Suzannah Hamlin Stanley's Blog, page 38

Unique handmade look tile backsplash - fast DIY but pros and cons!

As I shared the other day, our countertops are in and our kitchen is mostly functional again! After countertops comes tile backsplash, which we installed ourselves.

Choosing the tile... I didn't commit early enough on our tile so made a last-minute decision and have had a roller coaster of feelings about it! But it's up--we installed our entire backsplash in about 7 hours total, less than half the time we took tiling at our last kitchen!! This type of tile went FAST, but had both pros...

Prefab marble look countertops - budget-friendly and DIY-friendly options

Getting our countertops in was a HUGE milestone for our DIY kitchen reno. We are using the kitchen again basically as usual! Countertops are a major part of the expense of a new kitchen, so I shopped around and found a great option for ours from a local place, but I'll share how you can find something similar near you.


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5 weekend projects you can do right now--and a handy tool giveaway!

Sometimes, you just don’t have time for month-long renovation projects but you still want to improve your house. Well, you're in luck!

On the Your Home Story podcast this week, we are walking you through five projects that can be completed from start-to-finish in just two days, perfect for a weekend!

(Also, make sure to check out our post this week on Instagram to enter the giveaway that we have going on! It’ll give you the tools that you need to make one of these weekend projects a r...

Interior photography and editing tips for beginners

Whether or not you're a blogger, don't we all want to have visual reminders of our homes looking their best?? Clean, things put away, styled for the season...? Oh, how I wish I had photos of my grad school apartments and better pics of the first places Jason and I lived together. Even once I started taking photos of our homes and blogging about them, it took me way too long to get good at it and capture images I was proud of. (One of my biggest regrets about our first fixer upper, the...

Design, Make, & Live: Garages

Ohhh, the garage... has potential to be such a functional, important space, but it's so easy for it to get messy and not very usable at all!! We've had quite a few experiences of garage as car storage, gym, work area, overflow storage...

Someday I would love to paint the interior of our garage, seal or paint the floor, build some shelves for tool storage, and of course get rid of the stuff we don't need! In the meantime I can dream, plan, and learn about the options...

On the Your Home Story Po...

How hard is it to install kitchen cabinets?? The exciting part of our DIY kitchen reno

It's amazing how much can change in a week!! Last week I shared about our kitchen demo and we've been working HARD all week and have checked so many things off the list. Including installing the cabinets we assembled a couple weeks ago. We'd never done it before, and it was definitely a new skill to learn but pretty straightforward!

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How all that interior and exterior maintenance is actually going!

On the Your Home Story Podcast we've shared some great resources for both interior and exterior home maintenance--checklists, multiple experiences DIYing vs hiring out, ideas for automating, and more!

We thought we ought to check in with you on how we (and you) are doing with all those maintenance tasks. This week... we chat about peeling paint on Ashley’s windowsills and deck updates that I want to make for the exterior side of things. Then, we take it indoors and celebrate a few wins--like,...

What it takes to fully demo a kitchen! Our DIY kitchen reno progress

Our kitchen reno is GO GO GO and we got everything demoed over the weekend, and then some. Our temporary kitchen is fully set up in the dining room, ALL the old stuff (cabinets, soffits, top layer of flooring) is out of the kitchen, and we started work on our flooring.

Other posts on this DIY kitchen reno:
Read about our design/plans hereSee all the house before photos hereSee how we built our cabinets here.

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Building ALL our cabinets, prepping for kitchen demo day!

As I shared here (and in our 2019 projects list)... we are planning a full, DIY kitchen reno! We will demo our whole kitchen this coming Saturday. Until then we have been getting as much done as we can to prep and hopefully make the torn-apart-kitchen phase as short as possible.

We got so much done last weekend!!! We are feeling so positive and motivated about our kitchen reno (--let's hope this feeling holds!)!

Sharing our progress so far...
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Favorite home design books

We love to put down the Internet and flip through a book sometimes! It can be so fun to get ideas from a real, comprehensive design book. Not just instructional manuals, the pretty photograph kind too. We’re sharing our favorites (as well as some potentially controversial opinions about some popular ones!)!

The books we talked about this week on the Your Home Story podcast:
Design Sponge at HomeIn the Company of WomenStyled - Emily HendersonYoung House LoveLovable Livable HomeDomino: The B...