14 WAYS TO ARRANGE BED PILLOWS


I love the way my friends inspire me. 

I love when we're close enough to ask about our children's moodiness without fear of judgement, go swim suit shopping together, share ideas for our marriages, get to the nitty gritty of our anxieties and beliefs, and even ask how to make a bed look "catalogue" rather than feeling blah. (Shout out to my friend Courtney for this post inspiration. Check out her amazing photography skills that I try to imitate.)

I don't know anything magical or have years of experience, but I do have pillows and like to make my bed. So I'm going to tackle the last question. 


HEADBOARD, SIDE TABLES, LIGHTS

All this can get pricey. Start with what you have and tweak it (paint, swap furniture from another room, recover light shades, scour craigslist). If you want to make a headboard, you can see how I made mine. I also made a bench to match. If you're interested in our whole bedroom transformation, you can check that out too.

QUILT SET

I love the crispness of white. I found my quilt and sham set at target. I love that it has some texture with the sewn lines across it. It also helps that I don't have to worry about wrinkles after I launder it. I can't see it online anymore, but you could try in-store for something close to the same.


COVERLET

In addition to having pillows make your bed stellar, a coverlet (like my gray one with light brown stripes) can add some dimension laid across the end of your bed. 

You can make it compliment your bedding and pillows, pulling your room and colors together. 

Occasionally you might unfold it and put it on top of your other quilt.

4 KEYS TO MAKE A BED "CATALOGUE" USING PILLOWS

1. Layered sizes, textures, and colors.

2. Recognizing the power of and using prints.

3. Having a theme. 

4. Being willing to experiment, fail, and try again to get the look you like.


It was fun taking my pillows out and arranging my bed lots of ways for your enjoyment. You can make your bed with lots or little, with color, with neutral, fluff, or simple. I've given you 2 weeks of making your bed a different way every day!

Go into the design with confidence and own whatever style fits you best! 


Make sure to enjoy your freshly made bed while you can. If your house is anything like mine, soon enough it will be ruffled, wrinkled, played on, and disassembled. Even with all that happening, it's still totally worth the effort.



This post was also inspired an awesome diagram that I've personally referred to several times on my bedroom pinterest board

HOW TO MAKE A GALLERY WALL


I'm so excited to show you guys my gallery wall! 

With the thousands of pictures we all have, it's hard to narrow down to just a few. 

My whole goal in the pictures I chose: to show living, not just posing

I love it and I love that the entry to our house jumps with life as soon as you enter the front door. (I took these pictures standing in front of the door.)


How to make your own gallery:

1 - Measure your space.

2 - Knowing the type of frames you want to use ahead of time is helpful. I choose the ikea virserum brand of frames.

3 - List out the possible frame sizes. (there are lots for this brand)

4 - Draw your wall space on paper with dimensions in mind.

5 - Draw possible frames in your dimensions.

6 - Cut out your frame sizes in paper.

7 - Tape up the papers on the walls to see the layout.

8 - Make changes as needed, list the frames you need, order the pictures to fit the frames, and go shopping for your frames.

9 - Leave the papers on the wall.  


10 - When you have purchased your frames, they should match up exactly to the size of the papers you cut.

11 - Measure to the center of each paper and mark.

12 - Measure the back of the frame to see how far down the hanger will need to be hung, then measure the paper from the middle down that far and mark.

13 - In the crosshairs, hammer the nail right through the paper. 

14 - Check each frame, the hanger lengths will be different for each size of frame. 

15 - Remove the paper, hang the frames. 

16 - Put your pictures in the frames

HOW TO STABILIZE YOUR DRESSER // stuff i learn from ikea


I'm pretty simple.

I love simple solutions. I love ikea because they teach simple ways to construct.

I love things that are practical, useful, clean, and not fussy. These things together make beauty for me.

I love how beauty can be different for everyone.

When I visit my friends' homes, they are all very different in looks and feeling. But they are theirs and that's what matters.

I believe in creating a home for yourself and your family that provides room for growing. How that is done, is personal, experimental, and takes patience.

My house is never done and never will be. Sometimes I say, "oh, if I just do x, y, and z, then I'll totally be done with the upstairs or the garage or the backyard." No, that's not true. A house is a continual project zone. It's good that it's that way, it makes us work and makes us really hone what we want and love.

This said, I finally redid my master bedroom closet. We removed a dresser that we've had for the past 6 years. It was a hand-me-down from a hand-me-down and it was time to do something different.


Some shelves took it's place, the very shelves that taught me something from ikea.

They are simple and solid, but the real trick are the metal crossbars on the back of the shelving system.

Ikea is seriously genius.

How do they engineer so much stuff so simply that anyone can assemble it?!

These crossbars are the key to making the shelves be stable. I had the entire shelving unit together and it was rocking dangerously back and forth. I used 4 simple screws and the crossbars and it was super solid.

This is exactly what I needed to learn.


I want to re-use our dresser in the boys' room, but it need to be sturdy to do so. I needed to learn the crossbar trick on the shelves so I could do the same on our dresser.

It worked perfectly.

I went to home depot this morning and picked up some metal with holes in it (I already had screws at home) and simply screwed in the metal strips. I'm impressed and love that we can reuse this instead of listing it on craigslist in the free section.

It took me 2 minutes and the dresser is as good as new.

Tips for making crossbars successful:

1. If you want to go cheaper, pick up the crossbars at ikea. It was less than $2 for the ones used on the shelves, the home depot bars are $4.47 each. Either should work.

2. Mount them at an angle, not parallel to the floor.

3. Make sure the crossbars you get are long enough to stretch across your desired space. Measure before you buy.

4. Mount at two different angles for maximum stability.

5. Beware that by using home depot bars, there is a triangle of metal that will stick over the edge of your dresser on the bottom edge. I didn't mind because our dresser is going up against a wall. If this is an issue, I would go with the ikea bars instead.

Good luck and have a fantastic ikea/dresser/closet/simple day!

HOW TO REMOVE FACIAL HAIR


In honor of Mother's Day, let's get vulnerable. I have facial hair.

It's just a fact of life and I wish I had known how to get rid of it earlier than I did. Maybe this is just what you're looking for, maybe you share my lot in life, or maybe you want to send this recommendation on to someone else.


I can remember being self conscious of my lady mustache for a long time before I had the courage to ask for help. I think I finally asked my mom and if felt like a bold move in that first conversation (I was well over 20). The curse of dark hair means you can really see those hairs! I was embarrassed about my mustache, but knew there had to be an easy way to solve the problem. It's funny though, my mom has always done something about her upper-lip hair, I just never saw it.

SIMPLE CIRCLE GARLAND


Birthdays are a big deal around here. I'm sure they are at your house too. With kids running through every room in the house and through almost every thought, I decided to make things simpler for decorations this year. Introducing the reusable circle garland!

I usually decorate with twisted crate paper. It's what my mom did every birthday. Actually there is a whole method of birthday decorating that happened every year when I was growing up: twisted crate paper, hanging ballon bouquet from the ceiling fan above the table, and presents on the table surrounding our baby book. 

I've tweaked it just a little.


In creating this circle garland I can reuse it every birthday, wrapping it around some cardboard for easy storage when I need to take it down. 

The birthday presents still get put on the table, but they surround a picture of that child while they were in the hospital. I can't believe how quickly time has already passed for my littles...

We often blow up balloons that float around the floor, but sometimes we don't. 

And probably the most important thing is that I crate paper back-and-forth across their bedroom door. In the morning when they wake up they have to break through the crate paper to come out of their room. I get reminded several times by the littles before bed to NOT FORGET to put the paper on the door. 

I tell them they can't turn another year older until they break through the paper (ie. 2 on one side and 3 on the other). 
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