for me though, to have something just for myself, so I’m thinking about this one or one of these.

What’s life look like from where you’re standing?