In case you haven’t had a chance to listen to this week’s podcast or read the transcript, we wanted to put our big news into an actual blog post. It’s basically a combination of info from the podcast + additional details based on some common questions that kept rolling in. It’s one of the biggest life changes we’ve made in the last decade, so it feels good to get everyone up to speed in this post. And a huge thank you for all the support and encouragement you’ve shared for this new adventure of ours. We can’t wait to live with less, be outside a lot more, and eat even more fresh caught shrimp than we ever thought possible. And yes, to everyone asking – we definitely plan to share more about paring down, moving, the renovation, and even things like getting settled in a new area and feeling at home as this new chapter of ours unfolds.

Continue reading Holy Buckets, We’re Moving! (To A Smaller House In A New State) at Young House Love.

Someone asked me the other day for details on how we organized the beach house kitchen, which is something we photographed and filmed this summer to share with you guys, and when I went to send them the link to this post, I realized that we never actually wrote it! So yes, these pictures sat on the camera for months as my tan faded, along with memories of warm days spent with my toes in the sand (current status: toes in my Ugg slippers because it’s freezing!).

Years ago you guys liked having a look inside of our Richmond kitchen cabinets, so John and I had some fun snapping lots of organizing photos for this post last August (and filming what is perhaps the WEIRDEST video of our lives – please watch it if you can because I can’t even really explain what came over me, but John finds it highly amusing).

Continue reading How We Organized The Beach House Kitchen at Young House Love.

I’m so excited to share how we constructed these built-in pantry shelving for our beach house. They’re surprisingly straightforward to construct and can be easily customized to any space, even if you’ve got a small pantry or simple pantry closet. They’re made entirely of two things: 3/4″ MDF sheets and 1 x 2″ pine boards (well, and some screws and nails). Plus, this process can be easily adapted to just about any space where you want to add some custom storage or shelving (bedrooms, playrooms, living rooms, etc). So even if you’re a beginner, you can do this. Seriously.

The technique we used is one we’ve used twice before: first in our son’s room and later for our living room built-ins (shown below). Call me a creature of habit, but this method is easy to execute and we’ve always loved the finished look.

Continue reading How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves at Young House Love.

BEHOLD! The new & improved middle bedroom at the beach house (*crowd goes wild, people do The Hype, battle rap horns sound, DJ Khaled shouts “DJ KAHLEDDDDD”, maybe Cardi B. is there with one of those t-shirt cannons?*). I hope you enjoyed that mental image as much as I did.

daybed / rug / curtains / gold frame / wallpaper / ceiling fan

ANYWAY, the beach house middle bedroom update is done, and I can’t get over how sweet the board & batten and the wallpaper look together – especially with the old heart pine floors and doors. Those are 115 years old, and the wallpaper and the wall treatment are brand new, but they feel so good together – especially in person. My biggest pet peeve with this wallpaper is that it’s much more beautiful in person and it photographs brighter and busier (in real life it’s muted and soft like a blurry subtle watercolor).

Continue reading A Beach House Middle Bedroom Update: It’s DONE! at Young House Love.

I’m someone who loves those detailed “what worked & what didn’t” posts where someone looks back on the choices they made and shares what didn’t work out as well as they hoped – and how they adjusted to make things work better for their family (more comfortable/more practical/more beautiful/etc). And since we furnished this house over two years ago – can you believe we did it in the fall of 2017?! – I thought it would be fun to share the changes we made since then in one big rundown post. So here we go.

The Front Porch

• The Change: New front porch swing
• The Reason: The old one was already rotting!

The original porch swing we hung out here was nice and simple (white like the trim, and the vertical pickets tied right into the railing), but it sadly wasn’t up to the job of withstanding the weather.

Continue reading Seven Spaces We Updated At The Beach House Over The Last 2 Years (And Why) at Young House Love.

If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the wallpaper bandwagon, let this post be the soothing voice that gently strokes your hair and says “don’t worry my pet, wallpaper doesn’t have to be hard, permanent, or expensive. Also your hair looks good today, and I should probably stop touching it because I don’t know you like that.”

Adding wallpaper to the middle bedroom at our beach house took us just a few hours and cost us less than $100. It’s a whole lotta bang for not much buck (or extra high skill level). Plus it’s 100% removable so if we ever tire of it or want to swap it for something else, it’s not a big deal. So in this post we’ll show you exactly how we hung it, including a video I took of my lovely husband hanging a panel for you in real-time while I talk and point (you know, the things I’m most known for).

Continue reading How To Hang Peel & Stick Wallpaper (On Video!) at Young House Love.

Did you catch the sneak peeks of the board & batten that we installed in the middle bedroom at our beach house on Insta Stories? The picture below was also in last week’s podcast shownotes, where we discussed the wallpaper – and we got TONS of requests for a tutorial so here we go. I am not kidding when I say this was an easy project. Completely beginner-friendly – and it makes such a big impact in the room (especially since we added wallpaper above it – we’ll break down that process in a future post).

This is actually our third house where we’ve installed some sort of DIY board and batten. We did a really affordable treatment (only $57!), and then we made a “fancier” version in our current house by adding some extra molding details within the boxes.

Both of those projects were in hallways, so this latest project was our first go at using board & batten in a bedroom – and we tried a couple of new techniques this time which helped it turn out especially well for this space.

Continue reading How We Installed Easy Board & Batten At The Beach at Young House Love.

We’re in the midst of two room redos right now and I couldn’t be more excited about them! One is our bathroom reno that we shared last week, and the other is a much lighter and less dusty one, which involves zero demo or wall moving, but a whole lot of function that we’ll be gaining (plus a wall treatment + wallpaper, which thrills me to no end). We’re “reconfiguring” the middle bedroom at our beach house, which used to look like this. Yes, it’s a very small room that was basically all bed:

Having a lighter room redo running in the background while we wait for orders like our bathroom tub & vanity to arrive and finalize our tile selections is actually really fun. And thankfully we left our bathroom fully functional when we knocked out those walls last week, which means we can still use the space while we wait on that stuff to arrive and get deeper into that project.

Continue reading 4 Low-Tech Ways We’re Planning Our Latest Room Makeover at Young House Love.