I want to thank you all for your kind messages after last Friday’s post. You are so sweet and inspiring and I feel blessed to have this creative community to tap into. Thank you! I have gotten so many great tips and encouragement from you that my head is spinning with ideas! For example, Toby Alleyne-Gee suggested using sliding pocket doors instead of regular French doors and I find the idea genial!!! How come I haven’t though of it? We’ll be interviewing contractors in the upcoming weeks and we’ll keep the option in mind. Thank you so much, Toby!! For that and for all the other wonderful  suggestions.

To say that our first month in the new house has been exciting would be an understatement. We hosted a 20-plus-guests birthday party for Isabella, we scrubbed floors, washed windows and painted the living room (before and after the party, not during. We were nice to our guests, haha. We read about these paint parties some people throw to have all of their friends help but we were nice and didn’t hand out paint brushes as party favors). We removed fences and replaced doors and went on this crazy schedule of mowing our back yard every five days (because the soil is wet, the grass grows incredibly fast). And at nearly an acre of land, there was a lot of mowing and raking. I know it sounds cheesy but we also enjoyed every minute of this madness! That being said, I have this thing with mess. I don’t know exactly when or how it started, although genetics may play a role because I remember always being like this, but mess gets to me and I can’t think clearly when my home is out of order (which is most days :)))). I need a clean and uncluttered space to be able to do any kind of work. Mess makes me anxious and it’s not pretty 🙂 So, before I could attempt any design plan for our home, I needed to shake the stress of our recent move, relax and let the ideas come.