I’ve sometimes wondered if there’s some truth to that statement . . . but then I looked at our closets.

I think this girl needs to dive head first into a good ol’ fashioned closet cleaning.  Anybody with me?

I like color.  I like vibrancy and energy.  I like happy rooms that make me smile.  And I really like my kitchen.

It’s where we hang out, laugh at each others stupid jokes, create our attempts at dinner, and bond with our family and friends.

Sure, there are things I would change about it, things I would do differently the next time I design a kitchen – but all in all, it makes me happy every time I walk into our kitchen.

What space in your home is your happy place?  Hope you have a great weekend!

P.S.  Thanks to Sunny for including me amongst her favorite fellow bloggers for the Trendy Blog Award!

But do you know what’s even more rewarding?  Being able to open your fridge.

{ This picture was taken before the renovation was completed. }

Sounds crazy, but that’s a little luxury that we almost overlooked when we remodeled our kitchen {and the rest of our house} back in the fall of 2008.

You see, the original design of our kitchen from 1968 had the fridge on the right side of the kitchen:

In 1968 that wasn’t a problem since all of the fridges back then had full-size doors hinged on the right-hand side which opened wide enough to clear the wall on the right side of the kitchen.

Fast-forward to 2008 and most fridges are split-design, with the freezer on the left and the fridge on the right.  Because of that, the narrower fridge door would hit the wall and we wouldn’t be able to open the fridge door all the way – yikes!

Luckily we figured this out before we finalized the design plan for the kitchen {thank goodness!}.  We ran to Sears and measured the doors of every split-design fridge and came to the conclusion that we would be able to use our fridge as it was intended if we simply relocated it to the left side of the kitchen.  Whew, problem solved!

Moral of the story: think about form AND function when you’re designing a room in your house.  I’m glad we did, or else we’d be eating take out forever!  {Which actually might not have been too bad . . . }  Have you had any close-calls like that with your home?

{ December 26, 2008 – the day we officially moved into our house. }

It’s no secret that I’m a huge sucker for houses, and our house in particular.  But I didn’t always feel that way about our humble abode.

{ Our house the way it looked the day we bought it. }

You see, we started out our married life in 2007 in a great little townhouse – it was brand-new, in a fabulous area of town within walking distance of restaurants, bars and shopping, and it was an awesome home for us.  For awhile.  Less than a year into our town home-ownership I got antsy – very antsy.

{ Christmas 2007 in the townhouse. }

The big switcheroo started in February of 2008 when I drove by an open house in a quiet little neighborhood near where I grew up – the house was huge {over 3,000 square feet}, two-stories {love!}, completely affordable and in terrible shape.  I was instantly smitten.  I called Jason and my mom to come take a look at it – we were such nerds, exploring every room and trying to hide the fact that I was ridiculously excited about the house.  We dreamed up renovation plans and hoped that the owners would accept a contract contingent on the sale of our town home – turns out all that fretting was for nothing because the house instantly sold {and the story of the new owner is a doozie!}  I was bummed but the seed had been planted – I wanted to move NOW!

Fast-forward a month and our townhouse was on the market.  We obviously listed it ourselves and it was a pretty hot property, if I do say so myself.  Within a month we had a full price offer {a good $40k above what we bought it for the year before} and we started looking for a new house like crazy.

We focused our search on just one or two neighborhoods and soon fell in love with a huge house that turned out to have huge problems – we eventually walked away from the contract and kept on searching.  Then the sale of our townhouse closed in the middle of June and suddenly we were homeless.  My parents were incredibly generous and let us move in with them – it was only temporary, right?  We were sure to find a house soon . . .

All in all, we looked at easily over 150 houses – that’s the danger of being a Realtor and being able to show yourself houses!  We put an offer in on another house that was going to be a financial reach for us, and luckily it didn’t work out.

In the end, we kept coming back to a one-story ranch house on the same street as the house that started my new-home-craze {remember the open house that I wandered into?}.  It didn’t have a few of the things that I originally thought I wanted {like a second story}, but it had awesome potential and a lot of space in a fab neighborhood.  Oh yeah, and did I mention that every single room needed to be completely gutted?

We finally closed on our new house in September of 2008 – but we still had a long way to go before we could move in.

We hired a contractor, spent every spare moment for the next 3 months at Home Depot or Expo or a random tile store, and spent the other few waking moments scoping out the progress on our house.  Which, for most of the time, looked like this:

And then, finally, we moved into our new home the day after Christmas – it was awesome!!!  I think my parents were even more excited than we were – my poor parents.  They were so patient and awesome to live with during those 6 months – seriously, they deserve medals.

Anyhoo, that’s the story of how we met our house – and how we fell in love with it and made it our own.  Of course, we’re still tweaking and decorating and all of that good stuff – a home is never really finished, is it?  But I guess that’s the fun part.  :)

So how did you meet your house?  And be sure to check out other people’s house stories at Our Suburban Cottage.

P.S. Curious about our renovations?  Here’s a {somewhat outdated – sorry!} photo gallery of the changes we made.  And while we’re at it, here’s some info on how we refaced the fireplace, tore the entire house apart, prepped our subfloors for hardwood, and refinished the front door.  Oh yeah, and we got hooked on renovations so we flipped a house.

Like all my other projects, I imagine I’ll stop and start it about a jillion times before I finally finish – but my fingers are crossed that I’ll buckle down and knock out a bunch of the work pretty soon.  Anyway, when it’s done I think you’ll really like it!  Any guesses?  Not that I’ll spill the beans…

Before, the room wasn’t really tied together – even though I loved each element of the design, the olive drapes seemed to stand alone from the gorgeous peacock print of the recovered chairs, and our dining room just didn’t feel cohesive.  But after the addition of these gorgeous (and totally affordable!) gourd lamps from Home Goods, our dining room is looking oh so snazzy.  Maybe I’ll even be inspired to finally host a dinner party in there (ha, we’ll see!).

Adding the lamps gave the room a focal point, and also spread the turquoise from the chair seats to another part of the room – and I definitely think that having a pair  of lamps instead of just a single makes the room feel balanced instead of wonky.

The buffet still needs to be styled and I have a few other projects that I still want to tackle in there, but I’m thrilled with how it’s looking so far – at least it doesn’t look like it did this time last year!  Shield your eyes, this is a scary picture:

Baby steps, people.

Anyway, I knew Home Goods would have just the lamps I was looking for – have you ever checked out their lamp selection?  It’s amazing!  I knew it would be great, but I wasn’t prepared to have my choice of four different types of turquoise lamps.  Oh, the choices!  They were in different shapes (oblong, elongated gourd, traditional gourd, etc.) and varying shades of turquoise – I agonized between the lamps I finally purchased and a really bold, almost bright blue gourd lamp that I was in love with – but, in the end, I knew these turquoise beauties were the better fit.

So there you have it!  Yet another step towards our dining room finally becoming the fun and inviting space I knew it could be.  Are you guys also suckers for Home Goods lamps?  If not, what’s your go-to lamp store?

But the gloves are coming off today, folks, and you’re gonna get to see my least favorite feature of our house in its full glory.  Ready?

{ Yep, that’s the chair I pimped last week. And a cute cat. }

Those are the windows in my husband’s office.  They are ugly, and they are not limited to this room – the fugly windows are all along the front of the house (4 rooms) and they get even worse around the side and back of the house.  {Disclaimer: I actually do really love my house, the windows just make me twitch.}

Don’t believe me?  Check it out.

And this is the look we’re rockin’ from the outside:

I can tell that you’re jealous.

Even though it’s pretty obvious, here’s a rundown of why I hate these windows:

1. They have burglar bars on them.  Ugly and unsafe in the event of fire – what a winning combo.  {Although part of me actually does like the decorative iron ones on the front of the house…}

2. The windows in the front are tall and skinny {and not in a fashion model kind of way}.  My mom calls them arrow slits.  Nice, huh?

3. The windows along the side and back are that old 60s style where they’re long from side to side and float above the floor.  I can live with it, but I never would have picked’em.

4. The windows don’t have any trim on the interior, so they’re pretty naked {think bare drywall}.

5. They are as old as dirt, so the energy efficiency is practically zero.  I have windows on 2 sides in my office and it’s pretty much unpleasant year round.

6. The aluminum frames are ugly.

7. The lack of trim means that the window sensors for our alarm are just hangin’ out there.

There are probably other reasons why I hate them, but I just can’t think of any right now.

So, what do I do about these wonky windows?  That’s what I’ve been deliberating since we bought the house over a year ago, and I still haven’t come to a solution that I’m totally happy with.

These are what I see as my options:

1. Remove the burglar bars, finally give the windows a good cleaning {they’re pretty gross on the outside because of the bars}, and live with them.

2. Same as above, but add trim on the inside of the house.  The only problem is that the window ledge on the bottom of the windows doesn’t extend very far – that means I either have to do extra skinny trim on the outside  of the window or replace the window ledge, and neither option sounds that awesome to me.

3. Same as #1 {and maybe #2}, but also paint the aluminum frame on the exterior a deep black color.  Even though I don’t like the bars, I do like the contrast that the black bars provide against our lighter-toned brick, and I think I’ll really miss that contrast once the bars are gone.  {I could also paint the aluminum white on the inside to spruce it up a bit and match the trim.}

4. Replace the old windows with new ones.  The obvious con is the expense, but it would be nice to save on energy bills and have some non-offensive windows.

5. Same as #4, but change the windows along the front of the house from sets of 3 windows in each room to a large, single window in each room.  Or maybe 2 larger windows?  The obvious problems with that are that brick work would be involved (expensive) and I’m not really sure how the bigger windows would look in the end.  Here is what is quite possibly the world’s worst mock-up of what that might look like:

Okay, that’s terrible – please forgive me for posting that mock-up.

Anyway, that’s where we are right now – pondering and not making any decisions about the windows.  Got anything going on with your house that you just can’t figure out what to do?  I can’t promise we’ll be any help, but I know we’d like to hear about it!

It’s pitiful that it’s taken us this long to whip the garage into shape but, then again, this is what our garage looked like when we moved in – pretty much filled to the brim with random things left over from the renovation.  Not pretty!!

Fast forward one year, and our garage still looked like this:

I know, there’s no excuse!!  I’m blaming it partially on being a DIY-er – I hate to get rid of anything that could even possibly be used in some sort of project sometime in the future.  Everything has potential, right?  Of course, the other explanation for the disaster of a garage is that I have a serious problem when it comes to tackling large mounds of junk – I get intimidated and wind up just leaving it there for way too long.  Sad, I know.

After awhile, we kind of stopped trying and would just leave things wherever they happened to fall.

Am I the only one guilty of this?

Anyway, over the weekend I had finally had enough.  The weather was beyond gorgeous and I was suddenly filled with inspiration – I was going to tackle the garage (and luckily my hubby was more than willing to jump in and help).  Here was my plan:

1.  Make piles. We started out with 4 main piles – trash, garage sale, keep in the garage, and take in the house to go through.  The small trash went straight into the garbage can and the bigger stuff went to our side yard to wait for bulk trash pickup.  The garage sale stuff migrated to the side of the garage where it will live until we finally get around to having a garage sale, and the stuff that we needed to go through went into the house.  At that point, all that was left was the stuff that needed to stay in the garage.

As a random aside, we found a box of old wallpaper – remember the fuzzy gold stuff from our entryway and the black & white flocked wallpaper from our bordello-inspired powder room?

Yup, that’s it!  That gave us quite a giggle.

2.  Make smaller piles. The “stay in the garage” stuff was then divided and organized – moving blankets were folded and put in boxes, empty storage containers were stacked, Christmas goodies were piled together, garden hoses were rolled up, etc.

3.  Find places for stuff. We decided to put the smaller things on the shelves to keep them from getting unruly – all the bigger stuff went around the perimeter of the garage.  This might not be the approach that everybody would take, but it works for us because it leaves the middle of the garage open for cars.

4.  Whip out the broom. I was shocked by how much random debris we had in the garage – dirt, leaves, dust, you name it it was in there.  You might want to wear a bandana or something around your nose and mouth so that you don’t breathe all of that nastiness in – I was sneezing and stuffy for the rest of the day, so clearly I should have thought ahead on that one!!

After just a few hours of work, this is how our garage looks now:

You might not see a huge difference, but let me tell ya – now we can actually find things and my car gets to live in the garage instead of the driveway.  I’m a happy camper!!

Of course, there’s still a ton of things that I’d like to do to make the garage even more functional, and maybe even a little attractive.  I’m envisioning a system of wall hooks to hang our real estate stuff, a painted garage floor & a new paint job on the walls & shelving (it has a gross, speckled look now), and maybe even a little work table in that back right-hand corner next to the sink.  We’ll see if another bout of motivation strikes!

What about you guys?  Did you tackle any projects around the house?  And am I the only one that could only fit one car in her two-car garage?

Bringing in bold turquoise and orange through placemat pillows and glass floats added splashes of my favorite thing – color!!  But what finally made the space feel like a real home was hanging our new art series on the far wall – a wall that was formerly sooooo blank and boring.

I whipped up those babies one night after getting a little inspiration from the chalkboard in this living room by Margot Austin.

Wanna make some for yourself?  Here’s how to do it:

1.  Round up the goods. You may already have most of the necessary supplies on hand, like I did.  Here’s what you need.

~ frames w/ mats, the number and color that you want (I used 3 of this frame from Ikea)

~ paint for your background color (I used my free paint)

~ a foam brush

~ a paint pen (I used a white one with a chisel tip)

~ a ruler

~ painter’s tape

2.  Do the prep work. Remove the mats and backing from the frames, and set the frames aside.  For this project, you’re going to use the smooth side of the particle board backing as your paint surface (you could cut down art paper or cardboard to use instead, but I think it makes more sense to just use what you already have on hand).  Use your foam brush and background paint to paint the smooth side of the particle board.  You will probably need several coats of paint (I needed 2), and let the boards dry between each coat.

3.  Bust out the ruler. I wanted each line of scribbles to look uniform, so I ran a line of painter’s tape around each side of the boards and then marked out the height of each of my scribbles and the space between each line of the scribbles.  To do this, I used the width of my ruler as the height of each scribble, and the width of the painter’s tape as the distance between each line of scribbles.  (Note: don’t put painter’s tape on the mat – it will tear away little pieces of the mat and look terrible.)

4.  The fun part! Here’s where you get to channel your inner child and start scribbling.  You might want to try out a few practice scribbles before you actually start painting on your “canvas” – you want to try to keep each scribble the same size and height so that everything looks very graphic instead of messy.

5.  Enjoy! This has to be the easiest art projects ever, but it’s also one of my favorites.  It was a lot of fun to do, and I think the finished product looks so awesome – fun and graphic and a bit whimsical.

So now that you’ve seen what we’re rockin’ out at our house, what’s hanging on your walls?  Are you photograph-type people, or do you prefer framed art?  Or maybe it’s a collection of your kid’s cutest doodles?  Spill the beans!

FYI – I hung these art panels on the wood paneling the same way I did here.

This post is shared with The DIY Show Off, Thrifty Decor Chick, Between Naps on the Porch, Cottage Instincts, Making the World Cuter, Twice Remembered, The Girl Creative, and A Soft Place to Land.

During the past year, tons of things have changed.  I left my job as an attorney, started a new career in real estate, flipped my first house, started working from home instead of driving 45 minutes to an office, began sprucing up the homes of strangers over the web . . . and it has been such a delight to get to share all of these changes with you, even the little ones like making our backyard a little less ugly and sewing some new pillows for the den.  Who new that there was a whole community of awesome people that are into the same things that I am?  Let me tell you, it’s been awesome to get to hang out with you guys.

Since it’s IGTBH’s first blogiversary, I thought it was only appropriate to share a video with you guys that we shot the day we bought our house – the house that started it all, way before this blog was even a twinkle in my eye.  Want to take a tour of our home and see how it looked before we renovated the heck out of it?

It’s Great To Be Home – Our Home Before The Renovation from It’s Great To Be Home on Vimeo.

If you weren’t busy getting seasick from Jason’s camera skills (sorry babe!!), here are some things you may  have picked up on from the video:

~ This was during my brief stint as a blonde – so weird to see myself like that!!

~ Our house had the most hideous collection of drapes ever known to mankind.

~ We pretty much stuck to our entire renovation plan!!

~ I say “Alright” at least 30 times.

~ Our breakfast room used to look like a circus tent.

~ I really think that was a gun cabinet in the laundry room – it had locks and everything!

~ I clearly had no idea that the “craft room” would ultimately turn into my office.

~ I’m hoping you weren’t blinded by the original fireplace – sorry about that.

~ Can you believe how dark our den used to be?  And that was with all the lights on!

~ Did you recognize those bookcases in the den that turned into my salvaged craft cabinet?

~ I’m pretty sure Jason’s closet is bigger than mine – don’t know how that happened!

~ Burglar bars were apparently “in” in 1968 when our house was built.

~ After watching this video, I’m going to burn those pants I was wearing.

Anyhoo, thanks for hanging in there with me this past year – I’ve loved every minute of it!!  Here’s to another great year!

If you want to see how our house turned out after the big renovation, be sure to check out the Home Tour page of IGTBH.