How did we add a significant amount of livable square footage and increase our listed home from 1,300 to 1,550 finished square feet in just 48 hours? No overnight addition was built. We simply added a permanent heat source to our existing sunroom—and now it counts as livable square footage. A realtor friend told us … Read more

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Although only three people won free prints, everyone could get free shipping on Genuinely Yours orders before June 30th with code YHL2011FS. According to random.org, our winners are Alicia (whose family all shares their mom’s dark eyes), Sondra (who feels like she gave … Read more

We’re redoing the sunroom on a tight budget and trying to reuse as much as possible since we’re saving for other projects—Clara’s big girl room, a guest bathroom, and a porch and carport overhaul. There’s always a trade-off between saving money and getting full function: sometimes you can use everything you already own and get … Read more

I can’t help but laugh a little when a room reaches the final “finishing touches” stage—there’s something satisfying about seeing everything come together. After a weekend of small but meaningful updates (between all the board & batten we’ve been installing, caulking, and painting), Clara’s big girl room finally feels like it’s rounded a corner. One … Read more

Among the quirks I picked up from my mom was an aversion to return lines. There’s nothing inherently scary about going to customer service to return something that didn’t work out, but it always made me uncomfortable. More often than not I’d rather chalk it up as a mistake, accept the loss, and avoid any … Read more

We’re long overdue with an update on our front walkway, but now that we’ve finally had some rain the grass is filling in between the slate stones we painstakingly arranged and dug into over a few weekends in May. (See our previous posts for more photos and a step-by-step slate-laying tutorial.) A few spots will … Read more

We’ve almost been in this house for a month — we moved on the 14th of last month and this Sunday is the 14th again. The moving pod has been unpacked and returned (we talked about what we overpacked and what we donated on the podcast). It’s wild how a single pod can still feel … Read more

Apparently collecting more than 100 items to purge didn’t take nearly as long as we expected (see the full list of purged items here), so we got ambitious and held a last-minute moving sale this past Saturday. We wanted to get rid of things while our no-nonsense resolve was still strong — you know, before … Read more

After months of behind-the-scenes work (seriously—this kind of redesign takes forever), we’ve finally launched our blog refresh. Like any big project, there were hiccups: strange coding bugs, unexpected site crashes (thanks for bearing with us), an earthquake and even a hurricane. But rather than wait for the perfect moment, we decided to push it live. … Read more

Wondering which American accent you have? Below are three online quizzes that identify regional dialects based on pronunciation and vocabulary. After trying a dozen different tests, we picked the clearest, most useful options — one even narrowed results down to the correct state. Some sites were inaccurate or confusing — one incorrectly labeled me British, … Read more