Design
A Mood Board for Our Giveaway Winner
In January, we celebrated a significant milestone: reaching 1 million followers on Instagram! To celebrate this community, we launched an exclusive room-makeover giveaway. We narrowed down thousands of entries and trusted our Love Letter subscribers to choose a winner among five finalists. The lucky winners, Jack & Jim, are transforming an 1890s former frat house into […]
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October 3, 2023
Decor
My Top 36 Coffee Table Books: The Most Versatile Home Decor
I'm not exactly sure when or how it happened, but somehow, seemingly on accident, I've accumulated a burgeoning collection of one of my favorite home decor elements—coffee table books. My love for beautiful visuals and inspiring reads had unintentionally blossomed into a full-fledged collection. And lately, they've evolved into one of the most versatile home […]
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September 21, 2023
Casual Friday
Casual Friday: What I'm focusing on this year
Sources Over the holiday, Chris's brother and his family stayed with us for a week and it felt so good hosting family. Their 4 children almost perfectly align in age to our 3 girls, plus they have a little baby--which I held as much as I could while they were here! On New Year's eve, […]
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January 7, 2022
Design
Before and NOW: The Bonus Room
I've been envisioning hanging out in a fully-finished bonus room over the holidays, and it's official–the bonus room is complete! Well, for now. I still want to do a big gallery wall coming up the stairs, but I think that's something that will happen over time. For now, I have to say--this room is everything […]
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December 17, 2021
DIY
How We Made Our Hidden Door in the Bonus Room
When Jules gets an idea in her head, it's not a matter of "if" so much as "when". So when she brought up the idea of making the extra door in our family room, that leads into the playroom, hidden, I knew I had to figure a way to make it happen. Though this was […]
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November 30, 2021
DIY
Progress in the Bonus Room
It's been 2 weeks since I shared all the lighting I chose for the bonus room, and we have made so much progress in that space since then. We started with installing the paneling, but rerouted when we decided to install a transom above the door. A follower suggested we put in a pocket door […]
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October 26, 2021
DIY
DIY: How To Add Planking to Any Wall or Room
A while back, I shared in this post that I wanted to add planking to the entire bonus room (or family room), wall-to-wall-to-ceiling. We've added planking many times before, but to never an entire room. The bonus room is where we're finding ourselves hanging out together as a family. We love to pile in on […]
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September 30, 2021
Design
Build A Room: Decorating a TV Room in Phases, all for under $4500
This post is sponsored by Walmart Every so often, we like to do mood board posts, that build on each other in budget-friendly increments that's more true to life. It's rare to purchase everything for a room in one sitting, right? More often than not, a room comes together over time as budget permits. Here’s […]
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August 19, 2021
Decor
Try This: A Blanket over the Back of your Sofa as a Design Element
You can find our living room sources here! After the holidays, I shared how I spent some time playing musical furniture (a favorite game of mine), and suddenly home never felt so good. Even our living room, which has already evolved entirely since we moved in, received some zhushing and now all I want to […]
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January 20, 2021
Decor
Our Dramatic Basement Family Room Makeover
Last week, we got word that our sofa line with Interior Define was going to be on sale later this month and they would love new assets to promote the sale. Cue us frantically squeezing in a basement family room paint session to make it look its best. The truth is, we have been meaning […]
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September 17, 2020
Design
How To Style a Room with Carpet as the Foundation
This post is sponsored by The Carpet & Rug Institute. Visit www.beautyofcarpet.com to enter the Sweepstakes for a chance to win a $500 Visa Gift card! I often get asked, "What's the best way to design a room with wall-to-wall carpet?" We know all about carpet! In fact, when we renovated our downstairs 3 years ago, […]
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March 7, 2019
Art
A Gallery Wall of Favorite Toys for the Playroom (+ a Coupon Code to Mixtiles!)
This post is sponsored by Mixtiles. There's a special offer for ALL of our readers at the bottom of the post. There has always been a blank wall in the corner of the playroom that I've been meaning to tackle, but just kind of waiting for inspiration to strike. And then last week, I thought, what if […]
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September 25, 2018
Decor
Modern, Inexpensive, Large-Scale Portraits--Updated!
Over three years ago, I photographed our, then, two little girls in a simple and modern way, and blew them up as engineering prints and the result took the internet by storm. The project has been shared and duplicated hundreds of thousands of times and today, I thought I'd share a little update. Because they grew up […]
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February 7, 2018
Decor
IN STOCK ALERT: The Arteriors Jacob Coffee Table Look-A-Like is back!
Over a year ago, back in September 2016, I found an almost identical look-a-like to our very popular coffee table that now lives in the reading room: But, up until recently lived in our family room/playroom downstairs. It sold out that day, everywhere, and hasn't been back since. I set up an in-stock alert on […]
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January 22, 2018
Decor
A Kid-Friendly Christmas "Mantle" in the Playroom
This post is in partnership with Lowe's. Since this is the first holiday season that we'll have the playroom/family room completed, we wanted to deck it out a little bit since we spend so much time down here. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit Lowe's headquarters and peek at their Holiday collections […]
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November 17, 2016
Decor
High / Low : Our ARTERIORS Home Jacob Coffee Table Dupe!
The coffee table we used, and love so much, in our family room has a look-a-like and I can barely believe my eyes! Last week, on Instagram, one of our readers showed off their new beautiful coffee table and tagged me in the caption saying they were inspired by ours. (Update: It was @wendellswartz. You can see […]
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September 13, 2016
DIY
Before And After: Our Basement Family Room is Finished!
Before and After days are always fun around here, and this one is especially sweet since we have been working on our family room in the basement for at least 8 months, a surprising amount of time when I went back to see when we started. Now, we're calling it done (for now, I just can […]
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August 8, 2016
DIY
How to Make an Indoor Swing!
We're this close to being done with our family room/playroom, but we had one more project up our sleeve--a DIY indoor swing! This simple DIY was also quick and cheap and now it's officially the most coveted seat in the house. The corner fireplace (you can see that makeover here) pushed the area rug, table, […]
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July 12, 2016
Cleaning & Organization
A Peek Into our Toy Storage in the Playroom
We've had our toy storage for a couple months now (in their proper spot for a few weeks) so I figured it was high time I show them off and give you an initial review. And since we recently hung this large canvas print from Anewall above the dressers, this portion of the room is […]
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April 27, 2016
Decor
DIY Shiplapped Built-Ins: Finished and Styled!
We got word that our sectional will be here next Tuesday! That mixed with finishing the built-ins this past weekend has us just about ready to stick a fork in our downstairs family room. It's hard (for even me!) to believe that the last time we showed you our built-ins downstairs they looked like this: […]
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April 20, 2016
