Back in October, when she was still getting used to having a baby around the house, Sayde peed on our comforter and duvet cover. I removed the duvet cover from the comforter and washed it, then washed the comforter. That night when Ben and I were re-making our bed, we were too tired to put the duvet cover back on, so we said we'd do it the next day. I folded it up and put it on top of a dresser in our bedroom.

Here we are over 4 months later and that duvet cover is still sitting on the dresser--and our duvet-less white comforter now has 4 month's worth of baby and dog stains on it. 

When we were moving into our house back in February 2015, one of our moving helpers dropped a box of kitchen stuff and the handle of one of my favorite mugs broke off [see image above]. "No problem," I said faux-cheerfully, "I'll just glue it back on!" I placed the broken handle inside the mug and placed the mug in the corner of a side table in our living room so that I would remember to fix it ASAP. 

Yep, you guessed it; two years later and that mug is still sitting there. Every time that I grab a pen from the jar of pens that sits next to the mug, I'm reminded that I still need to glue that handle back on. And that there are SO many more [metaphorical] broken-handled mugs in my life, just waiting to be fixed when I find the time to get to them. 

When I was little and my parents were getting divorced, I started having these scary nighttime episodes called night terrors (look them up: they're no joke!). In one of these recurring nightmares, I was in a library that had books all over the floor and it was my job to put the books back on the shelves. Every time that I put a book on a shelf, another 3-4 books would fall down onto the floor.

This dream was a horrible anxiety-ridden nightmare because even at the tender age of 8, I understood that I would never be able to put all of those books back up--that the work would never, ever end. 

Now here I am at 32, and while I've never been officially tasked with that Sisyphean library shelf stacking job (thank goodness!), sometimes life can feel like that job.

It's not as scary or daunting as the midnight terror version because I'm used to life being this way by now,  but when I strike a line through something on my daily to-do list, only to add another 2-3 items to the bottom of the list, I realize that my list will never ever end, either. And that there are tons of tasks--like the mug and duvet cover--that aren't even important enough to make my daily lists, but that will remain on the sidelines of my life for who knows how long, heckling me as I go about my day handling the more important and more timely to-dos. 

So this is it, right? This is how life goes. You keep hoping to find time to paint the trim and eventually, either you make it happen or you give up on it and the trim goes unpainted until you pay someone to do it or get ready to sell the house. 

It's time that we [I] accept that this is how it is and just get over it. Now that we have a baby and I have even less time than I used to, I'm working on being okay with all of the unfinished business in my life; I don't want to be haunted by the broken mugs of days gone by.

This past weekend, as I was doing some straightening, I made my way over to the little table where the broken mug sits (and where paperwork and unopened mail goes to die--you know the spot because I'm sure you have one, too).  

I picked up the mug and looked at it and in that moment, I knew that I was faced with a decision: do I go dig around in the basement right now and try to find some glue and just fix this thing already, or do I give in, admit that I won't get to it, and throw the mug away? 

As I held the mug in my hand pondering what I should do and somewhat paralyzed by indecision, Charlie Mae woke up and start crying for me and that was that. I put the mug back down and went upstairs to get her.

As I write this, I can still see the mug sitting right where I left it--where it has lived for over two years and will probably continue to sit for another two years unless I take a stand and do something about it as soon as I press 'publish' on this blog post. 

I'd like to tell you that I will definitely go deal with it right now, but something else might come up in the next two minutes and it might not happen and that's just life. 

I want to be the type of person who fixes the mug right away--I really do!--and there have been times in my life when I was that person, but I'm not sure if that's who I am right now, or who I'll be again any time in the foreseeable future. And I'm learning to live with the fact that it's okay to be the person who throws the mug away or lives without a duvet cover for a year.

It really is. 

Right?

You know what they say about pregnancy and the urge to nest? It's spot-on. If I spend one more hour in our nursery--sorting baby clothes + toys, painting furniture, hanging artwork + banners on the wall--I think Ben might lose it...

But you guys, getting the nursery ready has been SO fun for me! And it has been such a comforting, tangible way to prepare for our baby! Did I go a bit overboard? Ben would definitely say so, but then again, he's been with me for 11+ years, so he should know by now that going overboard is kind of my M.O ;) 

And you know what? Even though I'm calling our nursery "done" for now, it's secretly not done [shhhh, don't tell Ben!]. I still want to paint some whales on the white toy chest shown in the pic above, I want to hang some family pics on the wall that's next to the crib wall, I want to get another small throw rug for in front of the crib, and I could go on and on...but for now, I'm just calling it done and telling myself that if these things don't get done in the next few weeks, we'll all live. 

So lets go on the tour, shall we? Scroll down for some snapshots of our old bedroom-turned-nursery [and please excuse the dark-ish pics, it was the best I could do on a fairly cloudy day and I'm no photog]:

We bought the changing table shown in the above + below pics from a Facebook "Yard Sale" Group for $20. It had lots of pen and crayon marks on it and was a bit beat up, but it was nothing that a little elbow grease couldn't fix!

​I spray painted all of the frames (and the mirror) that you see on the walls around the room, and of course painted all of the little watercolors that match her room + decor ;)

As you may not be able to tell from these pics, I did quite a bit of furniture painting to get this room ready. We bought the dresser shown in the pics above and below from Craigslist for $10 and then I repainted it white and painted the knobs to match some of the patterns in the nursery. I also painted the shelving to the left of the crib (it used to be brown wood).

Can you believe all of the adorable little coats this girl already has hanging in her closet? She's going to be quite stylish + warm come this winter ;)

​Thanks SO much to all of the amazing people who have gifted us with bags of hand-me-downs and new gifts alike! 

...And thus commences our tour. Thanks for sticking with me as I go down my baby-related rabbit hole these days. And thanks for all the sweet feedback from yesterday's blog post. You guys are the best. 

Oh, and for those who might be interested, here's the crib we purchased, here's the throw rug, and here's our glider (which we LOVE and was totally worth the investment). 

Happy Spring, everyone! Not sure how the first day of spring went for you yesterday, but we got a snowstorm last night, so that's fun (ha!)...

Anyways, today I'm sharing our most recent house project, which is the conversion of our old "office"/elephant graveyard (aka house dumping ground where we put things that didn't have another place) into our new guest bedroom. It's not *completely* finished, but really, is anything ever truly finished? We're calling it 'done' for now because we've got too many other projects to work on before baby and it feels finished enough to live with for the next year or two... 

Also, if  you're confused because you remember seeing another guest bedroom before + after on the blog in the past, don't be--we don't have a HUGE house with two guest bedrooms or anything, we just didn't anticipate how having a baby-on-the-way would affect our room needs and would therefore necesitate a lot of room switches less than a year after re-doing the guest bedroom. Sigh. 

{I guess what they say is right--you really do have to live in a house for a while before you understand what makes the most sense for each room!}

So, since we converted the old guest bedroom into my studio a few weeks ago, we decided to make the smallest room in the house, the former "office," into our new guest bedroom. Here's the evolution of this room in pictures...

As you can kind of see from the images above, the room isn't huge and it has these ugly built-in shelves where a full closet used to be (why would someone get rid of closet space!!?!?! Ahhhh!). There's also a hole in the middle of said shelves where we're assuming a ginormous tube TV went at some point.

Although we are not fans of this situation and really want to get someone to tear all of this down and convert it back into a closet someday, now is not the time to take on that project/expenditure, so we've decided to leave it as is for the time being...

In the images above, you can see how it quickly this room became our elephant graveyard. These pics were taken shortly after move-in, so it did get somewhat more organized at a later point, but of course I forgot to take pictures of that point before we cleared everything out to paint, so these "before" images will have to do...

After prepping the walls and painting (it took three coats of paint!), here's the "finished" product [for now]...

The paint color that we picked for the walls was supposed to be MUCH more cream/ivory than it turned out (it turned out fairly yellow), but after complaining about it to each other for a few days, we've come around and are okay with it...

As you can see, I used a silly white curtain and tension rod to cover up the gaping hole in the built-in cabinets (again, for now!)--which I think is better than nothing--and was excited to finally have a place to hang the tapestry that I purchased on my trip to Peru last summer.  ​

So there you go! Another room [kind of] done as we prepare for baby.

We've spent the last three weekends working on our upstairs bedroom switcheroo, and are hoping to finish our new bedroom makeover this coming weekend. Then we'll have just one room left...the nursery!!!! We can't wait to get going on that special space ;) 

Have a great day (and first week of spring), everyone!

Welp, I know I've been talking about this project forever now, so the time has come to share the before + after with you...thus today, I present our DIY pantry makeover! I know it may not look that impressive (and my poor photography isn't helping), but let me tell you guys, this project was *quite* the undertaking for newbie home owners/DIY-ers like us. 

It's hard to tell up there in the 'before' picture, but in our old set-up, we had very little usable storage space. The shelves above the washer and dryer were crazy deep and poorly made, so storing anything anywhere but the outside edge of the lower shelves was a nightmare to reach. Plus, always having laundry on the floor in the kitchen on the weekends wasn't very tranquil (ahem, Ben!). 

So, as we prepare for bebe and make room for all of the new tupperware, bottles, snacks, and who-know-what-else comes along with a baby (I mean, if you have kids you probably know, but I don't really know yet!), we knew we would need more storage space in our kitchen. Thus, this revamp. 

Here are the steps that led us from the before picture (on the left) to the after (on the right)... 

Step 1. Deal with the washer + dryer. 
Before I get into the steps, I should tell you that originally, a broken washer is what started all of this. It was crappy and old, and we decided that instead of getting it fixed, we should just get a new, energy efficient set. When the delivery company came to deliver the new set that we had purchased, we found out that it wouldn't fit in our pantry--it wasn't deep enough (despite our measuring and feeling assured that it was!)-- so everything was set into motion. 

We decided that the best solution to this issue would be to move the washer + dryer down to the basement--which had always been our long-term plan, so we hired a plumber and electrician to come and install the pipes and electric we needed to make this move happen.

Once all of this was done, we had the delivery people return to install the new washer + dryer and remove the old ones. Giving us the picture below:

Step 2. Tear down the horrible wooden shelving. 
This was fun! Once we cleared everything out of the pantry, we took a big sledgehammer/mallet and just smashed at the crappy wooden shelving until it came down. Sayde didn't like the loud noises, but we found it very satisfying ;) Then we had to pry the edging off of the wall using a random assortment of tools (you can see the edging in the pic below, on the right). 

Steps 3 + 4. Prep the walls for painting and remove the linoleum. 
In order to get the walls smooth enough to paint, we had to spackle over all of the holes, gouges, and lines where the shelving had been smushed into the walls for who knows how long.

​Then we had to remove the horrible linoleum floor: this took way longer than we wanted it to and was pretty brutal. Thank goodness we don't have a whole kitchen of this!

Steps 5 + 6. Prime and paint the walls. 
The easiest part of all! We used leftover paint from the kitchen (*money-saver*) and just did one coat of primer and one coat of paint. That was all it needed (phew!). 

Steps 7 + 8. Put in new shelving and new flooring. 
I know some people hate this wire shelving, but given our skill set and limited budget for this project, it was the best choice for us. Figuring out which type of shelving to get and how to install it was the hardest part--once we'd figured out the basics, installing it didn't take too long.

And then the flooring! Again, because of our limited skills and budget, we went for easy peel + stick vinyl tile. Would we have gone for this if we were doing an entire kitchen? Probably not, but it was perfect for this tiny space (and SOOOOO easy).

Steps 9 + 10. Add shelf liner and then fill pantry back up with stuff.
In order to make the shelving a bit more substantial, we added thick shelf liner to each shelf. Once that was done, we were finished! We slowly put everything (that had been sitting on the floor in our guest bedroom FOR WEEKS) back into the pantry and were amazed at the space! We seriously have empty spaces in the pantry and we now have a few empty cabinets, as well--it's a dream come true! I'm sure we'll fill them soon enough, though ;) 

And there you have it! I still want to add some hooks to the walls and get things a bit more organized on the shelves, but it's been an amazing upgrade thus far and was well worth the effort. 

Now on to our next 100,000 projects! ;) 

{You can view more of our past home improvement projects here.}

It's been 11 months since we first bought our "new" house. It's pretty hard to believe when I just think about it, but when I look back through pictures of the facade--which I've now captured in every season--I realize that yes, it has in fact been quite a while since we moved in and starting working on this place. 

Because I love Before + Afters (I think you know this by now), I thought you might enjoy seeing the evolution of the front of our house. I think that those of you who own homes will know that although the evolution is slow and we're still not where we want to be, each of these changes that we've made have taken lots of time, money, and effort on our part. 

Anyways, here's what we've done over the past 11 months...

{Oh, and a quick note before you look: please ignore our landscaping (or lack thereof). Despite working in our yard quite a bit over the past almost-year, we were really just maintaining. We decided that we would worry about our grass and flowers/major landscaping overhauls next year. You can only focus on so much at a time!}

Above: This is how our house looked when we first purchased it. Because it was the middle of the winter, we knew we wouldn't be working on the yard or outside anytime soon, so things stayed pretty status quo until spring...

Above: As soon as spring moved in, our first order of business was to paint over the outdated maroon siding around our entryway. Although we had planned for the color to be slightly more grey than it turned out, we were still happy with it. {Here's the official entryway Before + After post.}

Above: After painting the entryway, we moved on to our front door. Although we really don't like the oval stained glass door, the previous owner put it in RIGHT before selling the house and the door is really nice, so we decided to just paint it and live with it for a while; we'll change it someday down the road. Once we painted it a bright, fun red, I was much happier with it. {Here's the "How-to"/Before + After post for the door.}

Above: In July, we had the horrible Christmas Tree shrubs along the front of our house removed! We were so happy--they were pretty ugly and out of control. In this picture we haven't yet planted new shrubs, so the front of the house is a bit barren. As you can see, we also added an American Flag (Ben's touch--it was very important to him). 

Above: We planted new shrubs in the front and flowers were blooming! Also this was the greenest that our grass/weed yard looked all summer ;) 

Above: Just last weekend, we had all of our outside light fixtures replaced (Before + Afters below). Previously, they were all un-matching, cheap, and rusted or out-of-date. Yuck. We love our new fixtures and love how light our house looks when we have them all turned on at night! One more project you'll see in this pic: we painted our front stoop. Next up, we need to paint the entryway stoop the same color.

Welp, that pretty much sums it up! Here's what we still have on our "facade" list, all of which will have to wait until Spring 2016: 

• Repaint lightpost (it needs it!)
• Entryway: replace door in entryway, paint stoop, re-do stairs
• New front walkway
• Add "accent" white fence along front walkway (sounds lame but I promise it will look great! We have a neighbor who did this and we love how it looks)
• Landscaping, new grass, etc. 

It's never-ending but it sure is gratifying! Thanks for being a part of our first almost-year in our new home ;) 

You can view more of our home Before + Afters here. 

This past weekend almost killed me. I don't mean to sound dramatic--and it was an amazingly fun weekend for the most part--but I did end up having a nervous breakdown on Sunday night due to total + complete exhaustion, a serious case of decision fatigue, and a large bill received via email at 6pm. Sigh. 

But before that--great weekend! I taught a 2-hour workshop Friday night, a yoga class Saturday morning, a 4-hour Branding Workshop Saturday afternoon, a yoga class Sunday morning, and then we worked on the house ALL DAY yesterday. 

Too much for one weekend? Yep, I think so ;) 

However, despite the breakdown-inducing number of activities that we [I] packed into the weekend, we got some exciting stuff done on the house! Namely, we finally painted our front door, which has been on our list since before we even found our house. 

Backstory: Ben and I have been dreaming about having a bold, eye-catching front door since back in the day when we were still renters; We always talked about how "one day" we would have a house with a bright red door... 

When we found our new house, one of the things that we disliked the most about it was the front door. We hated the oval stained glass cutout (no judgment, just not our style!) and were determined that one of our first projects would be replacing the front door. 

Little did we know at the time, that's a HUGE project, it's expensive, and our front door was just put in before we bought the house. Plus, it's a very nice front door. Thus, we decided that as much as we want a different style door eventually, we need to just work with what we have for now. So we painted the door red. And I think it helped, don't you? 

You can view some pics of the process below...

{And please ignore our HORRIBLE front yard and landscaping--we can only do so much this first summer, so landscaping and growing new grass has been put on the back-burner for now...}

Above: Deciding on a color was *very* hard. I was so nervous!!

Below: Sayde oversees the painting process. This pic was taken right before she literally jumped into the tray of primer (covering her feet) and then ran into the living room, tracking white paint onto the floor and rug. It was quite the scene. 

Below: When we first started painting it looked a little orange and we freaked out! But 2 coats and some drying time later, and we loved the color. 

What do you think? Pretty crazy, right!?! We're obsessed. Oh, and here are the two tutorials we followed, if you're interested in doing something similar:

• How to Paint a Front Door (in 5 Steps!) 
• How to Paint Your Front Door

Next up? Very small project, but a long time coming--we hung some curtains in our downstairs bathroom!

Lastly, here are a few snaps from the Branding Essentials for Small Biz Owners + Solopreneurs workshop that I co-presented with Kate Sheehan of Telltale Media on Saturday! If you're interested in attending our next one, it's scheduled for September 12th and you can sign up here.  

Below, goody bag prep:

PHEW. And now hello, Monday morning! Here's to hoping this week is a little less insane... ;) 

Oh, and if you enjoyed seeing our house before + afters, check out our kitchen + living/dining room, and our bathroom transformations. 

We had a BEAUTIFUL weekend here on Cape Cod! And wouldn't you know it, we decided to take advantage of the sunshine and warmer weather, and get to work on an outdoor project that has been killing us ever since we moved in--our entryway. 

When we first bought our house, the only visible outdoor paint colors were white and brick red (more "before" pics below). We both hated the brick red and felt that it made our house look much more old-fashioned than necessary, so were eager to paint it ASAP. But alas, you can't paint outside when it's cold, so we had to wait...and wait...and wait....until now!

As you'll see, we decided to paint our entryway a light grey (which turned out much bluer that we'd expected, but that's okay because we still like it a lot), and it's amazing what a difference it makes in how the house looks. 

You can view some snapshots of the process + our slowly emerging outdoor spaces below.

{Oh, and beeteedubs, we've still got TONS of work to do on the yard, garden, curb appeal, shutters + door, etc., so please don't judge our current state of affairs! It's a work in progress...}

Above: Ben waters our very first bush! First thing we've ever planted in our yard--a birthday gift from his mom :) Our yard needs some serious TLC, but we're going to just watch what comes up this summer and tackle that project next year.

Below: We grilled out on our new porch (with our new porch set) last night, and although it got a little chilly, we were so happy to be sipping vino and enjoying this new space. Lots more love, flowers, furniture (and some strand globe lights?) coming to our back porch soon... ;) 

Hope your weekend was dreamy, too! Here's to longer days, DIY weekends, and slow + steady transformations :) 

Oh, and lets keep it real: Not pictured or captured? Our *utter* exhaustion, the time that I yelled at Ben for tracking paint into the house, and all of the things we didn't get done inside the house over the weekend (think: laundry piles everywhere). I crawled into bed at 8:45 last night and was probably asleep at 8:47. #homeownership

Of all of the things that we've done to our new house thus far, I think that we may be most proud of our kitchen cabinets. The reason for this is simple: They were a TON of work, but the work was TOTALLY worth it. 

To us, the transformation from reddish-brown to white makes the kitchen feel like a totally different room, and makes all of our old appliances look a little less dingy/outdated (but oh, are they outdated!). 

In total, the project took from late January until early April, so I'd say it was an undertaking. But, when we finally re-installed the cabinet doors a few weeks ago, it felt great. 

So, since some of you have asked, here's how we did it. I should note that this project was a b*tch (no offense to Sayde girl!!), but yes, I would totally do it all over again (in a heartbeat!) if I had another kitchen with ugly wooden cabinets on the other side of the house...I think it was worth it. 

Before I share the step-by-step, here's a reminder of what we started with: 

STEP 1: Remove all cabinet doors with an electric screwdriver. We were lucky here--the hinges on our doors were really easy to remove/reinstall at the end. We carried all of the doors down to the basement. 

STEP 2: Sand ALL surfaces that are going to be painted, including cabinet doors. Ben did this with an electric sander and it was quite a task. There was dust everywhere (every surface was covered in a thick layer of it). Then we used "liquid deglosser" to clean the sanded surfaces of all dust, oil, grease, etc. 

STEP 3: Prime, prime, prime! Prime all visible surfaces. Since our wood was SO dark we did 2 layers of primer on everything. Luckily, the insides of our cabinet weren't the same dark wood, so we choose to leave them as is (phew!). 

STEP 4: More painting! W did 3 layers (THREE!) of white paint on top of the primer. We used Benjamin Moore Advance in Decorators White (Satin finish for easier cleaning). This took forever. 

Once we had all of the cabinet fixtures painted, we were able to move in and start using our cabinets. We did go ahead and finish the doors for the bottom cabinets, so a certain little dog wouldn't be able to get into them with her long nose...

STEP 5: Remove all of the hardware from the cabinet doors and spray paint it with an "Oil-Brushed Bronze" spray paint (sanded it down first to rough it up a bit). 

STEP 5: Prime and paint the cabinet doors. Again, 2 coats of primer and 3 coats of paint! On both sides! No joke. This took forever because you had to wait for each side to dry completely before you could do another layer. Tip: Do the backs first, so that if they get messed up while you're doing the front/final steps, it doesn't matter as much. 

STEP 6: Reattach hardware (not shown). This was pretty basic because we used our old hardware, so we didn't have to create any new holes in the cabinets. 

**You'll see below that Ben is drilling into one of our drawers, and that's because, as with any home improvement project, you'll run into issues. This one drawer had all sorts of issues when we tried to reattach the front panel, so we had to be resourceful ;) 

STEP 7: Re-hang all cabinet doors using an electric screwdriver. And then have a glass of wine because we're done!

Can you tell I'm not a DIY blogger? If I were, I would know to clean up the counters, put out a bouquet of "freshly-picked" flowers, and remove the un-matching, dingy dish towel from the oven before taking the "After" picture. Oops! I promise I'll get better at staging over time ;) 

So there you go, that's our kitchen for the time being! We're not done, but at least it doesn't make me want to barf anymore, so I'd say that's a step in the right direction ;) 

Now we've GOT to get to painting our bedroom, the guest bedroom, the office, and my studio...!

Holy wallpaper. And Hollywood Strip Lights. When we first moved into our new house, our bathrooms were BAD. I mean, bleh. 

Ben thought that maybe we could wait a while on taking down the wallpaper--at one point, he even asked, "Is there any room in the house where we could leave the wallpaper, just to save ourselves some work?" Um, no, Ben, there is NOT. Nowayinhell. 

So, we got to work on the bathrooms right away. They're livable now, but they're not done (Is anything ever done when you own a house? I'm starting to think no...).

In fact, the upstairs bathroom is nowhere CLOSE to being done, but I still wanted to share both of them with you today, because I think you'll get a nice sense of satisfaction just from seeing the walls without all that horrendous wallpaper. It kind of scratches an itch.

Lets take a look, shall we? 

BATHROOM #1: DOWNSTAIRS

BEFORE (The worst wallpaper in the entire house! Why would anyone ever do this to a helpless bathroom?):

I cannot tell you how good it feels to be done removing wallpaper in this house. Fingers crossed that we will never have to remove wallpaper again, because wow, it is not fun. Not one iota. 

Oh, and here's the tutorial that we used for replacing the light fixtures--until we ran into bigger problems and had to Google and YouTube and talk to our local Hardware Store about handling the wiring/install issues. Never a dull moment, that's for sure!

As for the rest of our before + after/during pics, you're going to have to wait, as that's about it in terms of big home improvement projects that we've done since moving in. We hope to paint our bedroom this weekend (and finish the doors to our kitchen cabinets!), but things have been moving slowly lately, so we'll see...

Hope you enjoyed this little peek into the new house! And thanks for all your sweet feedback re: last week's before + after pics! You guys are the BEST. 

In light of Monday's Before + After post, I have something that I want to say. Something that I feel I should have said on Monday...but first:

A GIVEAWAY! The fine people over at Frette are offering two of their fragrance products (shown above) to Starr Struck readers! Hooray!

There will be two winners--one will win a set of three bedlinen fragrances and the other will win a set of three drawer freshener discs--and all you have to do to enter is one (or more!) of the following, as listed in the widget below:

Now for what I wanted to say about my Before + After post:

I don't think I made it very clear in this post that all of the work that went into those Before + After pics was really, really hard, and definitely wasn't as glamorous as the pics might make it look. 

What the bright, shiny, happy pics don't show are the fights and breakdowns that Ben and I had while working on the house, my dry cuticles that started bleeding from all of the chemicals and hot water (wallpaper removal), the tears that I shed when the light fixture we'd just tried re-wiring for the third time didn't work, and I could go on and on...

The fact is, just like we all already know, the internet often only shows the highlight reel, and that's exactly what Before + After pics do, too. 

Yes, our living room/dining room and kitchen are coming along swimmingly, but our bedroom looks like a weird empty wasteland, covered with piles of clothing and discarded shoes, and we've started referring to our office as our "elephant graveyard." 

Also, what you can't see in the pics are the yet-to-be-cleaned Sayde pee stains on the *brand new* rug (Sayde has a newfound need to mark her territory in our new house), the gunky, yellowed trim, the scuffed up wood floors that we won't be fixing anytime soon, and again, I could go on and on. 

I so appreciate your kudos and encouragement, but just want to remind you that what you see in the staged picture isn't always the whole truth. 

So there you have it. I hope you still like me and think our DIY house work is cool, pee stains and all... ;)  

Now go enter the giveaway and good luck!

Here we are, Episode #2! In between our hours (and I mean, HOURS) of removing wallpaper at our *new* house this past weekend, we took a quick break to record this second episode of our *brand spanking new* podcast, Starr Struck Radio. 

We closed on our new house last Thursday, so as you can imagine, this big milestone was basically the only thing on our minds over the past week. So, that's what we discuss on this week's episode--our story/our experience with the home-buying process and the challenges that we encountered as we went through this process. 

In the first half of the episode, we discuss our initial decision to start this process and the issues that came up during the house search. In the second half, we share how we found our new house and the challenges of actually buying that house and securing a mortgage. 

Near the end of the episode we delve into the challenges we’re facing now that we own our very first home and some of our tips for those who might be starting the home-buying process (or going through it right now).

You can listen to the show below OR by downloading it in iTunes (Note: there is another podcast called "Starr Struck"--UGH--so be sure you search "Starr Struck Radio" if you're searching for it).

We say it in the show, but I'll repeat it here: A HUGE thanks to all who listened and reviewed/rated us last week! If you haven't yet done so, we'd really appreciate it if you would subscribe and rate or review us in iTunes. It makes a big difference in getting us seen/heard and helps other listeners find us!

Similarly, if you have any questions about how to subscribe/podcasts in general, scroll down to the bottom of this post, where I've included some basic FAQs... 

Lastly, here are a few fun pics of our house/our first weekend of home-improvement projects! We're saving all of the before + after shots until we're further along--so no big reveals yet--but you can get a basic idea of what we're working with...

-What is a podcast? 
A radio show or audio file that you get from the internet and can listen to at any time. You can listen on a website (through the player above, for instance), or you can SUBSCRIBE to get the podcast (directions below) so that it is automatically downloaded to your phone or tablet each time a new episode comes out. 

-How do I get your podcast?
This is the BEST video I've ever seen explaining how to get a podcast (from the great folks at Serial). If you want to subscribe, as they explain in the video, you can do so through the Podcasts app on an iPhone or iPad, or in the Stitcher app on an Andriod device. Or, you can just listen by playing straight from the site, using the player above. 

-What is Starr Struck Radio about? 
Starr Struck Radio is a weekly podcast focused on living a creative and inspired life. Mary Catherine Starr and her sidekick (and husband), Ben, discuss all things related to navigating the world as an adult and finding joy in the everyday. The discussion topic will be different each week, as will the length of the podcast, but they'll usually fall between 25-40 minutes long. 

Yay for week 2! We're loving this new medium and hope you're enjoying it, too ;) 

Thanks again for your support with this venture!