I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings!! Between our birth class, visitors, travel, big work events, Articles Club, birthday parties, our church family group, and showers, November has been an exceptionally busy month. I am so grateful for a few days off work and without activities to relax a bit — and tackle a few things that have been on my to do list for weeks! One thing I did accomplish this month, though: finally pulling the trigger on new chairs for our dining table!! It should be well known around these parts that I tend to agonize over home decor purchases, especially ones that come with a large price tag. (For proof, see here, here, and here.) Though I think I have a strong design sense, I can’t help researching every possible option, and then second guessing everything a few times just for good measure. I’ve been researching and debating options for this space for about a year now, so it definitely felt good to finally make a decision! You can see where we started thanks to our most recent home tour: Our former chairs were given to us for free (yay!) from a friend’s parents when we moved to North Carolina, more than six years ago. Though I liked the general shape, they were lightly dusted in glitter and fluff (the chairs had been in their craft room!) and they didn’t work super well with our wood floors. Here are a few of the things I considered as I looked for replacements: — Between the teal upholstered bar stools close on one side and the tan sofa close on the other, there were a lot of surfaces with which to coordinate. — I loved the idea of at least some upholstered options, but was having a really hard

We’ve been in our home for about two and a half years now. Decorating progress, as ever, has been slow and steady. Sometimes slower than we would like, due to the budget and my tendency to overthink home purchasing decisions (there is NOTHING that I overthink more than home purchasing decisions). However, sharing these yearly-ish tours helps me see that there IS progress being made, that our home is inching closer and closer to the vision we have for it, and that we have much for which to be grateful. I hope you enjoy this peek into a home in progress! All photos are by the lovely Anna Routh, first shared in our home tour on Southern Weddings, except the obviously worse-quality ones, which were taken by me :) Here’s a good look at the true color of our red front door! Jack always wants to do good :) I am SO excited to say that since these photos were taken we’ve purchased new dining room chairs!! The ones here, the same ones we’ve had since starting out, were free hand-me-downs, and though they’ve served us well, I didn’t love their color, they had some glitter and fluff stuck to them from their previous owners, and there were only four of them. It took me so long to figure out what we wanted, but I’m happy to report I’m very pleased with our decision. Will share more soon! Our plan for replacing paper towels is still going strong! I shared my plan for re-working our big wall of art last year, and here’s the final result! The four photos are ones we took on our last four big vacations. We didn’t get a great pulled-back shot of the master bedroom, but here are a few details! For more photos and

This past weekend John and I had what I think of as the stereotypical homeowners’ weekend – we did little else besides checking off a long list of things on a household to do list we’d been adding to for several weeks. It was really good, actually, even though we did make eight (yes) separate trips to various home and garden stores in two days. Efficient we are not. For us, a weekend like this is something to report on, since we don’t actually have them too often. John and I really love our weekends – we like to fill them with everyday adventures – and one thing we agreed on when we were buying our house is that we didn’t want to lose them to lawn care and home maintenance. Happily, we haven’t! Even so, we still need to get things done every once in a while. My relationship with our house this first year has been interesting, and I’m looking forward to sorting through those feelings and sharing them with y’all – hopefully in about a month and a half, on the anniversary of our closing. In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to share a bit about our whole house color scheme. As I’ve shared before, our entry, kitchen, dining, and living room are all open to each other, so when we make decorating decisions for any one room, we have to take the impact on the other spaces into consideration. Since we’re collecting things over time, the board below helps me visualize many of the elements – some of which we’ve already put in place, some of which we’re considering – together. Though I am often drawn to neutral spaces (as you can see on my home Pinterest board), when it comes down to