(The Upstairs Common Area) My parent’s house is very architecturally interesting. It is a large A-Frame that has tons of light and open spaces. At the top of the stairs on the second floor is a common area with two large, green leather chairs and a portable fireplace. This had become another dumping ground. It’s amazing how we can get used to anything. Again: TOO MUCH STUFF! A lot of the items in piles on the floor were from the last minute clean-up of the fist level for the

(The Bedroom Closet) Onward and upward. After our success with the basement storage room we decided to tackle my parent’s closet. Closets can get out of hand so easily and particularly at the end of a season. It was a hodgepodge of summer and winter clothes as well as the simple fact, that again, there was just too much stuff. We edited and sorted piece by piece. We separated out winter clothes and put them in a different closet (one luxury of a whole house!). It can be overw

(Part 1: The Basement Storage Closet) Every house has them, on the surface it is orderly, but look in that closet off the den and watch out for falling boxes, broken picture frames, and last year’s halloween costume. My parents are no exception and have very generously allowed me to give you an inside peek behind closed doors. They live in Erie, PA and both my parents, Ellie and Mark, work full time jobs. My mother is a school nurse and Airbnb enthusiast and my father is a wr

This is a fantastic idea! While we were cleaning out my sister’s closet we found this family heirloom. If my Aunt Jeannette hadn’t been so clever as to include this note with the necklace, it’s true importance might have been lost! When passing along family treasures it is a great idea to take a page out of my Aunt Jeannette’s book and include a small description of it’s significance to be kept with the item so future generations can fully appreciate the piece’s history.

In spired by this beautiful weather I decided to rearrange my bookshelf. A fun way to organize books and add to a rooms aesthetic is by color. With my bookshelf, I separated the books in piles by color and then started at the top left corner with red and worked through the rainbow ending in the bottom right corner with black. I’m really happy with how it turned out!

Check out this great article! It talks about ways to camouflage unsightly necessities in every home from hiding your internet router to giving your refrigerator a facelift.