Those of you who follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter might have wondered why we slept in the guest bedroom for a few nights last weekend. The reason: we painted the master bedroom ceiling. One of the best parts of blogging about home projects is that we’re always learning. We haven’t mastered every decorating … Read more

This post covers a lot: before-and-after photos, a video tour of our organization, the total cost, closet planning tips so you can tackle your own update, and how we made Ikea Pax units look built-in with only about $65 of wood. First, the visuals. Also, please note Burger’s enthusiasm for photobombing—he insisted on being in … Read more

When I hyper-focus on a project, I go all in. That’s exactly how I tackled digitizing our old photo albums. We crowdsourced recommendations, combed message boards, and researched extensively. From that research, I narrowed our options to five photo digitization methods and tested each for quality, cost, speed, and ease. One method emerged as the … Read more

Before we launched this site back in 2006, we actually pitched a dog-naming book to publishers. It’s true—we wrote an introduction, several sample chapters, and a full proposal to send to agents while working in advertising. The spark for that project came from the joy of naming our first dog, Hamburger (aka Burger). Though the … Read more

Let’s talk about knocking out a few walls and framing a few new ones, shall we? After two slow weeks of thinking things through and getting contractor bids, progress suddenly accelerated in the laundry area and everything started moving quickly. What began like this… …now looks a whole lot more open. Yowza. Early last week … Read more

With my deck holes dug and approved by the county inspection, the next step was filling them in. There’s a bit of irony in digging only to immediately fill, but that’s how it goes. Like when I set fence posts last year, I started each hole with a couple of inches of gravel for drainage. … Read more

Perhaps this screenshot of our old header will give you a hint about what we tackled in this latest outdoor update (most likely number 7 of 582, since we break outdoor projects into bite-sized stages so we don’t get sore, overwhelmed, or blow the budget)… Yes — that’s the camellia tree we first mentioned back … Read more

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** And our random winner is… Robyn R (she’s in luck because her fantasy printer prints photos – which she says would save her so much money). Congrats, Robyn! A wireless printer is one of our favorite ways to keep the office looking tidy (even if … Read more

Here it is: a roundup of every 2025 Color of the Year from 15 different color authorities. We enjoy tracking these announcements because they help us follow trends and compare how forecasts change over time. This post will also be useful when we start predicting 2026. A clear trend emerged for 2025 — keep reading … Read more

Something about the knobs in our kitchen makes us feel like we’re being watched. Maybe you don’t notice it at first, but after looking at them for a few weeks, they start to take on personalities. Suddenly the arrangement of shapes and shadows looks a little like this to us: My favorite is the pirate. … Read more