Some people are surprised to hear that we illuminate our entire pool area using nothing but solar LED landscape lights. As in: the sun provides free evening ambiance with zero effort on our part. Nothing has to be plugged in. Our electric bill feels zero impact from softly illuminating this entire area of our house. So today I wanted to share the 3 solar products we use in case you want to give your own outdoor space a literal glow-up.

 hooks / wall scuppers / chair / drum stool / sconce / doorknob / white pot / lounge chairs / solar path lights

Technically we have a porch light and in-pool lights too, all of which use traditional electricity, but we almost never turn them on. Honestly, they’re a little blinding and we like a soft glow that doesn’t block out our view of the stars. Instead, day-to-day (or night-to-night?) we just rely on our solar-powered LED lighting for that oh so charming come-hither glow.

Continue reading Using *Only* Solar Lights To Add Backyard Ambiance at Young House Love.

It’s time once again to throw open every cabinet, drawer, and door to show you how we organized our kitchen, which we slowly renovated over the last two years (more on that slow but steady reno here). This post should be an especially fun one because you’ll see just how much we’ve improved upon the original organization of this kitchen, which we shared in this post almost two years ago. And, as usual, we made a video walk-through of the whole thing too, which also explains a few future plans involving two outdoor cabinets that we plan to add to the nearby kitchen porch. So yeah… lots to cover.

chairs | table | woven pendant | bookshelf | knife block | fruit bowl | toaster | similar plant pot

We’ll start with the video, because it’s truly the most comprehensive way to understand exactly what goes where in our new kitchen.

Continue reading How We Organized Our Small Kitchen (Hooray For Hidden Storage) at Young House Love.

We’ve mentioned how we use our pressure washer to revive various things around the house – like outdoor furniture and even an indoor rug – but we still hear from people who fear that it’s complicated to set up or expensive to buy or hard to control… and the good news is that it’s none of those things. So this post is a comprehensive start-to-finish guide for anyone who’s finally ready to get their pressure washing feet wet (maybe even literally).

Pressure washing is an easy, affordable, and TOTALLY AWESOME way to keep your outdoor spaces looking fresh. So I’m walking you through everything from setting it up and turning it on, to where and how we use ours. It makes such an insane difference every spring, I’d even call it a DIY VIP.

We were a bit intimidated the first time we tried pressure washing nearly 10 years ago.

Continue reading A Beginner’s Guide To Pressure Washing (It’s Affordable, Simple, & So So Satisfying) at Young House Love.

You know I love writing a spare-no-details product review (like this one and this one), so when enough people pointed out that when they search the blog for info about our beloved air purifier, nothing really comes up, I thought… I shall remedy that today.

I know. I’m a hero.

I feel like I should also point out that we bought these ourselves with our own money and nobody at their company knows us from Adam.

Sherry has always suffered from bad seasonal allergies, so we were thrilled to find a home air purifier that finally gave her the allergy relief that so many companies promise. The allergy difference that it makes for Sherry is night and day. So much so that when they were packed in the pod while we were moving she was like “WHY ARE MY ALLERGIES KILLING ME?!?!” and then we were like….

Continue reading Our Favorite Allergy-Busting Home Air Purifier at Young House Love.

Anyone who lives in a small-ish space knows that thoughtful storage can upgrade so many aspects of your life at home when it’s done right (and it can be a daily frustration when it’s not done well or at all). No matter how big your rooms are or how many you have, you just want to be able to access things easily & keep them in a smart spot – and downsizing from our 3150 square foot house to this 1400 square foot home last year definitely challenged us to be even more mindful about how we incorporate the most useful storage systems into our home. Suddenly we were living in 6 rooms (down from 14!) and we also no longer have a garage, an attic, a big outdoor shed/workshop, or even a closet in most of the bedrooms (of our 3 bedrooms, only 1 had a closet when we bought this house!).

Continue reading 7 Smart Storage Pieces That We Rely On Every Day at Young House Love.

“We just couldn’t figure out why you weren’t tearing out the kitchen.”

That’s what one of our contractor’s guys said to us right as we moved in last year. I understood his confusion. We were redoing floors, moving doors, vaulting ceilings, etc – but we left the small old kitchen relatively untouched – complete with mauve laminate countertops. You can see what I mean in this post.

But to know us is to know that we strongly prefer to live with an expensive-to-renovate room like a kitchen first, just so we don’t rush into spending major money on big permanent changes that we might later regret or wish that we thought through a little longer. So we spent the last 16 months debating various big ideas for this room, all while peppering in some simple smaller updates to get a feel for how they help improve the space and what we might want for our more long-term plan.

Continue reading 9 Ways We Made The Most Of Our Small Kitchen at Young House Love.

Note: This post was born from an updated Before & After page that we heard people were having trouble finding (since it wasn’t at the top of our blog feed). So here it is, forever immortalized as a chronological post. And now, since we’ll continue to update our Before & After page over time, we have this post frozen in time, which is nice to look back on. Wish we had done it around 6 months in and at the year mark too.

We downsized to this 1,400 square foot house in Northwest Florida on May of 2020 after a fast, furious, and long-distance three-month renovation. You can read more about how we found ourselves craving a pared-down lifestyle for our family here and here (that last one is a really good synopsis of what led us to this exact spot).

Continue reading Before & After Photos: 14 Months In! at Young House Love.

Believe it or not, we’ve lived in our new house for over six months now. Half a year! So we thought this would be a good time to check in on some of the goals we had for moving and downsizing to see what has met and exceeded our expectations – along with detailing some of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered along the way.

This is going to be long & detailed, because it feels like there’s a lot of ground to cover, and while this rundown will be pretty specific to our situation, I think it’ll still give you a good window into the realities of downsizing that you might also encounter if you were to go for it. And yes, it includes money details. And a chart. You know I love charts.

To Recap, Why Did We Move?

We’ve got a thorough explanation of our reasons for moving from Virginia to Florida in this post from February.

Continue reading Realities Of Downsizing: The Good, The Bad, & The Unexpected at Young House Love.