A Scrap Fabric Quilt

I was cleaning out my small fabric stash a few months ago and decided to make a quilt using up the scrap pieces I had. Some of the pieces were from things I made for our daughter so using it up felt sweet and nostalgic.

Of course once I got started I realized I only had enough fabric for one side of a quilt! So I needed to purchase more fabric after all.

I went ahead and ordered more fabric on Spoonflower - picking fabrics I liked but that didn't fit in with the colors I was using in our daughter's room.

And after all that I ended up falling in love with the new fabric side versus the scrap fabric side! What began as a frugal use up what I have sweet idea became just another regular quilt project! Ha!

Oh well, I have another quilt for us to use around the house that I like and can be proud of. But was it worth the headache after all? Maybe not!

And this was in the midst of our move and about when our house started to feel chaotic. Yet I had to finish this project I started because I did not want it haunting me in our new home while we were getting settled. Most people would have just quit. And maybe I should have as well. But I persevered.

I do love the color mustard. It is not a shade I am super comfortable with incorporating into our home. So this was a fun project to try a different color scheme than my norm. And perhaps that is the silver lining of it all! Embracing something new.

It is pretty imperfect like all my other quilts but it is good enough. I really could use to go back and fix some things. But at this point done and over with is all I can handle!

Am I leaving you inspired?! lol. Or are you just as stressed and exhausted as I am? Thanks for letting me share friends. Even in the midst of chaos a little beauty can still be found.

Our Laundry Room and Main Floor Bathroom

Here is another post about a space I never showed you! Our laundry room has been somewhat complete for awhile now. I just kept waiting to finish painting the whole room white to blog about it. And three years later we are moving out and it has yet to get painted! Proof that good enough is truly good enough!

The space connects our kitchen with the main floor bathroom and garage so we get quite a lot of traffic through here. Plus when we have guests, this is the bathroom they use. So keeping the laundry room both tidy and pretty was my goal.

The table and shelves were already here when we moved in so using some pretty containers to style and organize the space was fairly simple.

After a year or so of having a child and laundering cloth diapers on a regular basis, I went ahead and bough four nesting laundry baskets. Now with a four person home and cloth diapering, four is about the right number of baskets for our constant laundry needs.

Most of my cute cleaning supplies (like these brooms and dust pans) are from Grove Collaborative. They not only look nice but they also are great quality pieces that work well.

On the opposite side of our laundry room is a little mudroom area. Another luxury space I have always dreamed of having! We used it to store everyday items like bags and shoes. You can also see here where one wall got painted white while the others didn't!

Here you can see how our laundry area opens up to a small tucked away bathroom.

We also took off the door from the laundry room to our kitchen to have a little more space. This ended up making a huge difference. I say you have to make your home work the best for how you want to live! We, of course, have put the door back on to sell our house! But if we were here long term something like a barn door would be a great addition that could tuck right behind our refrigerator.

While a larger bathroom would have been nice, I grew to love this teeny tiny bathroom. So simple to keep clean and decorate! All we kept in here was extra toilet paper. It was wonderful! No places to hide unnecessary junk.

Back to the laundry space - here is how it really looked day to day. Always something drying! Finding a taller drying rack that fit right between our washer and dryer ended up being perfect at maximizing drying space while taking up as little space as possible (we used to have two that just took up too much space).

We stored a variety of things in the baskets - paper plates and cutlery for entertaining, extra soap, cleaning supplies, cleaning towels, and all our insulated food bags.

Below the dryer is where we stored all our beach towels. With lots of outdoor play, having towels close to the door proved to be very handy.

And here is our collection of cleaning and laundry supplies. I purged it down to just fit this drawer (minus a few things under the kitchen sink). I since then have gotten it down to even less stuff now that we use Thieves Cleaner for most things. But having a designated space forces me to continually get rid of things we aren't using.

And I had originally purchased this collapsible laundry sorter to sort laundry but after having a child I realized I don't really sort laundry anymore! It all just goes in with no problem. But it fit perfectly under this table so I just ended up using it to organize things.

So those are all the details of our little laundry space. For a room that gets used quite a bit, I loved that it worked hard for us while still being a pretty place to spend my time.

Stairway Gallery Wall

I always loved a stairway gallery wall so when we moved to this house I was VERY excited to finally have one. It took awhile to get it right and then I added to it periodically. Here is the finished gallery wall right before I took it down in preparation to move. You can file this under - things I never shared but wanted to make sure to blog about before we moved!

I stuck with all black and white photos and black frames to keep it uniform. It is hard to photograph from the stair angle but it truly was one of my favorite walls in our home.

I tried to include a range of photos - pictures of Brent and I before kids, our wedding, pictures of each child, and then a few of the kids together.

I continued the theme to our upstairs hallway. With the exception of one gold frame.

I love the story photos can tell throughout the home. I try to make them feel more like art so I use matted frames, a variety of styled photos (but mostly staged candid!), and keeping them black and white.

The two frames that have text include a song my husband wrote for me when we got married and our family purpose statement. All these years later these words and values still hold true to the life we try to live.

I often stop to look at these photos after I put the kids down for a nap and it puts a smile on my face. I also love when I am carrying my son up the stairs and we stop to talk about mommy and daddy's wedding. It is moments like these that remind me to fill my home with things that bring joy and tell our stories.