Summer Home Tour

Hi there and welcome!  If this is your first time here, my name is Courtney and I love all things related to home, especially DIY.  My husband, Billy, and I have learned lots by renovating 3 houses by ourselves and we like to share our ideas as well as some of the mistakes we have made along the way.  We have 3 growing boys and 2 Golden Retrievers so everything we do to our home needs to be able to withstand the abuse of everyday life in our family.

Our home is a split level in a NJ suburb of NYC (it takes us about 20 minutes to get to the city).  We dream of living in a farmhouse in the country someday where life moves at a slower pace, but for now we need to stay here.  Hence, the need for the diy projects to attempt to add charm to our house.

When you enter our front door, you step into our small entryway/foyer.  I recently wrote a post about our diy stairway runner here.

You can read more about our affordable entryway makeover here.

Our family room is right off of the entryway, through these french doors.  

Our Family Room was a project we completed several years ago.  We enlarged the space, added a stone fireplace and a mudroom, installed a new triple slider and added hardwood flooring.  This is our favorite space to hang out in as a family.

Our mudroom is a space we carved out from the family room and it just might have been the smartest thing we've done in this house.  We used some off the shelf pieces from Ikea to create a more custom look in this space.  You can read more about that project here.

These stairs lead up to the kitchen/dining/living level of our house.

Our kitchen is the hub of our house.  We added the Thomasville cabinets and farm sink ourselves about 5 years ago.

The divider between our Kitchen and Living Room used to be a wall, but we took that down and created an island using some Billy bookshelves from Ikea.  This gave us more storage on the Kitchen side, and bar height seating on the Living Room side.

We recently removed our over the range microwave and replaced it with a DIY mantel hood including a built in exhaust fan.  You can find a tutorial about that project here.

We removed the non load bearing wall between our Kitchen and Dining Room soon after we moved in.  Now, it is all one open space, which works much better for our decidedly un-formal family.

The Living Room is also open to the Kitchen.  

We recently "hacked" this coffee table to give it a more custom look.

A view of our Kitchen from the Living Room and the other side of our Billy bookcase island/divider.

These barstools were a recent and very affordable find from the Target Threshold line.

Our Master Bedroom level is our place to get away from all the crazy that is happening in the rest of the house.

We diy'd our Master Bathroom for just under $7,000 last year.  You can find a lost of our sources here.

I love adding peonies from our garden when they bloom in early summer.  They fill the whole bathroom with their amazing scent and add a nice pop of color to the mostly white space.

Heading outside, we like to relax under our covered patio on hot summer days.

And cool off in our swimming pool.

Thanks so much for stopping by.  We hope to see you again soon!