We’re not going to lie; things have really been slowing down around the house. Our kitchen countertops were sort of the icing on the cake for us. I guess you can say we are almost DIY’d out by this house! We have painted everything (well 90% of the upstairs at least), we’ve gutted and re-done our bathroom, we’ve made-over our kitchen…what else is there to do? This makes us pretty happy, but it doesn’t give us very much material for the blog. However, we’re going to keep filling our dedicated readers in on little projects here and there, as much as we can. So while you shouldn’t really expect much from us on a weekly basis, you can definitely expect at least one update per month. And there is always Instagram! You can follow me here and Andrew here to see what we’re doing almost everyday (everyday we take a picture that is, which is most days).
With that being said, we do have a little bit of an update for you. We have rearranged our dining room again! We have done this at least 3 or 4 times now. We were talking the other night and we think this is due to the fact that our house is tiny. As long as we are living in this house, we will always struggle to create more space that, frankly, we just don’t have. However, having a tiny house is a healthy challenge to stay neat, organized and clean and to make the most efficient use of your space. Creating a place for everything and getting everything into its place is definitely rough, but in the end, it’s worth it. I guess you could say that’s always been sort of a motto for me, “A place for everything, and everything in it’s place.” I like to apply it to being organized in the house as well as in my mind. But before I get all philosophical on you, I’ll keep things within the realm of DIY and home improvement and get to the point of this blog post.
We have a lot of books and most of them, up until now, were stored away in a bin somewhere in the basement. Thanks to our favorite store, Target, we now have a little book shelf in our dining room.
This thing cost about $20 bucks and it took Andrew all of 15 minutes to put it together. It’s definitely on the cheap, which is why it was the perfect shelf for the job. By adding this book shelf, we have done a few things:
- Once again, made the dining room space a little more usable, more efficient (at least for now until we change our minds and move things again)
- The dining room seems a little more inviting. Will I sit in the dining room, pick up a book and start reading it? No. But at least I have the option.
- We added another surface. If you have a small house, you know surface space is a precious commodity. Right now, we’re using that surface space to be a little festive for Halloween, but when we aren’t in the midst of a holiday, I’m sure we will be finding a great, practical use for this surface space.
- We’ve brought some of our favorite books out of hiding and put them on display. This also gave me the chance to style the book shelf to also make it sort of an accent piece. I added our crafty gold ampersand as a book end and tried to get symmetrical with styling some books standing tall and others laying flat in neat little piles. My OCD kicked into overdrive here and I made sure all of the arrangements had the books going in order from largest to smallest in size.
Now the dining room just feels…better! I still think it’s a waste of a room, but little touches like this book shelf have made it at least seem a little more useful, and if nothing else, fun.
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