Kitchen and Breakfast Nook

If I were to describe our new house in one word, it would be: BRIGHT. We noticed the amount of light in this house the very first day we saw it. It gets so much sunlight in almost every room. There are obviously different times of day where some rooms are brighter than others, but all around, it's bright!

I love my bright and happy kitchen and breakfast nook. The previous owners updated the kitchen right before they put it on the market. I'm not sure what it looked like before but I am so happy with the choices they made! In our old house, we talked about doing a kitchen makeover and it always looked like this one in my head.

I love the white cabinets and the dark granite countertops with the recessed lighting. Such a clean and crisp design. Taking these pics, I noticed that I use a lot of mint and teal as accent colors.

I moved my coffee bar over to this house but got rid of a lot of the accessories. With a toddler running around, we couldn't afford to risk it.

The breakfast nook is super cozy and it's where we eat most of our meals as a small family. The wicker loveseat in the bay window is a hand me down from my parents and it is a perfect fit. My mom suggested putting it there and we were hesitant....but we quickly saw that it was perfect for this spot. It allows us to add some extra seating too!

Little man also has his own little table in this space. It was originally from Ikea but I bought it off of Craigslist. We have really been happy with this purchase, it is a perfect place for eating or drawing or just sitting.

What do you think? Ready for a visit and a cup of coffee?

Rope Wreath- Living Room Update

I really wish this was a DIY tutorial post and I could say that I made this awesome rope wreath...but I didn't. We had an amazing weekend at the beach with my parents. It was a cloudy and rainy day on Saturday, so we shopped most of the morning.

My mom and I went into a few adorable shops, one of which sold this rope wreath. The shop owner had decorated some of the wreaths but we opted for the plain one. At another shop, we found a bundle of magnolia leaves and I decided to put them on the wreath.

As you can see....the wreath found a home on our victrola in the living room!

We also found several potted succulents in another shop, one of them is shown here on my milk glass plate.

I hope to post again this week to show you our kitchen and breakfast nook. Hope you have a great week!

Entryway- Hallway Drop Spot

Shortly after we moved into our new house, we knew we wanted to turn our hallway into a welcoming drop spot. I wanted a large place to hang coats, kick off shoes, and drop bags, keys, mail, etc.

This hallway is the first thing you see when you open the front door. That being said, I wanted it to be pretty while it was functional. Some days it stays on the prettier side and other times it is chaos. Because it isn't in the middle of any room, we don't really notice the chaos...and i'm thankful for that. Once we know we are having company, I will typically tidy up to make room for our guests' belongings.

On any given day....the hallway typically looks like this. I snapped this pic over the weekend. It was a rainy day and we were all home after running errands. 

When it's tidy....and i'm home alone....it looks more like this...

Details:

• Bench- hand me down from my parents that I painted white
• Shelf- Amazon
• All 3 baskets- HomeGoods
• Plant- HomeGoods
• Globe- Thrift store find
• Books- gift from my friend, Kim....from Nordstrom (they are actually carved into letters)
• Hanging basket- a small local shop (purchased years ago- can't remember name)
• Mail basket- from Dirty Annies at the Raleigh Flea Market
• Mirror, Letter N, and quote sign-- all gifts from my mom
• Rug- Amazon

Flowering Succulents

Keeping it short and sweet today...just want to share a new plant purchase! This time of year always prompts me to bring plants and flowers into our home more than any other time for year. We went to Trader Joe's yesterday and they have a huge selection of flowering succulents for $1.99 each. They are super tiny and cute. The florist there recommends repotting to allow for more growth.

I grabbed two of the many options and brought them home. I stuck one in a mason jar and the other in a tiny planter I have.

These plants are low maintenance....watered weekly and kept in sunlight most of the day. Even if you kill it, atleast it's only $1.99 wasted! I am excited to see these babies grow!

Our Living Room

This is the most lived in room in our new home. I love its functionality and coziness. It also has more seating so that we can seat roughly 6-9 people without pulling in extra chairs. It was important to me for the space to be functional for each family member and have extra seating for family and friends visiting.

Here are the before pics, from the listing. The room had carpet but we had hard woods put in right before we moved in.

Let's look a little closer at some of the details.

I love this Victrola that was given to us by a family friend. It houses my favorite clock, a housewarming gift from my Memaw.

We decided to mount our TV over the mantle so that we didn't waste wall space on it.

The wall opposite the TV holds our couch and recliner. This couch is super cozy and pulls out to be an extra bed.

Ahh these french doors... I love them. Noah's rug sits below them. He loves to play here.

Our recliner was a Craigslist find from before we got married, 6 years ago! The little table next to it is a thrift store find that I repainted. It has great storage and currently houses our diapers!

To the left of the mantle is this cozy little chair. I know a white chair in a well lived in space is a risk but it is worth it. I can always recover it later. (Chair from Homegoods)

I thought I would show some signs of life....to show what this room normally looks like. This is the mess that was made while I cooked dinner tonight.

Mirror from Ballard Designs...

 If you're still with me, sorry for the picture overload! I'm off to snuggle up on the couch for the evening!

Groovebook Review after 1 Year

I have been using the Groovebook app on my phone for over a year now and I thought it would be a good time to give a little review on my likes and dislikes!

You may have seen Groovebook on Sharktank, where they really took off. They are now owned by Shutterstock.

If you aren't familiar with Groovebook, it is an app that prints up to 100 of your photos and creates a 4.5" by 6.5" photobook and mails it to you monthly. It only costs you $2.99 a month. You can have additional books made to ship to friends or family, each at another $2.99. To learn more visit their site at Groovebook.com. All of the uploading and purchasing is done through the app though.

I have absolutely loved this service. I first heard about it right after we had Noah and we were taking roughly 100 photos of him a month! I was worried that I was running out of storage space on my phone and I knew I would never get out to print them all. Groovebook has worked as a great way to capture those memories in print!

We decided to have each of the first 12 months represent a month of Noah's life. You can see here where I labeled the books with his age. After the first year, I just decided to select the next 100 pics I wanted printed. We still take a lot of pictures of him, but not quite 100 per month!

If you look inside the book....you will see each picture is perforated and the date and time the image was taken is printed at the top. The perforation makes it really easy to tear out a picture to frame or share. Sometimes I will have the same pic printed multiple times in the same book so I can share with family.

I would say the only downside to the images is that the quality is not always great. I really chalk that up to the quality of the picture that I took. You can make edits to your images in your phone before putting them on Groovebook if you want to.

It doesn't handle square images well, so I try not to take a lot of those and I try not to select any of my instagram pictures when putting pictures on Groovebook. You can see an example of how is handles the square images here....

Lastly, if you have a smaller image than the 4.5 x 6.5 book, Groovebook will just add white space around it. It's not ideal but I prefer it to them just zooming in and cropping the image for me.

This doesn't really replace high quality prints for me, which I still do regularly with special images I want to frame or put in a different album. It does help me to capture all of the other memories to hold on to for a long time.

If you have any questions, please comment and i'll see if I can help! If you want to try Groovebook for free for a month, use my code below! (I don't get any credit for it, by the way!)

Another bonus is that it works as a great book for Noah to flip through! He loves to see pictures of his family and friends!