a home decor blog, making it pretty one space at a time
Good morning! And to my American readers, Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow! I wanted to do a post of babyproofing today. I remember when Don first started to be mobile my husband and I had a moment of anxiety- how are we going to make this place safe for him?! It was important for me to let Don freely roam while also keeping my style. Here are my tips and tricks with a babyproofing checklist.
an Image from when Don was just 6 months old and starting to scoot around!
[Read more…]
Today is the final reveal for our stairs for the One Room Challenge!!! Eeeep, this one was a nail biter! Before I get into that let’s backup with a before:
That is how it looked a year before. I go over the big DIY failure of my stairs here. Last December we tore out the wallpaper and it looked like this since then:
Sadly, I’m not kidding. My stairs looked SO bad for SO long before I decided to do anything about it. I painted, added in fancy molding, put up a gallery wall, sanded down the stairs and painted some more. 
Last Wednesday the runner that I picked out arrived. It was my dream rug from Annie Selke’s Dash & Albert. [Read more…]
The biggest issue with my stairs has been what to do with the tread? Let me back up- a few years ago, my husband and I were SICK of the nasty carpet on our stairs. It was old and stained. We toured a bunch of nice homes for Utah’s Parade of Homes and got the idea to tear out the carpet, and wallpaper and paint the stairs. Well, it looked beautiful! And then I decided to put on a coat of polyurethane to protect the wallpaper and everything turned a gross color of yellow and started bubbling. It was a total loss. But we lived with it for a few years. In the winter little paw prints show up from the snow and the air holes hold in dirt. Pretty much, they were a mess!
So last December, I decided to take off the polyurethane on the sides, paint those white and add a stair runner down the middle. My husband wasn’t a big fan of that plan, so my stairs have sat half unfinished for almost a year (face palm).SO embarrassing, right?! Well, once we decided to put laminate flooring in our home at the top and the bottom of the stairs, we thought we should put it on the stairs too. The problem is that I couldn’t find an inexpensive way to do this. My flooring does have a coordinating stair tread:
[Read more…]
Hi Friends! I have exciting news- tomorrow we are off on a vacation to California! We have a house sitter looking after our dogs and home and we will hop on a plane bright and early in the morning! A big highlight of the trip will be taking Don to Disneyland for the first time. My sister who lives in Ohio will also be there with her kids. I am SO excited!!! Just everyone hope that Don is good on the flight. The last time Don flew he was 11 months and not walking yet (which I am guessing makes a difference). He was so good on the flight and I am hoping that we will be as lucky this time. He has his own seat, so that should help.
Now back to the subject at hand- how to pack for kids. I am one of those weird people who likes to pack. I think that anticipating a trip is part of the beauty of traveling. For this trip, we have decided to try to not check any baggage. That means that we have to be SUPER smart packers. For that I decided to try out the EZ Packing system. I went with the starter set that includes 4 pieces. I ended up using the 3 smaller pieces for Don’s bag and the largest one for my bag.
To start off with, I gathered all of Don’s things he would need for the trip. I packed for 6 days plus 3 backup outfits because #toddlers. In the very smallest packing cube, I put all of his shirts. I love that they are all compact and together. Plus they are in there nice and tight so they won’t wrinkle (you know, like when you shove clothes in your suitcase and they all shift around).
I put the rest of this clothes (shorts, pants, jumpers, jacket, bibs, hats) in the next size cube.
The next largest cube I reserved for swim items. We are planning on lots of pool swimming, so we wanted to bring Don’s hooded swim towel. Towels are SO bulky to pack, but it worked nicely to have this on the bottom, and then layer on top his swim trunks, rash guard, reusable swim diapers, sunglasses, a light blanket and toys. I was super amazed at how much fit in this cube!
Baby Lit Books available here (Amazon affiliate link)
I was pretty sure that we would have to buy diapers in California, but spoiler alert, I got enough to fit! They got packed wherever there was extra space. We are also bringing a diaper bag which will have activities for the plane, extra diapers, wipes, travel sized toiletries, fever medicine, binkies, treats, a sippy cup, and passport. I love that the cubes are transparent so that we can easily find what we packed. I love opening the suitcase and seeing organization! You know, instead of having everything fall out. In the future, I would buy more of the small bins for myself so each outfit could take up one cube- it would totally make my organization dreams come true!
In a normal suitcase, I’d suggest packing these so that the bins are in your bag vertically, but Don’s odd shaped suitcase only worked with the bins in there horizontally. It works great, but here is a video the illustrates how to pack vertically if you have the space:
And guess what?! My friends at EZ Packing wanted to offer you a 10% discount! Just use the code Ashley10 at checkout.
I have created a free baby/toddler packing list, just fill in the below information and it will be emailed right to you. I love having a list of everything to consider packing so that I don’t miss anything! I hope this is helpful for you too!
I will be on my Instagram documenting my trip, so follow me there if you aren’t already!
This post was sponsored by EZ Packing. All opinions are my own. I really love how beautifully organized this helped my and Don’s bag be. I would 100% recommend this set to anyone.
p.s. want a free course on how to style your accessories to look amazing? Click below to get your free ecourse!
Guys! I am so excited to share with you this step of the project!!! To anyone just joining in, I am redoing my stairway for the One Room Challenge. A bunch of home bloggers get together and redo one room over 6 weeks- welcome to week 4. To begin my stair renovations, I had the perfect inspiration photo of a big gallery wall on stairs with floor to ceiling beautiful art. 
Then I found an artist with art I really, really loved (Motivated Wall Art on Etsy). She has printable art and I love her modern aesthetic and that she uses a lot of pink. Her prints are also really affordable, which I also appreciate. I picked out a bunch of her pieces that worked together, got them printed, and started framing them in Ikea Ribba frames. 
[Read more…]
photo by Kalee Renee Photography
I grew up in a home that was all about reading. I remember a drawer in the hallway that was jam packed with books. I would pull that drawer open and sit there reading my favorite stories (or at least looking at the pictures). I remember my mom spending hours and hours reading with us. Sometimes we would do dishes while she would read. She read us chapter books and my three sisters and I loved getting swept away in the story. I still have some favorite books that I love to read and re-read that were first read to me by my mom. I love reading because I was raised to read. Because of that, I want Don to also love reading!
photo by Kalee Renee Photography [Read more…]
Hello! Today I am jumping into week three of my stair renovation that I am doing for the One Room Challenge. The first week I shared my plans. The second week I painted the stairs white. This week I will show how to install picture molding on stairs. Here is where we started before I put up the molding:
[Read more…]
Some of my most popular posts on this blog have been my budget blogs. If you are new here, a few years ago I went on a radical budget and we paid off $40k in debt! (here’s the post on how we paid off all of that debt and here are my tips on what you should do first if you decide to get out of debt) One of the things I decided to do was pay for everything in cash so that I HAD to be firm on what I was going to spend. I would go to the bank once a week and get the correct amounts of cash from the bank and put them in envelopes for my different categories of spending. We decided on $50 a week for groceries. I had NO clue how I was going to make that happen, but I soon taught myself a process and I thought I would pass on to you my top tips for how to grocery shop on a budget. I also have two FREE printables included with this post to help you with this process.
Today’s post is about painting my stairs. It’s also about doing hard things. I have been avoiding painting my stairs because it is hard work. And painful. If you have a project like this (since we all do, right?!) my advice is to break it into small steps, don’t over think it and just dive in. Sometimes your brain is awesome and sometimes it holds you back thinking about what a pain every step will be. So get started with an open heart (and listening to a good podcast) and just do it. If you came here for tips of painting a stairwell without a ladder of scaffolding, here’s where those tips begin. Let’s begin with how things were looking:
I had dark grey walls with a dated gallery wall that I didn’t hate and so I wasn’t sure I should update it. But let’s be honest as I took it down, I felt freedom and relief that it was done! Ha! #honesty [Read more…]
Every night, in the middle of the night, this really fun thing happens when my dogs need to go outside, but we don’t want to turn on all of the lights in our house because we don’t want to fully wake up or wake up baby Don. We’ve used our phone flash lights, but it’s not as effective at keeping the dogs from crashing into things as they run ahead- haha [Read more…]
